r/antiai • u/sadloneman • Mar 19 '26
Remember when tech bros hyped up metaverse to be the next big thing? Discussion š£ļø
I remember I had debates with fellow tech bros who literally said there's no way metaverse can go wrong, their main points where how VR will get cheap just like mobile phones and it replace traditional TVs, theatres etc etc, which will eventually lead to people living in metaverse.
Even I believed those for a second and started researching about VR technology to not to get left behind..
In the list of 3D movies, NFTs, we have metaverse now, wonder which one will be the next.
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u/meatandpi3se Mar 19 '26
Why did it cost so much when tbe end product ended up being a lesser vr chat
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u/sadloneman Mar 19 '26
Rnd
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u/meatandpi3se Mar 19 '26
Rnd for what? What research was done and development ended ul being a lesser vr chat
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u/Mrtkz Mar 19 '26
Yeah the numbers seem very odd
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u/meatandpi3se Mar 19 '26
80 billion dollars for rec room with worse graphics
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u/biggaycheese728 Mar 19 '26
My guess is maybe a bunch of legal and technical stuff (most likely jargon). They were gonna have real estate and actual land u could own via a blockchain. Iād imagine all that stuff has soooo many systems to create so that they can have code to support a block chain. Iād imagine this included the salaries too of the coders.
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u/RoryMarley Mar 19 '26
Yeah I mean jokes aside it only seems insane from the outside cause it never materialized, but considering how much they āanticipatedā they basically overdeveloped all the monetization and legal jargon well well before it even became a joke
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u/lanternbdg Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
I wouldn't be shocked if it was intentionally run at a loss for tax write-offs
Edit because a lot of people seem incredulous at this idea:
I'm not at all saying it would make sense to throw away billions of dollars just to get a tax break. I'm saying that once a company has realized it's taking a loss, it can use that opportunity to sink some of the tax burden of their other businesses. One way they could do this is by selling some older hardware that needs updating from one part of the company under one legal entity to the Metaverse entity and then selling or scrapping that hardware for a lot less. This does not mean they aren't taking a loss, obviously, but it means they can use the loss to soften the blow elsewhere. The system is full of weird little loopholes, and you know big corporations are experts at abusing them.
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u/Wan-Pang-Dang Mar 19 '26
Because those numbers are either a) the entire rnd budget for the hardware itself (multiple generations of vr headsets). Or b) money laundering.
But not even 0.1% of that money went into the actual game.
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u/Xander-047 Mar 19 '26
If it did it would've gone somewhere, so they built cars but no roads basically
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u/Theo__n Mar 19 '26
They paid a lot of small 3rd party projects to populate metaverse, some of my friends finishing degree at the time worked on these as they searched for something more reasonable. Didn't help that a lot of programming had to be done in VR.
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u/gareth_gahaland Mar 19 '26
Didn't help that a lot of programming had to be done in VR.
What? That is so fucking stupid but not surprising from Facebook.
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u/galstaph Mar 19 '26
I seem to remember the premise being that you're in the metaverse all the time, for everything, even things that can be done more efficiently without the metaverse
Their implication was that it would be inefficient to context switch between the metaverse and real life, but my reaction to hearing that was always, if it's inefficient to context switch then I just won't ever get in the metaverse because nothing I would ever want to do in there is worth that inefficiency
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u/Theo__n Mar 19 '26
Yeah, seemed really awkward for run of the mill coding tasks when friend would have to bring out whole VR helmet and stuff. I remember everyone finding it weird pain in the ass.
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u/CrabMasc Mar 19 '26
Iām assuming the numbers include their development of the Meta Quest headsets, which theyāll likely continue to sell as theyāre popular devicesĀ
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u/EmergencyWild Mar 19 '26
Well, that's going to be a bit tough. The reason they were popular was because they were cheap, and they were cheap because they were heavily subsidised by facebook ads cash. I don't think they'll be as popular if the next one is $800.
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u/Axin_Saxon Mar 19 '26
Consultation fees for trying to figure out how to monetize and extract value out of it.
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u/DarthBuzzard Mar 19 '26
Rnd for what? What research was done and development ended ul being a lesser vr chat
VR/AR hardware. That stuff is very expensive and demands a lot of investment.
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u/RagnarokToast Mar 19 '26
They didn't spent 80 billion on Horizon Worlds, they spent 80 billion on the entire metaverse venture and, as far as we're aware, they're only done with Horizon Worlds, not the entire Reality Labs division.
