Facebook's Legs Video Was A Lie
October 13, 2022 5:45 PM Subscribe
Earlier this week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to demonstrate that avatars would no longer be mere floating torsos, but would soon have legs. It was a very weird video existing in a very weird space. Zuckerberg was clearly seen jumping around in the video, giving everyone an early look at the tech. Or was he?
Seems Zuckerberg can talk the talk, but can't walk the walk?
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:55 PM on October 13, 2022 [21 favorites]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:55 PM on October 13, 2022 [21 favorites]
I'm missing something here...what is the video or the lie of the thing?
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:56 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:56 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
I guess the metaverse just doesn’t have…
( •_•)⌐■-■
…any legs.
(¬■_■)
posted by azpenguin at 5:57 PM on October 13, 2022 [33 favorites]
( •_•)⌐■-■
…any legs.
(¬■_■)
posted by azpenguin at 5:57 PM on October 13, 2022 [33 favorites]
In other VR news, Meta announced the new $1,200 Meta Quest Pro, a business-oriented headset with a battery life of 1-2 hours that your employer will probably not buy for you.
Microsoft also thinks VR is the way forward so they're integrating Teams and Office, so you can look at Excel spreadsheets in VR.
posted by meowzilla at 6:02 PM on October 13, 2022 [9 favorites]
Microsoft also thinks VR is the way forward so they're integrating Teams and Office, so you can look at Excel spreadsheets in VR.
posted by meowzilla at 6:02 PM on October 13, 2022 [9 favorites]
Oh no, how surprising. After all this, all the foul play over the years? Who would have guessed that zuck would lie, again, about whatever suits whatever passes as needs for such a creature. Shocking!
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:03 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:03 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
Defeat must be really challenging for a business person like zuck.
posted by being_quiet at 6:03 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by being_quiet at 6:03 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
Interesting that the video shows Zuck jumping; will avatars actually have the ability to jump? Many games of the era they seem to be emulating lacked that. It was always exciting when you could jump. One of the first things I’d test.
posted by brook horse at 6:04 PM on October 13, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by brook horse at 6:04 PM on October 13, 2022 [2 favorites]
"Do you think that's air you're breathing?"
"No, I think it's bullshit fumes."
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:06 PM on October 13, 2022 [8 favorites]
"No, I think it's bullshit fumes."
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:06 PM on October 13, 2022 [8 favorites]
I find it unsettling that Dr Timothy Leary was all about VR at the end of his trip, and Zuck somehow ended up in the same place.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 6:06 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 6:06 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
That Kotaku article is a blatant distortion of the facts and I will not stand for it.
Fire Emblem Awakening characters had legs! What they didn't have was FEET.
GET IT RIGHT, KOTAKU.
posted by chrominance at 6:21 PM on October 13, 2022 [6 favorites]
Fire Emblem Awakening characters had legs! What they didn't have was FEET.
GET IT RIGHT, KOTAKU.
posted by chrominance at 6:21 PM on October 13, 2022 [6 favorites]
I am reminded of the old Bungie game Oni. At one point you fight an insane disembodied brain and are told “It wants …feet.”
posted by adamrice at 6:32 PM on October 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by adamrice at 6:32 PM on October 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
I’ve seen a lot of coverage of the Metaverse legs in the last few days. All I know is that every single article is infinitely funnier if you read leg as penis. And the articles generally stay just as substantive.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 6:35 PM on October 13, 2022 [15 favorites]
posted by inflatablekiwi at 6:35 PM on October 13, 2022 [15 favorites]
I know there are very hard problems in VR, but does anyone have an idea where they've been spending so much money? The graphics look like they're from the 2000s and the motion capture technology doesn't seem a billion dollars better than what Microsoft was demoing for the Kinect over a decade ago — are there subtle details which a casual observer like me misses or am I right to be reminded of a certain dotcom client who burned several million re-doing design comps without ever getting around to the building a business part of building a business?
posted by adamsc at 6:54 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by adamsc at 6:54 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
having spent billions of dollars to create a virtual reality universe (Horizon Worlds) that looked like it was from 2004, his company was working on improving that universe to make it look like it was from 2009 instead
Sick burn, no notes.
How long until the first office VR sexual harassment suit? Gotta be in the works by now if this thing has been in development at Meta for a while.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:59 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
Sick burn, no notes.
How long until the first office VR sexual harassment suit? Gotta be in the works by now if this thing has been in development at Meta for a while.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:59 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
I thought the 2004-level graphics stuff was mostly because they're painting about 20x as many pixels as 2004 (9x the resolution, >2x the framerate), while running on batteries. Turns out it's also because Carmack is pushing them towards supporting thousands of avatars in the same room.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:10 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:10 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
You need feet, to stand up straight with,
You need feet, to kick your friends,
You need feet, to keep your socks up,
And stop your legs from, fraying at the ends.
You need feet, to walk to Scunthorpe,
Or to dance, the hoochy-coo,
Yes the whole world needs
feet for something,
And I need feet, to run away from you.
posted by swift at 7:13 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
You need feet, to kick your friends,
You need feet, to keep your socks up,
And stop your legs from, fraying at the ends.
You need feet, to walk to Scunthorpe,
Or to dance, the hoochy-coo,
Yes the whole world needs
feet for something,
And I need feet, to run away from you.
posted by swift at 7:13 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
So...it looks bad? That's it? The article implies they are lying about something, which I believe, but I see nothing that explains what the deception is?
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:15 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:15 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
What I don't get is where I'm supposed to use a VR headset. I can't use it anywhere in my house because I'd fall over and break furniture. I have terrible balance and it's 10x worse when I can't see, so five minutes with a stupid headset over my eyes and I'd probably take out the coffee table.
posted by octothorpe at 7:16 PM on October 13, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 7:16 PM on October 13, 2022 [8 favorites]
Does no one remember what a pig's ear Second Life was? Did none of Meta's investors look back at the past and think, "Why, yes, here's an even better way to set money on fire?"
posted by RakDaddy at 7:29 PM on October 13, 2022 [12 favorites]
posted by RakDaddy at 7:29 PM on October 13, 2022 [12 favorites]
Post-demo but pre-demo-exposé, I liked Garbage Day's take on Zuck's past, present and future:
There are a lot of different factors as to why Facebook took over the world, but as someone who worked in digital publishing and saw the platform shoot to the top of the referral traffic list one day out of the blue, I can tell you why it initially took off. It was simply there. It was easy to use, it was free, and it was able to onboard a lot of college students. By the time I got my first writing jobs in 2011, an entire generation of students had used it to make friends and they were now suddenly young adults out in the world, still using it. So when Facebook launched a new suped-up app in 2012, announcing that “the future was mobile” — boom, the rest is history. And everything that happened to Facebook after 2012 was simply about following that momentum by acquiring other companies and adding portal features to keep users coming back.posted by gwint at 7:29 PM on October 13, 2022 [12 favorites]
But that strategy can’t work again now. Instead of a new app to monopolize the experience of someone else’s hardware, they’re trying to make the hardware too. They don’t just want to launch a definitive mobile app, they want to invent the iPhone at the same time. But they can’t acquire anymore and they’ve never been very good at innovating, so here we are: A $1500 headset that will let you have a weird cartoon Zoom call. But at least you’ll have legs.
I honestly always feel like I'm missing something, when people talk about the metaverse, because this feels kind of the same as Second Life? Which was a fun novelty for a while but people got bored. And this is like, so much more expensive, it requires you to wear a dumb headset. And like, I get that they're billing it for long distance business meetings, but we have a lot of pretty good video call systems now, and even so, people frequently have the meetings voice only, because you don't always need video, and sometimes being on screen is annoying.
I mean, I believe in technological moonshots, because it was hard to even imagine an iPod before it existed, and it was amazing. But it's really hard for me to understand what the appeal of this would be beyond just the novelty factor, and it seems like the hardware would be way too expensive for mass adoption. I can totally see why VR would be a popular way to play certain video games, and maybe even to watch movies/ interactive visual fiction. But I very deeply do not understand the business case for this beyond optional entertainment for people with significant disposable income.
I guess I can think of a lot of niche uses of VR, like training surgeons, or for veterinary school dissections that don't involve actual animals. But those feel like uses that would emerge out of small companies or university labs, not be presented by a major corporation for mass adoption. So maybe that's the issue here; where VR is should be in niche uses like medical training, and as an entertainment novelty for the retail market. But Meta is scrambling for revenue streams, so they're trying to push it as a mass-market technology when it seems like we're years and years from seeing or understanding a mass market use case.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:37 PM on October 13, 2022 [23 favorites]
I mean, I believe in technological moonshots, because it was hard to even imagine an iPod before it existed, and it was amazing. But it's really hard for me to understand what the appeal of this would be beyond just the novelty factor, and it seems like the hardware would be way too expensive for mass adoption. I can totally see why VR would be a popular way to play certain video games, and maybe even to watch movies/ interactive visual fiction. But I very deeply do not understand the business case for this beyond optional entertainment for people with significant disposable income.
