What was the good side effects?
Comment on Meta admits its first ‘superintelligence’ was too stupid to survive for three days
Mikina@programming.dev 21 hours ago
Watching Meta fumble with AI is pretty funny.
I’m still mad they dropped VR for this. That’s the one industry that needs for someone to burn billions into, and I’d rather have to deal with a Metaverse bullshit again, than whatever the AI is doing to people, because that has at least some positive impact - like better VR games. I also kind of liked using my headset in bed as a movie theater/multiple monitors, if the headset got a little bit better so you can use it longer, it would be perfect.
Metaverse was annoying, but at least it had some good side-effects.
We dropped that in favor of AI bullshit.
Evotech@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Mikina@programming.dev 14 hours ago
I know a lot people hate on this, but when I gave VR workstation a try (asi in, using VR for your second+ monitor) on my Quest 3, it was pretty nice.
At one point I was just taking my laptop to bed, passthrough block on my keyboard, and could comfortably work with 3 larger monitors. Or just plopping in bed with a controller, stream a large screen in front of me, and play a game.
Also, it’s great for focus. Not having the rest of the world around you distracting you works wonders.
The Quest 3 was usable (the resolution sucked too much on Q2 to be able to use virtual monitors), but I can imagine it could get pretty tiring spending more than an hour or so in it - which is what I presume they could eventually solve. I’m excited for Steam Frame, assuming it will work as a standalone Linux computer. If I could just develop anywhere with my monitor setup, needing only the headset and a keyboard, it would be great.
Another thing are meetings. It’s something you have to experience with an open mind, because it has been shoved into our throats under the Metaverse label, which made a lot of people adverse to it. I did give it a try, and it’s such a huge difference between just staring at someone on a Zoom call. Just the fact that you have some kind of gesturing, along with the virtual dashboards that are easy to draw to (using the tip of the controller as a pen on your table, or just plopping a virtual blackboard agaist your wall), and it just makes the meetings and presentations so much better.
Again, you have the issue of the headsets being unwieldy for long term, but that’s something they’d probably solve.
Of course, the whole Metaverse bullshit, and the way it was marketed and shoved down everyone’s throat was stupid, but the technology in itself was pretty nice to use - I enjoyed the experience. It had it own problems, but that’s something that could be solved.
Also, once I got into FPS in VR, it’s really hard to enjoy regular flat screen FPSs. You need to have a magnetic gun stock for it to be playable, but once you get that, it’s so much more fun. Just the fact that you have to actually change mags makes the experience so much better. It’s something that is hard to describe, but just feels a lot better. In general, some of the best experiences gaming I had were in VR, but most of it was just a promise or tech demos, because the field didn’t have time to mature, and was too unafordable for studios to take it seriously.
So, yeah, I think it had promise, and it’s a shame the world has given up before it became affordable and iterated upon, especially since we traded it for bullshit AI.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
Dunno why you’re getting downvoted. Had a co-worker fully adopt a VR workplace set up, which saved on physical monitors. So the technology had promise, even in a professional setting.
Mikina@programming.dev 12 hours ago
I kind of get it, it’s a thing that was extremely glorified by tech-bros as future of everything, before they moved over to AI, so everyone is alergic to that.
It’s also something that sounds stupid until you try it, and that’s hard to describe, and tbh my attempt to share the experience does sound like your regural run of the mill tech-bro speech, now that I read it again. I don’t think it’s possible to reasonably talk about things like these, because “and then I tried it and I was hooked! Of course it have its problems, but we will solve those” is exactly the techbro speech.
I’m as anti-bigtech as anyone here, and it’s not like I live in VR and believe in the Metaverse, fuck that, and it’s not like I have all my money in crypto and Meta stocks. I just honestly thought it was kinda cool the one time I tried it, and hope we’ll get a more open alternatives once Meta finishes burning money on RaD it needs. Which I definitely can’t say about crypto, AI, blockchain or NFTs.