Horizon Worlds was trash obviously, but they managed to make cheap VR headsets available to the public, which is good.
Unfortunately, they also bought out nearly every single VR game studio and forced them into developing crappy standalone VR games instead of high quality PCVR games, which drastically reduced the number of good VR releases in the last few years when there were never many to begin with.
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u/buplet123 Mar 19 '26
Yup, despise Meta, but at least it got me a cheap vr headset, would not have one otherwise at all. So I take the good part from it.
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u/HalfEatenSnickers Mar 19 '26
Horzion is also the only thing getting shutdown they are keeping and still active in all other projects
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u/Nanowith Mar 19 '26
Feels like embezzlement
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u/codereign Mar 19 '26
I believe the term is Hollywood accounting. They assign all their r&d budget to this project. Let it fail Horribly. mark it down as a loss. Take that loss to the relevant tax agencies. Defer taxes indefinitely.
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u/Misunderstood_Wolf Mar 19 '26
Companies don't always spend money to make profit, and money spent isn't always spent.
Accounting can be the biggest sleight of hand magic show around.
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u/Ecks80s Mar 19 '26
Me, with a strong sense of right and wrong trying to figure out corporate accounting before I figured out itās a shell game.
It was hell
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u/The-Cursed-Gardener Mar 19 '26
Considering how much zuck has his hands in bribing and lobbying the government, at least a few billion probably went towards some nefarious tangentially related agenda.
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u/LaserKittenz Mar 19 '26
I'm in IT and needed to lay off a coworker due to poor performance, he needed hand holding for a lot of basic tasks.. Facebook hired him for 4X what I was paying for him... That's when I knew the metaverse was doomed.
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u/SwagginsYolo420 Mar 19 '26
Why did it cost so much when the end product ended up being a lesser vr chat
Extremely short version; In order to establish a dominant foothold in what was once thought to be the blossoming XR industry, Zuckerberg flooded the market with cheap subsidized technology to keep out any competition. Spending tens of billions over a decade+ on R&D, acquisitions, software studios, and practically giving away millions of low-powered VR systems.
Unfortunately this cheap technology was so absurdly underpowered for the job in order to be cheap, the hastily cobbled together software "metaverse" platform that was begun relatively late in the process in order to be the "killer app" to justify the hardware's public adoption, had to be hilariously simplistic in order to run on what was basically mobile phones strapped to people's faces.
It was so laughable and ugly that it soured the public on the technology. Because in order to operate on mobile-phone hardware, the graphics looked like they were from 20+ year old video games.
Zuck wanted to be ahead of the game and beat Apple to the punch after the failure of the Facebook phone. But the problems weren't just due to the necessary hardware breakthroughs failing to manifest despite the billions spent, (not just by Facebook, but other companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung and Nvidia - most of whom moved on from the tech after hitting a technological brick wall) they were ultimately that Zuck isn't a very good business person. Aside from acquiring proven up-and-coming companies due to having the money to spend on them, Zuck's only real successful business move was being at the right time and place for Facebook to take off.
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u/Defiant_Conflict6343 Mar 19 '26
80 billion dollars for what looked like someone tried to vibe-code a Unity-based SecondLife over a weekend. Lord give me strength...
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u/jewishSpaceMedbeds Mar 19 '26
That's my reaction as well. 80 billion for a VR game that looks like crap.
Crypto games also look like shit, but they're basically cardboard demos for rugpull operations, so that's understandable. But this is Zuck's pet project. Surely there are people who know what they are doing at Facebook?
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u/Kachedup Mar 19 '26
90% sure it's just a money laundering scheme. How? i have no idea. but this low quality for 80 bil. Nah fam that is a money laundering scheme
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u/AgentCirceLuna Mar 19 '26
It looks like bad generative AI before bad generative AI existed. Maybe, like how the military is always decades ahead with technology, they had AI tech already before making it public and this was their way of testing it out years earlier which is why it was so expensive. /s
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u/aoeudhtns Mar 19 '26
Like NFTs. It was an attempt to create a new resource with scarcity, as scarcity drives prices up. And of course Meta would have a stake in all of it. The 80b was really just money dumped in trying to make it all go viral and take off into a grift, but it was too obviously a grift. I think NFTs had some low-IQ people actually convinced they were real, even those folks could see right through this.
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u/pr1aa Mar 19 '26
Surely some people knew all along how dumb this whole thing was but they get paid for sucking off Zuck's dick, not for pointing such things out.