I guess I can think of a lot of niche uses of VR, like training surgeons, or for veterinary school dissections that don't involve actual animals. But those feel like uses that would emerge out of small companies or university labs, not be presented by a major corporation for mass adoption. So maybe that's the issue here; where VR is should be in niche uses like medical training, and as an entertainment novelty for the retail market. But Meta is scrambling for revenue streams, so they're trying to push it as a mass-market technology when it seems like we're years and years from seeing or understanding a mass market use case.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:37 PM on October 13, 2022 [23 favorites]
So...it looks bad? That's it? The article implies they are lying about something, which I believe, but I see nothing that explains what the deception is?
The idea is that they suggested they were showing what their new app could do--give your avatar legs--but they actually just showed you an animation setup that did this:
How offended you are by the advertising is one thing, but I think it's pretty close to objectively embarrassing because "legs" don't seem like they should be out of reach for one of the biggest companies on the 'net.
posted by mark k at 7:42 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
The idea is that they suggested they were showing what their new app could do--give your avatar legs--but they actually just showed you an animation setup that did this:
“To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.”By analogy, this would be like going back to 1978 and seeing an add for Space Invaders that looked like the War of the Worlds movie, implying that was what you'd get for 25 cents instead of block 8-bit (?) graphics.
How offended you are by the advertising is one thing, but I think it's pretty close to objectively embarrassing because "legs" don't seem like they should be out of reach for one of the biggest companies on the 'net.
posted by mark k at 7:42 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
I'm missing something here...what is the video or the lie of the thing?
So the reason the video is a "lie" is that it implies that the legs will move in a natural fashion and support things like jumping based on the direct control of the person who controls the avatar. This is actually pretty hard to do in VR because you don't have enough info on what the body is doing to figure out good leg movement (which is why the original version didn't have legs).
The quoted statement “To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.” means that the leg movement was recorded by motion capturing actors in a studio and then played back as a canned animation, instead of being based on the real time movement. In game terms, the video with legs is a "cut scene" instead of being "gameplay capture". As the rest of the article talks about, faking this kind of thing for press previews is very common in the game and general tech industry so this isn't really a lie.
posted by JZig at 7:43 PM on October 13, 2022 [9 favorites]
So the reason the video is a "lie" is that it implies that the legs will move in a natural fashion and support things like jumping based on the direct control of the person who controls the avatar. This is actually pretty hard to do in VR because you don't have enough info on what the body is doing to figure out good leg movement (which is why the original version didn't have legs).
The quoted statement “To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.” means that the leg movement was recorded by motion capturing actors in a studio and then played back as a canned animation, instead of being based on the real time movement. In game terms, the video with legs is a "cut scene" instead of being "gameplay capture". As the rest of the article talks about, faking this kind of thing for press previews is very common in the game and general tech industry so this isn't really a lie.
posted by JZig at 7:43 PM on October 13, 2022 [9 favorites]
I've been very "VR will be the new 3D TVs" for a while, and I still believe that to be true. But Zuck is so completely insanely out of touch with anything resembling normal human wants and needs that all of his big visions for how we're all gonna use this thing is ...
"you could WORK and ATTEND MEETINGS in this virtual space!"
...that's your pitch, my guy? You want people to pay fifteen hundred goddamn dollars to attend everyone's most-hated activity in arguably the goofiest, most useless way possible, with graphics a gameboy color would laugh at?
Yeah. Those things are gonna sell like hotcakes, I'm sure.
I get it, Facebook dominated the web for a few years, then was everyone's default app when we all got our first smartphones, and now it's a cesspool of racist and conspiracy posts and he wants to be relevant again so if they could dominate a whole new industry the way Microsoft dominated desktops and Apple & Google dominate mobile phones, well hey... Zuck's back on top, baby!
But, no, Zucky-boy, no one wants this. Even your own damn employees, being literally paid to use it, (and on the verge of being punished for not using it) don't want this.
If the thing your company is making is despised by the people making it, trust me : NO. ONE. WANTS. THIS.
posted by revmitcz at 7:45 PM on October 13, 2022 [18 favorites]
"you could WORK and ATTEND MEETINGS in this virtual space!"
...that's your pitch, my guy? You want people to pay fifteen hundred goddamn dollars to attend everyone's most-hated activity in arguably the goofiest, most useless way possible, with graphics a gameboy color would laugh at?
Yeah. Those things are gonna sell like hotcakes, I'm sure.
I get it, Facebook dominated the web for a few years, then was everyone's default app when we all got our first smartphones, and now it's a cesspool of racist and conspiracy posts and he wants to be relevant again so if they could dominate a whole new industry the way Microsoft dominated desktops and Apple & Google dominate mobile phones, well hey... Zuck's back on top, baby!
But, no, Zucky-boy, no one wants this. Even your own damn employees, being literally paid to use it, (and on the verge of being punished for not using it) don't want this.
If the thing your company is making is despised by the people making it, trust me : NO. ONE. WANTS. THIS.
posted by revmitcz at 7:45 PM on October 13, 2022 [18 favorites]
If the thing your company is making is despised by the people making it, trust me : NO. ONE. WANTS. THIS.
Don't tell him. I enjoy watching that fucking company slowly crumble.
posted by Ickster at 8:03 PM on October 13, 2022 [32 favorites]
Don't tell him. I enjoy watching that fucking company slowly crumble.
posted by Ickster at 8:03 PM on October 13, 2022 [32 favorites]
I've been using a Quest for over two years now. It's great! It's nice to play video games that let you use your body! It's nice to play immersive games with friends! It's nice to just put on a headset and not trouble with wires or booting up a PC or anything! It's just neat.
No one wants metaverse. I am just so confused why Zuck is intent on taking something that's finally finding its groove and trying to force it to be something else. It's like he just wants to yank your GameBoy out of your hand and yell NO, COMPUTER ONLY FOR MEETING NOW. Y tho, Zuck? Y?
posted by phooky at 8:06 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
No one wants metaverse. I am just so confused why Zuck is intent on taking something that's finally finding its groove and trying to force it to be something else. It's like he just wants to yank your GameBoy out of your hand and yell NO, COMPUTER ONLY FOR MEETING NOW. Y tho, Zuck? Y?
posted by phooky at 8:06 PM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]
I guess I can think of a lot of niche uses of VR, like training surgeons, or for veterinary school dissections that don't involve actual animals.
A few years ago a couple of my co-workers put together a training tool for guys who repair jet engines. It had a virtual airliner in a virtual hangar. The engine could explode all of its parts out from each other so you could see how they all fit together.
It costs an airline about a million bucks a day to leave a plane on the ground. When they need repairs, that cost is worth it. But if you can avoid those costs for training, then that's an easy win.
VR makes sense for that. But for regular folk? It reminds me of that essay I can't find by that software engineer with a Russian name, talking about how, because telephony got good enough that businesses didn't need to get their people overseas in four hours, that it wasn't worth the trouble of flying the Concorde any more.
posted by nushustu at 8:17 PM on October 13, 2022 [8 favorites]
A few years ago a couple of my co-workers put together a training tool for guys who repair jet engines. It had a virtual airliner in a virtual hangar. The engine could explode all of its parts out from each other so you could see how they all fit together.
It costs an airline about a million bucks a day to leave a plane on the ground. When they need repairs, that cost is worth it. But if you can avoid those costs for training, then that's an easy win.
VR makes sense for that. But for regular folk? It reminds me of that essay I can't find by that software engineer with a Russian name, talking about how, because telephony got good enough that businesses didn't need to get their people overseas in four hours, that it wasn't worth the trouble of flying the Concorde any more.
posted by nushustu at 8:17 PM on October 13, 2022 [8 favorites]
Meta is so much of a joke that it was a part of Stephen Colbert's monologue last night (2022/10/12). Its incredible
posted by JoeXIII007 at 8:25 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by JoeXIII007 at 8:25 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
I am just so confused why Zuck is intent on taking something that's finally finding its groove and trying to force it to be something else
I have this theory that he is looking at his legacy as being the guy who 'invented' a racist phonebook, and realizing that he will be relegated to odd historical footnote within a few generations, so he is trying his best to make a name for himself that will withstand the test of time. The problem is that, like most of these dudes, he isn't that smart and basically fell into the position he is in so has no idea what he should actually be doing.
posted by Literaryhero at 8:26 PM on October 13, 2022 [20 favorites]
I have this theory that he is looking at his legacy as being the guy who 'invented' a racist phonebook, and realizing that he will be relegated to odd historical footnote within a few generations, so he is trying his best to make a name for himself that will withstand the test of time. The problem is that, like most of these dudes, he isn't that smart and basically fell into the position he is in so has no idea what he should actually be doing.
posted by Literaryhero at 8:26 PM on October 13, 2022 [20 favorites]
This is even more cringy than having a guy in a leotard dancing the robot at a big robot reveal. And, of course, I have little faith that the ultimate reveal of Meta Legs will even rise to the unimpressive level of the most recent follow up robot reveal.
posted by 3j0hn at 8:27 PM on October 13, 2022
posted by 3j0hn at 8:27 PM on October 13, 2022
Ablebodied people are really hung up on walking.
posted by Soliloquy at 9:19 PM on October 13, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by Soliloquy at 9:19 PM on October 13, 2022 [11 favorites]
So what you're saying is, Meta has jumped the shark?
