Above: Facebook's Metaverse solution in the Oculus Store, currently rated at 2.5 stars
Facebook is ironically moving to define the future of the Metaverse:
Facebook has announced a $50 million fund that it says will help it develop the metaverse more responsibly. It’s officially called the XR Programs and Research Fund, and the company says it’ll be invested into “programs and external research” over the course of two years... Facebook says the fund’s goal is to make sure it builds its part of the metaverse with an eye towards compatibility with other services, as well as inclusivity, privacy, safety, and “economic opportunity.” Right now, Facebook’s metaverse biggest metaverse program is a platform called Horizon, which exists as a beta Oculus app that lets people have VR meetings.
But the thing is, according to its own listing on the Oculus Store, Facebook's "biggest" metaverse application only has 23 user ratings which now stand at an aggregate of 2.5 stars. (The low rating may have something to do with development turnover and lack of prioritization.)
Assuming the rule of thumb of 1 user review per 50 active users applies here, Horizon likely has less than 2,000 user downloads. As a comparison point: VRChat, which is still in Early Access, has 107,517 user reviews on Steam alone, with an aggregate rating of Very Positive. So on the face of it, is Facebook the best qualified organization to "develop the metaverse more responsibly"?
Which brings up the question of why Facebook is doing this in the first place. Here's my take back in July, when Zuckerberg announced plans to turn Facebook into a Metaverse company:
My cynical take (and it's hard not to be cynical, when it comes to Facebook) is this move is made in great part to stave off anti-trust regulation that is now looming over his company. ("Hey we're not really a social media monopoly, look at us trying to compete with Epic/Apple/ROBLOX etc!") But in fairness, Zuckerberg has long been passionate about VR, buying Oculus (with founding Linden Cory Ondrejka's guidance) many years before the Facebook backlash reached fever pitch.
According to a recent Washington Post report, some of that cynicism was warranted after all:
Facebook’s buzzy hardware push is not just a PR stunt, it’s an elaborate effort by Zuckerberg to transform the company into a passion project that exists far from the controversies of social media. It is a political strategy too, part of a broader push to rehabilitate the company’s reputation with policymakers and reposition Facebook to shape the regulation of next-wave Internet technologies, according to more than a dozen current and former Facebook employees, think tank experts, legislative aides and Biden administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
In Facebook’s Washington, D.C., office, the metaverse is already a full-on political push: The company is meeting with think tanks to discuss the creation of standards and protocols for the coming virtual world, enabling Facebook, some say, to turn the conversation away from such urgent but distasteful matters as the massive antitrust lawsuit filed last year by the Federal Trade Commission.
So putting the two stories together, one has to wonder where this is all heading. The final irony is that it's a very good idea for the industry to come together around universal standards for interoperability and even moreso, to formulate and agree to privacy standards and other ethical guidelines. But unless it's a broad coalition of partners that's transparently and democratically organized, it's hard to see the XR Programs and Research Fund benefiting anyone except of course Facebook.
As I mentioned to Rober Scoble in Twitter; "There has to be a dialogue, by somebody, somewhere, sometime." I will not fault Facebook on this subject.
Posted by: Joey1058 | Monday, September 27, 2021 at 07:27 PM