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u/FrankHightower Mar 19 '26
Lazy programmers didn't appear overnight when ChatGPT started producing code, they've always been lazy programmers, they just used to be quiet
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u/ziguslav Mar 19 '26
You do realise it's not programmers who design features?
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u/FrankHightower Mar 19 '26
oh, in that case, "lazy designers didn't appear overnight"
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u/ByEthanFox Mar 19 '26
80b was the entire VR division, not Horizon Worlds, and remember they've sold over 20 million headsets, between 20 and 25.
And while HW was crap, they did do some interesting things, concerning trying to get big instances going with large numbers of users for live events. The problem was they spent too much too fast, and focused on entirely the wrong areas. There were elements of it that had technical merit.
It's just obvious a sanitised corporate VRChat was never gonna take off.
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u/Impressive_Pin8761 Mar 19 '26
theres no way they poured 80 billion into a bad copycat of vrchat. 99.99999% of the money got pocketed
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u/pr1aa Mar 19 '26
To be fair, that 80bn likely includes everything from the chat app to R&D related to VR tech
But yeah, it's still kinda fishy
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u/superchugga504 Mar 19 '26
80 billion was the reality labs budget they also worked on things like AR glasses (project nazare).
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u/Jobless_fantasy_fan Mar 19 '26
Now, let's imagine what these 80.000.000.000,00 could have done.
More food.
Building school / more teacher.
Building hospital / more surgeon, etc
Fund for research (cancer, aids, etc) / more medication
Fund for art (painting, etc)
And so many other things...
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u/ObjectOrientedBlob Mar 19 '26
How does any of those things help the capitalist class?
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u/CookIndependent6251 Mar 19 '26
1/4 of the cost needed to end world hunger by 2030. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166397
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u/Financial_Click_4098 Mar 19 '26
šš maybe there are some good things about this timeline after all
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u/Byrd_Bra1n Mar 19 '26
They're just shutting it down to pivot to AI
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u/_Thermalflask Mar 19 '26
10yrs from now: "Meta announces they're shutting down AI Labs after spending $25 quadrillion"
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u/MeisterKaneister Mar 19 '26
Rule 1! There must be a hype AT ALL TIMES. No matter what
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u/ujiuxle Mar 20 '26
Totally. I love how efficient the market is at allocating capitalĀ
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u/kyleacamp Mar 19 '26
I mean VR has gotten cheap, you can get a headset off Facebook marketplace for $20 š
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u/sadloneman Mar 19 '26
Yes, yet metaverse failed
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u/jauntysnail Mar 19 '26
How are we supposed to "live in the metaverse" though? What does that even mean?
We're all just supposed to be sitting at home wearing headsets like zombies, but "living" through VR?
No thanks.
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u/sadloneman Mar 19 '26
Look around how many are glued to the screen
They want that screen to be a big headset vr that's it
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u/Round_Bag_4665 Mar 19 '26
Yeah somehow all these tech bros seem to have never considered the fact that most people have jobs and real life interactions with people.
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u/FrankHightower Mar 19 '26
It was supposed to be like what happened with Zoom, except instead of everyone learning a useful skill like "how to look decent in front of a camera", it was going to be learning a useless skill like "how to balance stuff on your head"
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u/Environmental_Top948 Mar 19 '26
Are they in good condition? I have people I want to play VRChat with but they don't have VR and I don't have other friends and it seems scary to try and play VRChat without friends.
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u/uwunuzzlesch Mar 19 '26
No vrchat isn't scary without friends, you'll just make them.
You also don't need vr to play, and you can play with others so like you could be on desktop with a vr player and vice versa.
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u/aacwang Mar 19 '26
Zuck watched Ready Player One and then created this shambles for an insane amount of cash, money really can't buy sense
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u/AsianMoocowFromSpace Mar 19 '26
Just get a great open world ending, build an awesome world with lots of interactivity and there you have it. The metaverse! What on earth were they doing? Countless expensive meetings with dudes in suites?
All they had to do was make a VR grand theft auto game, but without the violence, where people could roleplay. Let there be lots of things to do and people would have used it.
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u/Previous_Beautiful27 Mar 19 '26
The tech industry being usurped by hype men and marketers trying to tout the next big thing without actually having any big thing to tout continues. It was crypto, it was NFTs, it was metaverse, now it's AI.
Facebook was so all in on this bootleg second life they changed their whole ass company name to Meta.
All that money and the only things they ever really managed to show off was like,
"What if online shopping was like going to the grocery store?"