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:42 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:42 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]
So the thing is that this kind of reveals not what state of the art VR can’t do, but what it won’t do. I’m sure there are bandwidth issues, but in principle it would be possible to sensor someone’s arms and legs with accelerometers. Then put them on a multidirectional treadmill, and you’re all set. You’ve got the legs, whatever. But then it becomes so expensive, arduous, and tedious…
It’s a very specialized audience.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:46 PM on October 13, 2022 [4 favorites]
It’s a very specialized audience.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:46 PM on October 13, 2022 [4 favorites]
I should add that for it to really catch on, you’re probably going to have to find a good way to sensor and articulate the genitals. I doubt Facebook is going to integrate this technology into their metaverse, but the ultimate winner in this space will.
posted by mr_roboto at 11:02 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by mr_roboto at 11:02 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
How long until the first office VR sexual harassment suit? Gotta be in the works by now if this thing has been in development at Meta for a while.
While not in the office environment, there have already been a number of sexual harassment incidents involving VR systems - this is why a lot of multiuser VR apps now enforce a "bubble" of personal space around VR avatars, for example.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:08 PM on October 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
While not in the office environment, there have already been a number of sexual harassment incidents involving VR systems - this is why a lot of multiuser VR apps now enforce a "bubble" of personal space around VR avatars, for example.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:08 PM on October 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
At least Mr Z's hair looks as good in VR as in real life.
posted by boilermonster at 11:13 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by boilermonster at 11:13 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
“Mr. Zuckerberg, our team has gone beyond what you have asked of us. Not only are we going to re-invent the wheel, we're going to re-invent THE LEG!”
posted by UN at 12:02 AM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by UN at 12:02 AM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
MetaFilter: a good way to sensor and articulate the genitals
posted by chavenet at 1:29 AM on October 14, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 1:29 AM on October 14, 2022 [8 favorites]
Microsoft also thinks VR is the way forward so they're integrating Teams and Office, so you can look at Excel spreadsheets in VR.Plot twist: the microchips in the Bill Gate$ vaccines are actually to enable leg tracking
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 1:29 AM on October 14, 2022 [3 favorites]
Meta announced the new $1,200 Meta Quest Pro, a business-oriented headset with a battery life of 1-2 hours that your employer will probably not buy for you
and which will track your eyes for ad targeting.
posted by acb at 1:32 AM on October 14, 2022 [3 favorites]
and which will track your eyes for ad targeting.
posted by acb at 1:32 AM on October 14, 2022 [3 favorites]
But if you can avoid those costs for training, then that's an easy win.
Not just costs, risks of all kind. We're starting to use VR for training people to do certain kinds of maintenance tasks that involve giant cranes, taking very expensive things apart involving destructive methods, then rebuilding and welding, radioactive materials, things like that. Just the training involves very real safety risks and radiation exposures. It's much nicer if we can walk people through it visually without needing to do it on the real thing.
But we do NOT use it for stupid zoom or teams calls. In fact we hardly ever even use the video for that.
posted by ctmf at 1:56 AM on October 14, 2022 [11 favorites]
Not just costs, risks of all kind. We're starting to use VR for training people to do certain kinds of maintenance tasks that involve giant cranes, taking very expensive things apart involving destructive methods, then rebuilding and welding, radioactive materials, things like that. Just the training involves very real safety risks and radiation exposures. It's much nicer if we can walk people through it visually without needing to do it on the real thing.
But we do NOT use it for stupid zoom or teams calls. In fact we hardly ever even use the video for that.
posted by ctmf at 1:56 AM on October 14, 2022 [11 favorites]
I mean, VR chat programs and consumer grade full body tracking and even teledildonics are things that, you know, already exist. And they aren't totally unreasonably expensive right now. $1600 worth of equipment isn't cheap, but it's something you can skip avocado toast to save up for.
That's what makes this Metaverse faffery all the more bizarre.
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:01 AM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
That's what makes this Metaverse faffery all the more bizarre.
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:01 AM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
you can look at Excel spreadsheets in VR
GLORY BE
posted by Meatbomb at 2:13 AM on October 14, 2022 [10 favorites]
GLORY BE
posted by Meatbomb at 2:13 AM on October 14, 2022 [10 favorites]
you can look at Excel spreadsheets in VR
Jesus wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer!
posted by Servo5678 at 5:00 AM on October 14, 2022 [3 favorites]
Jesus wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer!
posted by Servo5678 at 5:00 AM on October 14, 2022 [3 favorites]
I’ve said the entire point of this charade is for Faceb… Meta 🙄 to own formerly public spaces. Can’t do it in real life, and it’s way cheaper virtually, so do it there. Make it more appealing over time than reality. Build on the already-extensive IAPs of large-scale games (think Fortnite and its ilk.) Get to a point where Meta has a piece of all the action: virtual real estate, skins, media, all of it. In short, how can we monetize and monitor everything?
The real challenge is that the tech isn’t there yet (legs), the appeal isn’t there yet, and the entry cost is laughable. Eyebrows is right on this; this isn’t a mass market product yet because it doesn’t have a killer app. But Meta is doing all this by force because this is all they’ve got. Social media as they define it has… no legs.
I give it a decade. The pump is primed here with generations completely okay with spending real money on intangible, completely virtual things. If it doesn’t happen, it’ll be due to Meta going broke trying, or government regulation to slow or stop it.
posted by hijinx at 5:57 AM on October 14, 2022 [3 favorites]
The real challenge is that the tech isn’t there yet (legs), the appeal isn’t there yet, and the entry cost is laughable. Eyebrows is right on this; this isn’t a mass market product yet because it doesn’t have a killer app. But Meta is doing all this by force because this is all they’ve got. Social media as they define it has… no legs.
I give it a decade. The pump is primed here with generations completely okay with spending real money on intangible, completely virtual things. If it doesn’t happen, it’ll be due to Meta going broke trying, or government regulation to slow or stop it.
posted by hijinx at 5:57 AM on October 14, 2022 [3 favorites]
I worked for a rival social networking start-up just as Facebook was first ascendant. It's revisionism to claim that Facebook succeeded simply because "it was there" when other sites were not: from a UI standpoint, the difference between Facebook and literally every other web site was night and day. I know, because my job required me to actively hunt out every halfway site in existence at the time, documenting every button and feature and interface component that they had. You couldn't point to a single module on Facebook, a single rectangle on its screen, without finding one or two things they'd come up with that quietly redefined what those components were used for, what functions they served, and what purpose they had for their users.
That rate of innovation continued for a shockingly long time, especially by Internet standards. Five years in, Facebook was still delivering new redesigns on a quarterly basis that were obscenely ahead of its time. In fact, one of the first things I really found frustrating about Facebook was how many times it would introduce a really interesting paradigm, then get the zoomies and leapfrog itself six months later without dwelling in the brand-new thing it had just come up with. Eventually it became the posterchild for terrible, bloated UI, but for a long time it was one of the trailblazers. And that's just talking desktop: the real reason Facebook took off the way it did was that it was ascendant just as the iPhone was introduced, and it more-or-less established some of the most basic conventions for mobile site design right out of the gate. By the time the App Store debuted and sites were able to send notifications, it was primed to become everybody's lasting addiction for an eternity in Internet time.
Obviously none of this changes the fact thatFacebook Meta Facebook became the standard-bearer for invasive, manipulative evils, or that the app itself has absolutely cratered. But the fascinating thing about the Metaverse to me isn't that Zuckerberg is a cheap hack who's showing his ass to the world. It's that Zuckerberg was one of the prime designers of a product that, for a while, was not only groundbreaking but one of the absolute landmarks for thoughtful, careful user-oriented design, and Metaverse is still a hacky piece of shit. And I don't think it's as easy as saying that VR sucks or that Zuck's lost it or that Facebook as a company doesn't have at least a pretty solid set of pretty smart people.
One of the fascinating things about technology is how drastically the form factor of a device changes a person's relationship to it. A lot of people couldn't comprehend how much the iPhone was about to change society, because they'd seen laptops and they'd seen Blackberries and it was hard to process just how much a device that was about the same shape as a Blackberry would drastically change things around. (Hell, look at how the iPod sparked a breakthrough in portable music players long after pocket-sized MP3 players had been invented.) Very subtle changes can go a long way.