But, yeah, unpopular opinion and all that.
Abyssian@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
They funded some of the best VR games ever made. Sure, their motivations behind it were to get kids addicted and be recording everything they see and say forever and have it all tied to their lame ass social media shit… bit it gave me cool, fun shit to do.
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
sure, my furnace is fueled by burning children, but it gives a really nice heat.
Abyssian@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
No company really wants anything beyond endless profit and control.
Mikina@programming.dev 14 hours ago
My main point was that it was marginally better than what we traded it for with AI.
The AI furnace is fueled by burning children, and also makes everyone colder and more miserable, but you can make a lot of investor money promising to build more furnaces like that.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
They funded some of the best VR games ever made.
Oculus Studios published Beat Sabre, so I’ll give you a pass.
Abyssian@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Meta bought it, they didn’t fund it or publish it.
Klear@piefed.world 19 hours ago
They poured a LOT of money into game development, including support for third party studios. Most of the games they helped become a reality ended up with PCVR versions as well.
artyom@piefed.social 18 hours ago
VR is a dead end outside of gaming and porn. I don’t know why so many tech companies are obsessed with making it into something more.
eleijeep@piefed.social 17 hours ago
I think it has a lot of potential outside of those two things, but the problem as with all modern technology is that the companies making it always do so in the most abusive, hostile way possible so everyone rejects it immediately as another Big Tech trap.
Think about how useful AR could have been for all manner of different tasks and professions, and what we have instead is pervert-glasses with built in surveillance, connected to the giant propaganda machine in the sky.
Apple’s “Apple Vision Pro” vision was actually a reasonable assortment of reasonable ideas when you watch their announcement marketing, and then what we got was an overpriced, underdeveloped toy as we’ve come to expect from them.
VR/AR is going to be a casualty of this era of tech, an era which will be remembered as taking the forward-looking, human focussed applied-science field that we love it for and turning it into a tool of extractive capitalism, an enormous vehicle for investment fraud, and an enabler of fascist authoritarianism.
Hopefully one day we will recover. In the mean-time, I still have hopes for the Steam Frame which is what it should be: a dumb, unopinionated peripheral.
artyom@piefed.social 16 hours ago
Yes, everyone rejects Big Tech, that’s why the companies are so small.
Disagree. It failed for the same reason every headset before it did. The entire concept is fundamentally flawed. No one wants to wear a goofy fucking facemask all day. And I think it’s pretty apparent from their advertising that that’s exactly what they expected people to do.
Meta expected companies to hold business meetings in VR. Why would anyone do that? What’s the point?
Valve certainly understood the assignment by making it a “streaming-first headset” designed primarily to be connected wirelessly to a PC. This just made it way smaller and lighter.
They were also brilliant in developing and implementing FEX so that you can running any X86 Windows game on an ARM Linux headset.
Mikina@programming.dev 12 hours ago
I only tested it like twice, on a meeting with my friends when we were working on a game in our free time, but I was honestly surprised how better the meeting went in VR.
Being used to just staring at flat faces on Zoom, you kind of forget how much you are actually missing in the term of expressions. It’s hard to describe, but it just felt a lot better when people are in a 3D space and can gesture around.
The whiteboard tools were also nice, like being able to draw with the pointy end of your controller either on table in front of you, or place a virtual blackboard against your wall at home.
Sure, in-person meetings are better, but this was pretty close to the point where it felt almost as a real meeting.
For standups and the like it’s an overkill, but brainstorming sessions were a lot better.
Of course, we never did that again, because the hassle of setting up headsets is too annoying. But especially for remote teams, I can imagine it being nice for occasional meetings.
It also might’ve just been the novelty effect and it would get old amd annoying soon.
Sabata11792@ani.social 15 hours ago
I can’t come up with a practical use for VR outside of gaming. It’s not practical, comfortable, or worth the effort to rub one out with the headset on.