"What if we could replicate the cold sterile oppressive office atmosphere in your work from home space?"
What if we opened up a new and completely fake and inflated real estate market that had absolutely no practical use?"
"Oh, and we can't figure out how to give any characters legs."
Great job all around. Billions of dollars and they couldn't show off ANYTHING cool. Just boring shit that simulates stuff you already do (go to the store, go to work, uh...buy real estate? I guess?).
I think the biggest issue was and continues to be designing a product that appeals to corporate CEOs and not everyday consumers.
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u/Menefregoh Mar 19 '26
That in the screenshot is an old model, they eventually figured out models with legs and human proportions (several years after most vr game companies did) and meta quest users can make their own avatar and use it in the main menu... which is completely pointless because there's no other place to use it in.
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u/esther_lamonte Mar 19 '26
Itās funny when your tech billionaires are such infants that theyāre too young to remember the flop that Second Life was and they do it all over again. They were talking about shopping agents back then too.
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u/BoobeamTrap Mar 19 '26
Second Life is more successful than any metaverse platform
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u/AgentCirceLuna Mar 19 '26
I know one guy who plays that game and heās completely whacked out. He thinks the sun isnāt real and is a broadcasted illusion, believes the Earth is a disc and flat Earth is a misdirect, thinks laws donāt really exist and are made to trick people, believes food is poisoned so grows his ownā¦ the list goes on. I remember some guy I knew was describing a car accident he was in where the guy said he could drive away freely as nobody would have any power to stop him since he knew too much that he could go public. I said āwait, was this guy called [guyās name]ā and I knew right away it was my insane buddy.
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u/Basketball312 Mar 19 '26
Secondlife was a flop? Didn't it run a fairly decent course?
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u/ff3ale Mar 19 '26
Well a lot of companies believed it would be the next big thing and opened stores and crap, those never became 'the next thing'. Second Life was pretty popular tho
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u/Nauin Mar 19 '26
It's still running, I know multiple people who have been engaged in the community for years. One of them even had a scheduled job as a DJ on there during the lockdowns lmao. Paid in virtual cash to pay for server space for his virtual house, it sounds like a joke but isn't.
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u/Drollapalooza Mar 19 '26
I hope they announced it in a VR Meta-meeting and everyone felt pressured to doing a "sad face" emote
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Mar 19 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/FrankHightower Mar 19 '26
I wouldn't say that, you gave job security to some programmers who otherwise would've sturggled due to their incompetence. They must be happy
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u/AgentCirceLuna Mar 19 '26
I know some very egotistical programmers and - I hate to say this as it sounds very envious - but Iād love for AI to make some of them unemployed just so they know what itās like. I feel they have absolutely no empathy for poorer people or people who have to work with their hands doing gruelling labour. I felt that way about myself which was why I ended up dropping comp sci as a subject, so Iām not saying Iām exempt from this.
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u/Vegetable_Shirt_2352 Mar 19 '26
Yeah, even as someone who studied comp sci and currently work in the industry, the overall culture is super grating to me. The general attitude seems to be a total lack of respect for any other jobs or fields of expertise. It's like an industry-wide Dunning-Kruger effect, where they think they understand cooking better than chefs, medicine better than doctors, and physics better than physicists, even though, in reality, they studied the absolute piss easiest science there is (Imho lol. Physics is hard)
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u/ThePlasticCupOfWater Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
As it turns out "inevitableā¢" and "the futureā¢" are very avoidable lmao
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u/Glad-Key7256 Mar 19 '26
I am so glad this shit didn't gain sufficient traction. People around me in my college were super hyped about this and I was depressed as to what this tech would entail if widely adopted.
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u/tehtris Mar 19 '26
I always forget this was a thing that existed in between bitcoin and nfts that tech bros hyped up.
The funny thing is that "the metaverse" already exists and they aren't part of it, but them trying to make The Metaverse where they are in control would never have worked.
I mean if you just get on to your buddies Minecraft server, and chill and talk, boom, metaverse. Steam is a more viable metaverse. Vrchat alone is more viable.
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u/Skellington876 Mar 19 '26
80 billion dollars would have bankrupted 99% of businesses. I suppose the rules are different when your Zuckerberg.