And one of the fascinating things about VR/AR is that it's about as drastic a leap away from other screen-based form factors as we've ever attempted. Nobody knows how it works. No one has figured out how to make it anything but a niche appeal. Every product that's attempted it has become the butt of a joke—I'd count Google Glass in this category, and eesh. But it's also a pretty alluring dream, in the sense that sci-fi geeks have been sci-fi geeking out about immersive virtual worlds for about as long as sci-fi geeks have existed. At the same time, some its major obstacles are hard to surmount: the devices have to be big enough to cover a chunk of your face, it's awkward to stick a VR thing on your head when friends are nearby, and people are sick of screens to the point where the other big push is towards computational environments rooted in physical reality, with the computer working as a behind-the-scenes operator. (A lot of smarthome stuff is pretty stupid and dystopian too, but things like Dynamicland are genuinely exciting and neat.)
One theory I've seen is that Meta is just building a technological foundation right now, waiting for Apple to debut its product, and planning to pivot to "whatever Apple figured out, if Apple figured this out." That's more-or-less what Google did with Android way back when, and it worked out really well for Google. And Apple is historically awful at creating social experiences, whereas Facebook is historically very good at it, so perhaps their plan is to copycat while working out all the flaws in their competitor's plan, and to be the only company with strong enough technology in place early on that they can go head-and-head with Apple's R&D department. They have gotten pretty good at plagiarism in the last few years, after all.
But I think the issue's bigger than that. Facebook's early genius lay in its minutiae. It was a masterpiece of interface density, of tightly-interlocking components that communicated with one another in shockingly smart ways. (I'm unsurprised that this evolved into incredibly nuanced ways to mine users for data—it's the same kind of thinking, sorta.) And the problem with VR isn't "information density," it's "coming up with a use case that's actually functional and adds meaningfully to what someone can do with their life." Facebook genuinely made communication drastically easier on a lot of fronts; "Zoom but with legs" offers me nothing actually meaningful, even in the hypothetical world where my coworkers and I all wear these dongles every time we want to chat.
If it wasn't Zuckerberg and Meta heading up this foray, this would be a fascinating story about how hard it is to figure out what new technology actually is, in the sense of carving out a new relationship between a medium and its participants. And on some level, this is still that story, because Facebook is the only one of the Big Four companies whose success had to do with inventing social software, and understanding people well enough to design around them. But its failure on that front is overshadowed by the fact that, well, Facebook and Zuck aren't what they once were, and they also tried very hard to accidentally-on-purpose destroy democracy, so haha fuck this ball-less guy and his nonexistent goddamn legs.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:07 AM on October 14, 2022 [44 favorites]
That rate of innovation continued for a shockingly long time, especially by Internet standards. Five years in, Facebook was still delivering new redesigns on a quarterly basis that were obscenely ahead of its time. In fact, one of the first things I really found frustrating about Facebook was how many times it would introduce a really interesting paradigm, then get the zoomies and leapfrog itself six months later without dwelling in the brand-new thing it had just come up with. Eventually it became the posterchild for terrible, bloated UI, but for a long time it was one of the trailblazers. And that's just talking desktop: the real reason Facebook took off the way it did was that it was ascendant just as the iPhone was introduced, and it more-or-less established some of the most basic conventions for mobile site design right out of the gate. By the time the App Store debuted and sites were able to send notifications, it was primed to become everybody's lasting addiction for an eternity in Internet time.
Obviously none of this changes the fact that
One of the fascinating things about technology is how drastically the form factor of a device changes a person's relationship to it. A lot of people couldn't comprehend how much the iPhone was about to change society, because they'd seen laptops and they'd seen Blackberries and it was hard to process just how much a device that was about the same shape as a Blackberry would drastically change things around. (Hell, look at how the iPod sparked a breakthrough in portable music players long after pocket-sized MP3 players had been invented.) Very subtle changes can go a long way.
And one of the fascinating things about VR/AR is that it's about as drastic a leap away from other screen-based form factors as we've ever attempted. Nobody knows how it works. No one has figured out how to make it anything but a niche appeal. Every product that's attempted it has become the butt of a joke—I'd count Google Glass in this category, and eesh. But it's also a pretty alluring dream, in the sense that sci-fi geeks have been sci-fi geeking out about immersive virtual worlds for about as long as sci-fi geeks have existed. At the same time, some its major obstacles are hard to surmount: the devices have to be big enough to cover a chunk of your face, it's awkward to stick a VR thing on your head when friends are nearby, and people are sick of screens to the point where the other big push is towards computational environments rooted in physical reality, with the computer working as a behind-the-scenes operator. (A lot of smarthome stuff is pretty stupid and dystopian too, but things like Dynamicland are genuinely exciting and neat.)
One theory I've seen is that Meta is just building a technological foundation right now, waiting for Apple to debut its product, and planning to pivot to "whatever Apple figured out, if Apple figured this out." That's more-or-less what Google did with Android way back when, and it worked out really well for Google. And Apple is historically awful at creating social experiences, whereas Facebook is historically very good at it, so perhaps their plan is to copycat while working out all the flaws in their competitor's plan, and to be the only company with strong enough technology in place early on that they can go head-and-head with Apple's R&D department. They have gotten pretty good at plagiarism in the last few years, after all.
But I think the issue's bigger than that. Facebook's early genius lay in its minutiae. It was a masterpiece of interface density, of tightly-interlocking components that communicated with one another in shockingly smart ways. (I'm unsurprised that this evolved into incredibly nuanced ways to mine users for data—it's the same kind of thinking, sorta.) And the problem with VR isn't "information density," it's "coming up with a use case that's actually functional and adds meaningfully to what someone can do with their life." Facebook genuinely made communication drastically easier on a lot of fronts; "Zoom but with legs" offers me nothing actually meaningful, even in the hypothetical world where my coworkers and I all wear these dongles every time we want to chat.
If it wasn't Zuckerberg and Meta heading up this foray, this would be a fascinating story about how hard it is to figure out what new technology actually is, in the sense of carving out a new relationship between a medium and its participants. And on some level, this is still that story, because Facebook is the only one of the Big Four companies whose success had to do with inventing social software, and understanding people well enough to design around them. But its failure on that front is overshadowed by the fact that, well, Facebook and Zuck aren't what they once were, and they also tried very hard to accidentally-on-purpose destroy democracy, so haha fuck this ball-less guy and his nonexistent goddamn legs.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:07 AM on October 14, 2022 [44 favorites]
I should add that for it to really catch on, you’re probably going to have to find a good way to sensor and articulate the genitals. I doubt Facebook is going to integrate this technology into their metaverse, but the ultimate winner in this space will.
The ultimate winning product will be both bluetooth connected and top-rack dishwasher-safe. Bonus points for an API that OK Cupid/Tinder/Etc can integrate with.
posted by mikelieman at 6:08 AM on October 14, 2022
The ultimate winning product will be both bluetooth connected and top-rack dishwasher-safe. Bonus points for an API that OK Cupid/Tinder/Etc can integrate with.
posted by mikelieman at 6:08 AM on October 14, 2022
Also, if you're wondering how Meta got even 300,000 people to use Horizon Social... it's because they force you to make an account to use their new Oculus.
Not that they'd ever be unscrupulous and pad their numbers. Meta would never pad numbers to make something look more useful and effective than it is.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:37 AM on October 14, 2022 [8 favorites]
Not that they'd ever be unscrupulous and pad their numbers. Meta would never pad numbers to make something look more useful and effective than it is.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:37 AM on October 14, 2022 [8 favorites]
That Kotaku article is a blatant distortion of the facts and I will not stand for it ... What they didn't have was FEET.
Quite so! Until the deployment of this astounding innovation from the disruptors at Meta, best we can get is paws.
posted by flabdablet at 7:08 AM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
Quite so! Until the deployment of this astounding innovation from the disruptors at Meta, best we can get is paws.
posted by flabdablet at 7:08 AM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
All this stuff pains me—the whole Zuckerverse VR thing. I simply don't understand the point and am trying to wrap my head around it. It's not a game, it's not work, it's not restful. What is it? I certainly don't want to socialize with people virtually. I wonder how many virtual murders it will take to get someone banned?
posted by jabah at 7:20 AM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by jabah at 7:20 AM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
Virtual sexual assault has been around since the MUD/MOO days. I'd call it a certainty for the Metaverse, clunky prevention efforts notwithstanding. It's not like the Zuck gives a damn about it.
posted by humbug at 7:28 AM on October 14, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by humbug at 7:28 AM on October 14, 2022 [7 favorites]
It's not a game, it's not work, it's not restful. What is it?
It's a cookbook.
posted by acb at 7:29 AM on October 14, 2022 [9 favorites]
It's a cookbook.
posted by acb at 7:29 AM on October 14, 2022 [9 favorites]
I simply don't understand the point and am trying to wrap my head around it. It's not a game, it's not work, it's not restful. What is it?
Puts me in mind of the product-pitching scene in Big, where Tom Hanks as the boy in a man's body is trying to make sense of a building that turns into a robot ("What's fun about that?"). Zuck et al. are the uptight humourless John Heard characters, the meeting has been going on for a decade, and any Robert Loggias have long since quit in disgust, frustration, or just plain amused incredulity.
(But I also believe Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted can indeed be trusted so who knows.)
posted by hangashore at 7:36 AM on October 14, 2022 [4 favorites]
Puts me in mind of the product-pitching scene in Big, where Tom Hanks as the boy in a man's body is trying to make sense of a building that turns into a robot ("What's fun about that?"). Zuck et al. are the uptight humourless John Heard characters, the meeting has been going on for a decade, and any Robert Loggias have long since quit in disgust, frustration, or just plain amused incredulity.
(But I also believe Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted can indeed be trusted so who knows.)
posted by hangashore at 7:36 AM on October 14, 2022 [4 favorites]
the problem with VR isn't "information density," it's "coming up with a use case that's actually functional and adds meaningfully to what someone can do with their life."
I think Meta does have a theory on that, and it's worth understanding whether or not you buy it. The theory is "social presence."
The internet made a lot of in person things (like classrooms, conferences, office work) not have to be in person anymore, and then the pandemic gave those things a big kick out of their rut so a lot of them actually aren't in person anymore.
We're still fighting over how much actually happens in person; it's not settled yet, but pretty clear that a lot more will be remote than before. One of the things we lose when we choose remote is social presence -- the body language and eye contact and whatever it is that makes Zoom calls measurably more tiring than in person conversations. Remote is convenient enough that we'll end up using it for a lot of things even if we're losing something important by doing so.
People who try good-enough VR setups say that they restore social presence for remote interactions -- there's a qualitative difference between feeling like you're "with" people or not. Meta is betting that this feeling of social presence is worth a lot of money, because you save so much money by moving an additional in person thing to remote that they wouldn't have to capture very much of the savings to do well. Social presence is only worth anything if all of the other fiddly bits are fixed, and there's a lot of fiddly bits, but what's a few tens of billions of dollars more to fix all of those?
Whether or not you think Meta will actually make this work, I think it's worth paying attention to because most of the premises are true -- the shift to remote work, the loss of something meaningful from remote work, the qualitative difference when VR is working right. So there *might* really be gold where they're digging, and if there is we'll all end up living in their world and that'll be an interesting time.
---
How would they actually get this rolling, though, when it currently looks so unappealing?
What I think that could look like is, imagine John Carmack gets what he wants -- the things he pointed out in his yearly critique of what the team wasn't doing well yet. So now there's a $300 version of the $1500 headset, that can connect you in a few seconds to a space with thousands of people in it, with all the interface hassles ironed out to the millisecond ... and it turns out that it's possible with that new thing to meaningfully replace in person visits to professional conferences. You come away from the conference with the same sort of sense of having met the key people in your field that you get from an in person conference, and you save so much money that the headset just comes for "free" with the ticket price of the conference.
If that catches on in a given industry, now that industry has all the well-connected people owning this headset, and they might as well use it to talk to each other. And then they get one for their managers, and oh it also does some other stuff too, and you hit that critical mass where the things that benefit from social presence are easier to throw on the headset for than not.
I dunno, not saying it all works, just that there's a real idea behind it.
posted by john hadron collider at 8:06 AM on October 14, 2022 [17 favorites]
I think Meta does have a theory on that, and it's worth understanding whether or not you buy it. The theory is "social presence."
The internet made a lot of in person things (like classrooms, conferences, office work) not have to be in person anymore, and then the pandemic gave those things a big kick out of their rut so a lot of them actually aren't in person anymore.
We're still fighting over how much actually happens in person; it's not settled yet, but pretty clear that a lot more will be remote than before. One of the things we lose when we choose remote is social presence -- the body language and eye contact and whatever it is that makes Zoom calls measurably more tiring than in person conversations. Remote is convenient enough that we'll end up using it for a lot of things even if we're losing something important by doing so.
People who try good-enough VR setups say that they restore social presence for remote interactions -- there's a qualitative difference between feeling like you're "with" people or not. Meta is betting that this feeling of social presence is worth a lot of money, because you save so much money by moving an additional in person thing to remote that they wouldn't have to capture very much of the savings to do well. Social presence is only worth anything if all of the other fiddly bits are fixed, and there's a lot of fiddly bits, but what's a few tens of billions of dollars more to fix all of those?
Whether or not you think Meta will actually make this work, I think it's worth paying attention to because most of the premises are true -- the shift to remote work, the loss of something meaningful from remote work, the qualitative difference when VR is working right. So there *might* really be gold where they're digging, and if there is we'll all end up living in their world and that'll be an interesting time.
---
How would they actually get this rolling, though, when it currently looks so unappealing?
What I think that could look like is, imagine John Carmack gets what he wants -- the things he pointed out in his yearly critique of what the team wasn't doing well yet. So now there's a $300 version of the $1500 headset, that can connect you in a few seconds to a space with thousands of people in it, with all the interface hassles ironed out to the millisecond ... and it turns out that it's possible with that new thing to meaningfully replace in person visits to professional conferences. You come away from the conference with the same sort of sense of having met the key people in your field that you get from an in person conference, and you save so much money that the headset just comes for "free" with the ticket price of the conference.
If that catches on in a given industry, now that industry has all the well-connected people owning this headset, and they might as well use it to talk to each other. And then they get one for their managers, and oh it also does some other stuff too, and you hit that critical mass where the things that benefit from social presence are easier to throw on the headset for than not.
I dunno, not saying it all works, just that there's a real idea behind it.
posted by john hadron collider at 8:06 AM on October 14, 2022 [17 favorites]
I think it'd be a much shorter reach to tweak Zoom for social presence than to build whatever the heck is the Zuck wants.
For one-on-one and small-group (like, six people or fewer) work, I've already used Zoom quite a bit and... it's fine. I know they're there, they know I'm there, we can get stuff done and ask questions as needed. Any meeting larger than that, I agree the experience is wearying and awful... but I honestly can't see how a Zuckian VR room is better?
posted by humbug at 9:22 AM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
For one-on-one and small-group (like, six people or fewer) work, I've already used Zoom quite a bit and... it's fine. I know they're there, they know I'm there, we can get stuff done and ask questions as needed. Any meeting larger than that, I agree the experience is wearying and awful... but I honestly can't see how a Zuckian VR room is better?
posted by humbug at 9:22 AM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
Can someone who knows this sort of thing, why can't they just use a preexisting physics engine and body mechanics? Ok, sure, if you play games where you interact with a projected 3D environment, you eventually see some wonkiness, but why not start there are work on better collision detection or something? I'm sure if you threw a couple of hundred million at Epic for them to work on a nice version of the Unreal engine this would be more sorted than it is now. Or am I missing something obvious?
posted by Hactar at 9:42 AM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Hactar at 9:42 AM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
Do the game engines allow "eye contact" with other players? AIUI we think that’s one of the things people deeply miss.
posted by clew at 9:50 AM on October 14, 2022
posted by clew at 9:50 AM on October 14, 2022
john hadron collider, I think you're 100% right about Facebook's theory. I just... also used Habbo Hotel and IMVU a lot as a kid, and have occasionally played MMORPGs. I've used VR headsets a fair amount, too. And thus far, I'm not convinced that "VR presence" is as groundbreaking as people want it to be: in my experience, what it made me realize is just how much "presence" I get out of extremely simple game environments, and just how how narrow the divide is between the crude-toy version and the immersive-headset version.
My takeaway has been that VR is great for witnessing and observing. The actual eyes-on experience feels very passive to me; it doesn't make me want to do stuff, it makes me want to see stuff. (Outdoorsy video games and mysterious puzzle rooms are just, 🤌🏼) Like, it's no surprise to me that VR porn has taken off faster than VR anything else: porn is a fundamentally passive experience, and I think that "passive" is where VR thrives.
I expect to be proven wildly wrong about this, but my suspicion has been that Apple's approach is going to be an AR/VR blend, with an emphasis on the "augmented" rather than the "virtual." I feel like their take on "social headset wearing" will consist of a bunch of people sharing actual physical space, using headsets to share some kind of reality between them. They don't imagine a world where family members all retreat to their separate rooms and live in isolation: they want parents and kids hanging out together in the living room, playing with some kind of half-physical half-virtual super-LEGO. Or college kids hanging out in a dorm room that's too small for an actual TV, simulating a giant movie screen on the opposite wall instead of hunkering down around a tiny laptop with mediocre sound. The kind of thing where, if you look over, you see an actual person.
That's partly me speculating based on the technologies Apple's been openly building into their other devices—they are so much more obsessed with "look at how well we model physics happening on your kitchen table" than I've ever seen, which makes no sense for phones but a lot of sense for headsets—and partly me injecting my own feelings into things. Because... sure, I want to get stoned and play No Man's Sky in VR now and again, but Facebook literally became Facebook because people who never used AOL Instant Messenger on their desktop machines were totally willing to post statuses on their phone. The whole success of social networks boils down to how easily you can let them slip into your life and strangle your attention span. And now Facebook's gambling on... the exact opposite of that? They want to go from "light and innocuous" to "literally suffocating your face"? I just don't see it.