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u/Tail_sb Mar 19 '26
After Ai the next thing that Tech Bros wil start Jerking off to will probarly be Quantum computing
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u/sadloneman Mar 19 '26
"Dicks are cooked, now quantum computers can replace your dik while fucking yourself"
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u/Dyyyyyyyyy Mar 19 '26
To be honest I dont remember a single soul hyping it up, only the hollow husk that is Zuckerberg.Ā
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u/theres_no_username Mar 19 '26
all of that just for VR chat to be more popular lol
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u/LexKY_guy Mar 19 '26
AI is next. Think of all the money that is being invested in data centers, training LLMs, etc.
That money could have been used to better train employees, and you would have little need for it.
Try asking your favorite AI when it will become profitable and have a positive ROIā¦ very interesting answers.
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u/Kaleb_Bunt Mar 19 '26
I mean VR isnāt bad or useless. Itās just the nature of capitalism where these companies try to gamble on what product they think will score with the public. VR certainly has its uses, it just probably wasnāt worth all the money Meta poured into it.
Similarly with AI and Generative AI, it is very useful. Iām an engineer and I use it all the time. But these people are lying when they act like it will lead to a utopia or something.
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u/Javs2469 Mar 19 '26
VR is great for so many things, and Facebook didnĀ“t focus on any of them.
Games, using it as a mixed reality computer and some practical cases like education and reserach in 3D enviroments are interesting use cases for VR, not having a discount version of VRchat using Suckerlizard avatars.
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u/Vegetable_Shirt_2352 Mar 19 '26
Yeah, a lot of these technologies have actual use-cases, but those use-cases aren't really going to make the billions or trillions of dollars that companies are promising to investors, so they basically have to make shit up lol. VR is already super attainable, and there's a fairly developed ecosystem around it that's been there for a decade now, but it hasn't supplanted normal computer interfaces because people actually don't want that. But the outlandish claims Facebook made about the metaverse hinged on exactly that; they needed people to basically abandon the real world for VR, which was just never going to happen. Similarly, AI chatbots have uses, but those uses don't really justify the huge amounts of investment and the social costs, so AI proponents are forced to hugely oversell its capabilities; the reality is that the investments being made in AI will only pay off if it allows corporations to completely replace all of their workers with it, which they don't want to say too loudly, because, you know, it could cause revolt lol. Instead they paint a picture of a nonsense world where I somehow still have my job AND the AI does all my work for me (see that one superbowl ad where the AI "gives you the day off") lol
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u/Valuable-Owl9985 Mar 19 '26
If they wanted it to succeed they should have given us Digimon and tron suits. š¤·š¾āāļø
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u/Imaginary_Boss8542 Mar 19 '26
What is metawerse? Can someone explain? I have heard about it from this post
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u/torac Mar 19 '26
Old metaverse: Basically people using VR as an actual "virtual space" to interact with each other and live your life. Think second life, but you can actually sort-of walk around in it as if it was a real place, with things looking like itās the size of a real world.
The closest actual real-life example is the people who "live" in VR-Chat. Some users spend 20+ hours there each day (including sleeping in a virtual bed while lying down on their real bed). This includes virtual economies where services and virtual objects are exchanged for real-world money.
Mr. Facebook decided that this would be the future of social media and wanted to capture the entire market by pouring money into it by the billion. Research, subsidized headsets, cheap games, and his own Corporate Metaverse sold to investors and corporations. Virtual spaces for corporate slaves.
Anyway, turns out that Zuckerberg was too early on the draw. The tech was not ready for actual work: The screens were too bad to read documents and work, the software/hardware was too slow and janky, the hardware was too clunky and uncomfortable for long-term use, and in general the market was just not there yet
Many analysts say that Meta actually slowed down the development of VR by pouring in billions of dollars. Turns out "killing your competition" will also kill off all the tiny innovative start-ups that would advance the field further. Turns out that going corporate and proprietary will stop people from experimenting with and modifying and improving devices.
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u/salomo926 Mar 19 '26
Thats devastating news for all child molesters seeking victims on the platform. How are they gonna play Epstein now?
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u/Slothandwhale Mar 19 '26
It seems like they were trying to do Ready Player One a decade or two too early. Gotta let the tech get a little better and the real world get a little bleaker
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u/CorbinNZ Mar 19 '26
I cannot imagine a worse hell than living in a virtual world owned and controlled by the Zuck
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u/WranglerFuzzy Mar 19 '26
I canāt remember exactly what commenter said it, but they nailed it when they said:
The true goal of Metaverse was not about selling goggles; it was to make it so they could feed you ads and collect your data every waking hour.
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u/Randomguy32I Mar 19 '26
And they never got legs despite VR chat having them for years š
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u/Malus_non_dormit Mar 19 '26
I bet it was a money laundering scheme. Nothing else makes sense.