Either headsets remain a specialized product, or they discover a way to integrate themselves into our everyday reality, offering the perks of other screens but mapping them onto actual physical space. To me, that sounds like AR, not VR. "Shared in-person experience" is something I might buy into, at the right price. "Escapist new full-time reality" feels like it appeals to soulless business people and overly depressed gamers. Which... explains its current target demographics, honestly.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:34 AM on October 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
My takeaway has been that VR is great for witnessing and observing. The actual eyes-on experience feels very passive to me; it doesn't make me want to do stuff, it makes me want to see stuff. (Outdoorsy video games and mysterious puzzle rooms are just, 🤌🏼) Like, it's no surprise to me that VR porn has taken off faster than VR anything else: porn is a fundamentally passive experience, and I think that "passive" is where VR thrives.
I expect to be proven wildly wrong about this, but my suspicion has been that Apple's approach is going to be an AR/VR blend, with an emphasis on the "augmented" rather than the "virtual." I feel like their take on "social headset wearing" will consist of a bunch of people sharing actual physical space, using headsets to share some kind of reality between them. They don't imagine a world where family members all retreat to their separate rooms and live in isolation: they want parents and kids hanging out together in the living room, playing with some kind of half-physical half-virtual super-LEGO. Or college kids hanging out in a dorm room that's too small for an actual TV, simulating a giant movie screen on the opposite wall instead of hunkering down around a tiny laptop with mediocre sound. The kind of thing where, if you look over, you see an actual person.
That's partly me speculating based on the technologies Apple's been openly building into their other devices—they are so much more obsessed with "look at how well we model physics happening on your kitchen table" than I've ever seen, which makes no sense for phones but a lot of sense for headsets—and partly me injecting my own feelings into things. Because... sure, I want to get stoned and play No Man's Sky in VR now and again, but Facebook literally became Facebook because people who never used AOL Instant Messenger on their desktop machines were totally willing to post statuses on their phone. The whole success of social networks boils down to how easily you can let them slip into your life and strangle your attention span. And now Facebook's gambling on... the exact opposite of that? They want to go from "light and innocuous" to "literally suffocating your face"? I just don't see it.
Either headsets remain a specialized product, or they discover a way to integrate themselves into our everyday reality, offering the perks of other screens but mapping them onto actual physical space. To me, that sounds like AR, not VR. "Shared in-person experience" is something I might buy into, at the right price. "Escapist new full-time reality" feels like it appeals to soulless business people and overly depressed gamers. Which... explains its current target demographics, honestly.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:34 AM on October 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
The thing with legs is the tracking. The VR hardware right now will track your head and hands, but not your feet. The physics engine or whatever could make legs but those legs won't correlate with what your real legs are doing.
posted by RobotHero at 10:36 AM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by RobotHero at 10:36 AM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
But can you convince your friends to paint a fence in the metaverse?
posted by gottabefunky at 10:42 AM on October 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by gottabefunky at 10:42 AM on October 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
Get to a point where Meta has a piece of all the action: virtual real estate, skins, media, all of it. In short, how can we monetize and monitor everything?
Yes and I don't think they're trying to build a thing at all. They're trying to build a framework everyone has to use to make their thing (or at least they hope so). They're not making the game, they're making the Unreal engine other people use to make games. The "bootstrap" web site-building framework, not the website itself. Then, they can do nothing and automatically have all their monetizing and tracking shit inserted by dependency in everything everyone else makes.
posted by ctmf at 11:01 AM on October 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
Yes and I don't think they're trying to build a thing at all. They're trying to build a framework everyone has to use to make their thing (or at least they hope so). They're not making the game, they're making the Unreal engine other people use to make games. The "bootstrap" web site-building framework, not the website itself. Then, they can do nothing and automatically have all their monetizing and tracking shit inserted by dependency in everything everyone else makes.
posted by ctmf at 11:01 AM on October 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
The thing with legs is the tracking. The VR hardware right now will track your head and hands, but not your feet.
You can get additional trackers on VR systems that use lighthouse tracking and strap them to your feet for lower-limb tracking, but I haven't seen anything using this yet that seems worth the hassle (and this from someone who found VR to be at least often worth the hassle)
posted by entity447b at 11:10 AM on October 14, 2022
You can get additional trackers on VR systems that use lighthouse tracking and strap them to your feet for lower-limb tracking, but I haven't seen anything using this yet that seems worth the hassle (and this from someone who found VR to be at least often worth the hassle)
posted by entity447b at 11:10 AM on October 14, 2022
Fire Emblem Awakening characters had legs! What they didn't have was FEET.
And in Fates they somehow lost their pants.
posted by pwnguin at 11:27 AM on October 14, 2022
And in Fates they somehow lost their pants.
posted by pwnguin at 11:27 AM on October 14, 2022
I am a VR developer who has worked with full-body tracking systems. The "Legs!" announcement strikes me as reactive and a strange emphasis intended for people who aren't really familiar with VR (which is most of their intended user base, I suppose). In my opinion, legs are not important for this kind of VR experience.
You may have noticed that many VR games do not represent the player's arms, but have floating hands or even just held objects with no hands. This looks weird in a screenshot or video, but generally feels fine when experiencing it. Calculating the position of one's arms by extrapolating backwards from the hand and head positions is pretty difficult, and is generally not super accurate, leading to weird popping and other artifacts. Our brains are very good at filling in missing things, so it feels more immersive to just see one's hands move in VR and feel our physical arms move than to see a "wrong" arm (or leg), which can feel pretty unsettling.
When one has lower-body tracking, moves one's feet, and sees one's avatar do the same thing, it's very cool! Almost as cool as seeing one's hands move. However, when it comes to avatars in VR, it is better to not show the thing than to show the "wrong" thing.
Consider also that it has been standard in FPS games to simply not have legs for player characters. It would look very strange if other characters in the game had no legs, but the player themselves is generally focused on what's in front of them and is not looking down at their own legs.
If they can get it to somehow actually track the player's actual movement then that's fantastic, but without using actual tracking devices I'm skeptical, and generally I would say it's not a great idea to encourage people to jump or high-kick with their headsets on. I would have just given everyone hoverskirts.
posted by subocoyne at 11:58 AM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
You may have noticed that many VR games do not represent the player's arms, but have floating hands or even just held objects with no hands. This looks weird in a screenshot or video, but generally feels fine when experiencing it. Calculating the position of one's arms by extrapolating backwards from the hand and head positions is pretty difficult, and is generally not super accurate, leading to weird popping and other artifacts. Our brains are very good at filling in missing things, so it feels more immersive to just see one's hands move in VR and feel our physical arms move than to see a "wrong" arm (or leg), which can feel pretty unsettling.
When one has lower-body tracking, moves one's feet, and sees one's avatar do the same thing, it's very cool! Almost as cool as seeing one's hands move. However, when it comes to avatars in VR, it is better to not show the thing than to show the "wrong" thing.
Consider also that it has been standard in FPS games to simply not have legs for player characters. It would look very strange if other characters in the game had no legs, but the player themselves is generally focused on what's in front of them and is not looking down at their own legs.
If they can get it to somehow actually track the player's actual movement then that's fantastic, but without using actual tracking devices I'm skeptical, and generally I would say it's not a great idea to encourage people to jump or high-kick with their headsets on. I would have just given everyone hoverskirts.
posted by subocoyne at 11:58 AM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
I am one of the couple of million of longterm users of Second Life. And the Zuckerberg Metaverse(tm) project continually boggles my mind. Second Life avatars were never legless, even back in 2003. And today they are graphically beautiful, so why are the Z-Metaverse avatars so much worse?
You know, back around 2010, Facebook tried to merge with Second Life, to much fanfare. It was a dismal failure. Second Life is a community of people whose focus is on inworld community and selfexpression. Facebook tried to get users to link their Facebook accounts with verified real-life names to their Second Life accounts, breaking the fundamental rule of Second Life social life--that people have a right to privacy about their real lives. Facebook tried to get people to have their avatars look like their real life bodies, breaking the fundamental rule of Second Life embodiment: that people be free to live in whatever sort of body makes them happy--what I call a transcarnate ethos. And yes, there was (and is!) a very large pool of Second Life residents with transgender avatars, but there's also an embracing of people whose avatars are frogs or androids or anthropomorphic furries or any form people enjoy living in. Facebook framed all of that as people lying about who they truly were, because it insisted not just on real names, but on a ciscarnate vision of reality, under which who you are is defined by the body you are born into, and deviating from your real life bodily form is said to be deceptive.
The attempt to reshape Second Life into an extension of people's real life Facebook walls sank like a lead balloon.
And here we are, a dozen years later, and Zuck seems to understand what makes a virtual world appealing even less than back then.
I presume the legless avatars were actually a choice--one made to ensure people would lack genitals, so they couldn't do what people have always done in virtual settings, i.e. have erotic relationships. But forced celibacy just isn't going to catch on in a viable virtual world . . . The point of a virtual life is to have a life.
I agree that Zuckerberg's aim is to create a megamonopoly, in which he will own the land we walk on, the skies we fly in, the bodies we occupy, and the games we play, so that we have to pay him for every aspect of our shiny virtual lives. Only. . . the Z-Metaverse is the opposite of shiny. It's pathetic-looking, and nobody wants to use it.
And really, thank the ghods. I'll continue to socialize with the folks I love in the small Second Life metaverse, in a virtual community that is stable and mature, while always evolving and being creative, and in which every avatar and jacket and spaceship and beachhouse has been created by and for users. A world that, while not utopia, is more utopic than the real world, not more dystopic than it.
posted by DrMew at 12:03 PM on October 14, 2022 [15 favorites]
You know, back around 2010, Facebook tried to merge with Second Life, to much fanfare. It was a dismal failure. Second Life is a community of people whose focus is on inworld community and selfexpression. Facebook tried to get users to link their Facebook accounts with verified real-life names to their Second Life accounts, breaking the fundamental rule of Second Life social life--that people have a right to privacy about their real lives. Facebook tried to get people to have their avatars look like their real life bodies, breaking the fundamental rule of Second Life embodiment: that people be free to live in whatever sort of body makes them happy--what I call a transcarnate ethos. And yes, there was (and is!) a very large pool of Second Life residents with transgender avatars, but there's also an embracing of people whose avatars are frogs or androids or anthropomorphic furries or any form people enjoy living in. Facebook framed all of that as people lying about who they truly were, because it insisted not just on real names, but on a ciscarnate vision of reality, under which who you are is defined by the body you are born into, and deviating from your real life bodily form is said to be deceptive.
The attempt to reshape Second Life into an extension of people's real life Facebook walls sank like a lead balloon.
And here we are, a dozen years later, and Zuck seems to understand what makes a virtual world appealing even less than back then.
I presume the legless avatars were actually a choice--one made to ensure people would lack genitals, so they couldn't do what people have always done in virtual settings, i.e. have erotic relationships. But forced celibacy just isn't going to catch on in a viable virtual world . . . The point of a virtual life is to have a life.
I agree that Zuckerberg's aim is to create a megamonopoly, in which he will own the land we walk on, the skies we fly in, the bodies we occupy, and the games we play, so that we have to pay him for every aspect of our shiny virtual lives. Only. . . the Z-Metaverse is the opposite of shiny. It's pathetic-looking, and nobody wants to use it.
And really, thank the ghods. I'll continue to socialize with the folks I love in the small Second Life metaverse, in a virtual community that is stable and mature, while always evolving and being creative, and in which every avatar and jacket and spaceship and beachhouse has been created by and for users. A world that, while not utopia, is more utopic than the real world, not more dystopic than it.
posted by DrMew at 12:03 PM on October 14, 2022 [15 favorites]
Zuck has just read Snowcrash and is trying to reproduce the company that ran that metaverse. The unnamed? company became rich by selling virtual real estate and let other companies develop games and experiences within the space. The metaverse became successful when facial tracking became good enough that business accepted it as an alternative to meeting physically.
I really don't think it's much more complicated than that...he's become obsessed with a 30 year old vision of what could be and he's throwing piles of money into making it work.
But fundamentally...it won't work until/unless the hardware can go from expensive, uncomfortable, and isolating to cheap, comfortable and transparent enough that you don't bump into furniture.
posted by Eddie Mars at 12:13 PM on October 14, 2022 [4 favorites]
I really don't think it's much more complicated than that...he's become obsessed with a 30 year old vision of what could be and he's throwing piles of money into making it work.
But fundamentally...it won't work until/unless the hardware can go from expensive, uncomfortable, and isolating to cheap, comfortable and transparent enough that you don't bump into furniture.
posted by Eddie Mars at 12:13 PM on October 14, 2022 [4 favorites]
I agree that getting more and more realistic-looking and -moving avatars will be fantastic for game play, so that sounds very much like a task a games company might have more success with, perhaps less so for a 'find out every bit of your personal information, behaviour and preferences then increasingly dominate, shape and control every aspect of your environment accordingly' company (though I can imagine the latter being quite motivated indeed).
And judging from the jumping-Zuck video above and articles like this recent one from Forbes about how we (or at least some of us) choose our online avatars, maybe I wouldn't feel so completely revolted by the whole concept of uncanny-valley avatars if they didn't seem to always have that whole thousand-yard-stare thing going on. The horror, the horror.
posted by hangashore at 12:55 PM on October 14, 2022
And judging from the jumping-Zuck video above and articles like this recent one from Forbes about how we (or at least some of us) choose our online avatars, maybe I wouldn't feel so completely revolted by the whole concept of uncanny-valley avatars if they didn't seem to always have that whole thousand-yard-stare thing going on. The horror, the horror.
posted by hangashore at 12:55 PM on October 14, 2022
you’re probably going to have to find a good way to sensor and articulate the genitals
"What are you...? Get that stuff away from my... You idiots! I said you have to make sure we can CENSOR the genitals!"
posted by straight at 1:52 PM on October 14, 2022 [4 favorites]
"What are you...? Get that stuff away from my... You idiots! I said you have to make sure we can CENSOR the genitals!"
posted by straight at 1:52 PM on October 14, 2022 [4 favorites]
The thing with Zoom or Teams calls is you can chat in parallel, check your mail, zone out a little bit and browse something. Wearing a helmet and being in a VR meeting instead sounds like cosplaying something from the 80:s. Even the Red Dead Redemption thing sounds better.
I think the use case for VR will continue to be where something other than the other people on the space is the centre of attention. Something like the airplane engine mentioned above, or even a patient being operated on. And even then I’d think augmented rather than virtual reality will be the thing.
posted by boogieboy at 2:16 PM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think the use case for VR will continue to be where something other than the other people on the space is the centre of attention. Something like the airplane engine mentioned above, or even a patient being operated on. And even then I’d think augmented rather than virtual reality will be the thing.
posted by boogieboy at 2:16 PM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
clew: "Do the game engines allow "eye contact" with other players? AIUI we think that’s one of the things people deeply miss."
Weird. I'm the exact opposite. Zoom meetings force me into massively more eye contact than I prefer. (If it matters, I am AFAIK neurotypical.)
It also destroys my ability to tell if somebody's watching me, or if I have a moment of relative privacy. I can't even look away from the meeting lest somebody think I'm slacking off.
Fix THIS, Zoom -- I think Discord gets it mostly right, honestly -- and I'll be so much less tired of virtual meetings.
posted by humbug at 2:43 PM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
Weird. I'm the exact opposite. Zoom meetings force me into massively more eye contact than I prefer. (If it matters, I am AFAIK neurotypical.)
It also destroys my ability to tell if somebody's watching me, or if I have a moment of relative privacy. I can't even look away from the meeting lest somebody think I'm slacking off.
Fix THIS, Zoom -- I think Discord gets it mostly right, honestly -- and I'll be so much less tired of virtual meetings.
posted by humbug at 2:43 PM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
People like porn and arguing, so Meta VR will be fine once they discover how to easily deliver that to users.
I'm more excited about the idea of multi-player AR. It will be like having real-life Digimon.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:05 PM on October 14, 2022
I'm more excited about the idea of multi-player AR. It will be like having real-life Digimon.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:05 PM on October 14, 2022
I just remembered that Monkee Michael Nesmith patented a technique (and actually used it for concerts) where a real environment is used to create an augmented VR landscape for people to mill about in and interact in over the internet. I wonder if he or his estate got any licensing fees from the Zuck? I think he mentioned that he lost a girlfriend because she met someone else…in the VR venue he created.
posted by jabah at 4:05 PM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by jabah at 4:05 PM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
As someone in the medical field I don't at all understand the hype around using virtual reality for surgical training. The hard part of learning surgery isn't knowing what it looks like inside a body. You get that from standing at the operating table and watching surgeries. The hard part is learning what to do with your hands. Any virtual/augmented reality training would be pointless without realistic haptic feedback. And I have to imagine we're a zillion technological generations away from being able to produce haptics that feel anything like actually manipulating tissue.
posted by saturday_morning at 4:55 PM on October 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by saturday_morning at 4:55 PM on October 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
After DrMew’s post I could believe that this whole thing is the continuation of Zuck’s snit that Second Life didn’t like his rules. Possibly just a featherbed built by a cunning development group!
posted by clew at 6:58 PM on October 14, 2022
posted by clew at 6:58 PM on October 14, 2022
And I have to imagine we're a zillion technological generations away from being able to produce haptics that feel anything like actually manipulating tissue.
I recall reading many years ago that a lot of surgeries are done laproscopically, and that regular time on training sims is part of the job because the controls are inverted and its kinda hard to see in there by design. Training on the same machine the same way every week probably gets borning, and to that point that someone made a Wii game about it. In this interview with the developers, hospital admins came to them with the idea.
posted by pwnguin at 8:51 PM on October 14, 2022
I recall reading many years ago that a lot of surgeries are done laproscopically, and that regular time on training sims is part of the job because the controls are inverted and its kinda hard to see in there by design. Training on the same machine the same way every week probably gets borning, and to that point that someone made a Wii game about it. In this interview with the developers, hospital admins came to them with the idea.
posted by pwnguin at 8:51 PM on October 14, 2022
Saw this in my feeds today :
theverge.com: A meeting in Google’s 3D chat booth felt like real life science fiction
posted by sebastienbailard at 9:54 PM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
theverge.com: A meeting in Google’s 3D chat booth felt like real life science fiction
posted by sebastienbailard at 9:54 PM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]
A meeting in Google’s 3D chat booth felt like real life science fiction
Jesus, that's actually incredible. Actually useful. Being able to feel like you're sitting across the table from someone you love, or a therapist, or any number of other situations.