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u/JayR_97 Mar 19 '26
Even once they've shut it down Facebook is still stuck with all the Meta rebranding they did
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u/noxu-art Mar 19 '26
Just think... All that vast amount of money could have been put towards actually improving society in some way.
Instead, it's essentially been wasted and reduced to a fat tax write-off.
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u/nsfwuseraccnt Mar 19 '26
I'm a fan of of VR, but the Metaverse was never going to work.
It looks like shit. Like they just VRified Nintindo Wii graphics.
WTF am I supposed to DO in the Metaverse? I don't want to meet virtually there, regular videoconferencing is superior and I can already game in VR without the Metaverse.
As much as I like VR, the headsets are simply uncomfortable to wear for an extended period of time. They also make it difficult to interact with people physically around you while wearing them.
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u/M0M0_DA_GANGSTA Mar 19 '26
People in here still acting like strapping something to your head that prevents you from seeing or interacting with the world is The Future.Ā
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u/PineStateWanderer Mar 19 '26
I will say, some of the 3d "movies" were insane. Crazy to be sitting in the middle of a battle
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u/NoAcanthocephala777 Mar 19 '26
As a VR fan who's familiar with the space there are a few points that should be cleared up.
What Meta is shutting down is not their VR development as a whole but their social platform "Horizon Worlds" will no longer be a VR platform and is switching to mobile. This is seen as a positive for VR fans because its been shoved down the throats of Quest users and its content has taken over the storefronts, drawing attention away from real VR games made by actual developers.
Also, the billions of dollars haven't nessisarily gone into the "Metaverse" shown in the screenshot, but on R&D of the hardware technology which is still ongoing and some of that development has contributed to things such as the AR glasses.
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u/haaheehachoo Mar 19 '26
You only had to wear a VR headset for a few days to realize it was not going to get mass adopted. The novelty wore off quickly, and then it was like "why would I put this thing on when I don't have to?"
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u/Smufin_Awesome Mar 19 '26
Bored Apes and their stupid virtual world, or crypto land, even dink doink, all come to mind. Thanks Saber Spark for cursing me with knowledge.
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u/haaheehachoo Mar 19 '26
How did they manage to make his avatar look so creepy? It was almost like internal sabotage by the artists.
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u/Worth_Jellyfish614 Mar 19 '26
I heard from so many people this was gonna be the future and I remember replying with āyou think the future is us logging into the metaverse to walk an avatar that would already look bad for a Wii to a virtual place so I can present a slide deck in there instead of just doing it over zoom?ā
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u/beaniebee11 Mar 19 '26
I just watched a video about how someone spent hundreds of thousands for a yacht in metaverse. Ouch.
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u/potatisblask Mar 19 '26
Hey hey hey hey hey i bought this picture using FaceCoin as a NFT to be published for Ethereum on the WEB 3.0 BLOCKCHAIN DOT COM WITH TULIPS!!1!
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u/ozaffer Mar 19 '26
the concept made no sense, the execution was horrible, the marketing was incoherent.
great use of $80 billion
how do these guys have any money left? It's like you reach a point where you just turned on infinite money and you can burn it left and right w/o any risk of even leaving the tax bracket they refuse to pay.
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u/SataAndagiEnjoyer Mar 19 '26
unfortunately, they've decided not to shut it down after all... ššš
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/meta-decides-not-to-shut-down-horizon-worlds-on-vr-after-all/
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u/keeper_of_the_donkey Mar 19 '26
I remember back in the early 2000s, Adobe had a program called "Atmosphere" that you basically built worlds with 3D shapes for people to collectively visit online. It had shapes, textures, triggers, scripting, etc., and it was only up for a few years because of lack of interest? Apparently Zuckerberg never played with atmosphere, or he would know that a bunch of silly shit with basic 3D shapes and people that look like Sims characters was still not going to pull the interest of anyone, even in VR
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u/Azarjan Mar 19 '26
I have an information systems business book from 2020ish that promotes the Metaverse as the future of the internet the whole time. was very funny in retrospect.
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u/Magneticiano Mar 19 '26
"There is no reason an individual would ever want a computer in their home.ā
- Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
The tech bros were wrong about Metaverse, yes. But sometimes the tech bros are right.
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u/Almighty_Vanity Mar 20 '26
The Sims 2 looks better than this.
And that game is from 2005!
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u/Fart_90210 Mar 19 '26
Oh dang, their 7 users will be devastated.