On the one hand, I remember the first time I saw a demo of what would essentially become Microsoft Surface, I was blown away and thought "yeah, maybe in 10 years, I'll get to experience something like that" and then, like, 2 years later the iPhone launched. Maybe a year after that, I was at the Hard Rock in Hollywood and they had a 20 foot wall you could fully interact with and I'm still floored by how quickly that went from "we used $10k worth of tech and a giant refrigerator-sized device to show you this demo" to "here's one you can hold in your hand and it's not prohibitively expensive" in a matter of 2 years (I'm even counting the time after Apple dropped the price down to $400).
On the other hand, goddamnit, it's Google. And they'll either never bring it to market, make it for Enterprise Customers only, or discontinue it due to "lack of interest" because they priced it too high.
But thank you sebastienballard for sharing that link. Fascinating stuff. I would love to see that come to fruition and absolutely bury the "Meta" platform because no one wants a stupid 3D cartoon of themselves wandering around a weird utopian garden so they can meet with their coworkers.
posted by revmitcz at 12:43 AM on October 15, 2022
Jesus, that's actually incredible. Actually useful. Being able to feel like you're sitting across the table from someone you love, or a therapist, or any number of other situations.
On the one hand, I remember the first time I saw a demo of what would essentially become Microsoft Surface, I was blown away and thought "yeah, maybe in 10 years, I'll get to experience something like that" and then, like, 2 years later the iPhone launched. Maybe a year after that, I was at the Hard Rock in Hollywood and they had a 20 foot wall you could fully interact with and I'm still floored by how quickly that went from "we used $10k worth of tech and a giant refrigerator-sized device to show you this demo" to "here's one you can hold in your hand and it's not prohibitively expensive" in a matter of 2 years (I'm even counting the time after Apple dropped the price down to $400).
On the other hand, goddamnit, it's Google. And they'll either never bring it to market, make it for Enterprise Customers only, or discontinue it due to "lack of interest" because they priced it too high.
But thank you sebastienballard for sharing that link. Fascinating stuff. I would love to see that come to fruition and absolutely bury the "Meta" platform because no one wants a stupid 3D cartoon of themselves wandering around a weird utopian garden so they can meet with their coworkers.
posted by revmitcz at 12:43 AM on October 15, 2022
Part of what makes Google's thing feel so natural is the low latency.
Can't see that remaining a feature once it starts being used over the Internet, as opposed to a high speed campus LAN.
posted by flabdablet at 1:13 AM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
Can't see that remaining a feature once it starts being used over the Internet, as opposed to a high speed campus LAN.
posted by flabdablet at 1:13 AM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
As Max Headroom would say, I see high latency as a fea-fea-fea-feature, not a b-b-b-b-b-b-bug.
posted by jabah at 8:23 AM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by jabah at 8:23 AM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
First off, legs in VR have existed for a while. I saw people with them years ago in Altspace, and VRChat also supports them. You do have to buy some extra sensors to strap around your ankles, but if you're already investing in a VR setup and you really want legs, you can have legs (although I guess not in Zuck's world).
But he's been late to the game in typically egregious ways on other fronts as well. I listed to a news podcast talk about how Meta is working on anti-harassment measures. Altspace launched with personal space bubbles years ago (if you get too close to someone who has it turned on your avatar disappears) and you have the power to mute anyone else you want. In fact, the very first time I went into Altspace, when I landed in the welcome area, someone was popping back to the welcome area from the main area to complain to a rep that everyone was muting them and didn't they care about free speech??? (The rep was like, "people have the freedom to mute whoever they want") Like, did people at Meta not even do the most basic research of trying out the social VR spaces that were already out there? And also, sadly, the media also seems not to be doing that research and is just reporting direct from Meta press releases.
There is already a vibrant, creative, and very active community in VR in VRChat, and it's full of furries because it turns out if you just let people be whoever they really want to be with no judgement, deep down everyone wants to be a furry. At least that's the only conclusion I can draw. If you want an intelligent exploration and critique of VRChat, and a window into what it's like, this video by People Make Games is excellent.
During the pandemic I spent a lot of time gaming in VR with friends near and far, and the most realistic experience was definitely .. don't laugh .. Star Trek Bridge Crew. We would catch up while sitting around the on-board conference table waiting for everyone to log in. The way the avatars looked (my friends were usually strangely good at making avatars that looked like them) with mouths that moved when people talked and full bodies and arms (it's a seated game so the designers could put legs in because you weren't going to be moving them) it was all very life-like. And the pace of the missions allowed for a nice team work plus watercooler experience -- you could shoot some Klingons, and then shoot the breeze while you waited for the next mission to be assigned. Unfortunately Ubisoft seems to have forgotten it existed so there's been no updates in, maybe two years? But last I checked the servers are still on. These days we mostly do Walkabout Minigolf, which is another great way to catch up, especially since they keep releasing new and interesting themed courses.
posted by antinomia at 8:37 AM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
But he's been late to the game in typically egregious ways on other fronts as well. I listed to a news podcast talk about how Meta is working on anti-harassment measures. Altspace launched with personal space bubbles years ago (if you get too close to someone who has it turned on your avatar disappears) and you have the power to mute anyone else you want. In fact, the very first time I went into Altspace, when I landed in the welcome area, someone was popping back to the welcome area from the main area to complain to a rep that everyone was muting them and didn't they care about free speech??? (The rep was like, "people have the freedom to mute whoever they want") Like, did people at Meta not even do the most basic research of trying out the social VR spaces that were already out there? And also, sadly, the media also seems not to be doing that research and is just reporting direct from Meta press releases.
There is already a vibrant, creative, and very active community in VR in VRChat, and it's full of furries because it turns out if you just let people be whoever they really want to be with no judgement, deep down everyone wants to be a furry. At least that's the only conclusion I can draw. If you want an intelligent exploration and critique of VRChat, and a window into what it's like, this video by People Make Games is excellent.
During the pandemic I spent a lot of time gaming in VR with friends near and far, and the most realistic experience was definitely .. don't laugh .. Star Trek Bridge Crew. We would catch up while sitting around the on-board conference table waiting for everyone to log in. The way the avatars looked (my friends were usually strangely good at making avatars that looked like them) with mouths that moved when people talked and full bodies and arms (it's a seated game so the designers could put legs in because you weren't going to be moving them) it was all very life-like. And the pace of the missions allowed for a nice team work plus watercooler experience -- you could shoot some Klingons, and then shoot the breeze while you waited for the next mission to be assigned. Unfortunately Ubisoft seems to have forgotten it existed so there's been no updates in, maybe two years? But last I checked the servers are still on. These days we mostly do Walkabout Minigolf, which is another great way to catch up, especially since they keep releasing new and interesting themed courses.
posted by antinomia at 8:37 AM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
Someone made Doom for VRChat which is a good metric of how much flexibility people have to make whatever they want.
And yeah, compared to Meta avatars, where you only get to mix-and-match different human-shaped things, people can make all sorts of avatars for VRChat.
posted by RobotHero at 1:25 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
And yeah, compared to Meta avatars, where you only get to mix-and-match different human-shaped things, people can make all sorts of avatars for VRChat.
posted by RobotHero at 1:25 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
You sure? It might be much closer to QWOP
posted by Pronoiac at 7:05 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Pronoiac at 7:05 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
A meeting in Google’s 3D chat booth felt like real life science fiction
For comparison, a drawing made by Albert Robida in 1890 of a science fictional "telephonoscopic booth."
posted by jabah at 5:01 PM on October 16, 2022
For comparison, a drawing made by Albert Robida in 1890 of a science fictional "telephonoscopic booth."
posted by jabah at 5:01 PM on October 16, 2022
Another thing that's going on, from Artnet.com: Archaeologists at Pompeii Say the iPad Pro—Which Comes With a LiDAR Scanner—Is Changing the Way They Work
Archaeologists from Tulane University developed a new digital workflow, enabled by the iPad Pro, to conduct excavations at Pompeii.
Archaeologists from Tulane University developed a new digital workflow, enabled by the iPad Pro, to conduct excavations at Pompeii.
The iPad is even equipped with a LiDAR scanner—technology typically used on airplanes to help read topography covered with dense vegetation, and which has led to numerous groundbreaking finds in recent years. At a smaller site, it can created 3-D maps of trenches that creates an exact record of where each and every artifact was unearthed.posted by sebastienbailard at 8:50 PM on October 16, 2022 [5 favorites]
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