[HN Gopher] Meta's Awful 'Horizon Worlds' Ad Helps Explain $70B ...
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Meta's Awful 'Horizon Worlds' Ad Helps Explain $70B Metaverse Loss
Author : ChrisArchitect
Score : 25 points
Date : 2025-02-17 20:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| jsheard wrote:
| The original Instagram link goes to a 404 for me, did they delete
| it out of shame?
|
| lol
| sandy_coyote wrote:
| The animation in the commercial reminds me of Reboot, the 90s cgi
| kids cartoon. I found the animation too uncanny to stomach.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| Meta claims to be anti-DEI and yet gave most of the ostensibly
| male character models in their metaverse product a nice pair of
| ta-tas. Not that I'm complaining, I love me some ta-tas.
| wand3r wrote:
| Maybe they are just catering to what the market wants? It could
| be that people who are early adopters in online immersive
| virtual reality want to see or be men with "ta tas".
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| Maybe?
|
| In any case I am not at all anti-diversity. I am very pro
| diversity. I just think its funny that given their recent
| political realignment and public statements all but one of
| the character models (that the sort of people who spout anti-
| DEI rhetoric would insist must identify as male) in their ad
| have prominent boobs.
|
| I think the real answer is that their 3D rendering and
| animation systems just absolutely suck despite the 10s of
| billions of dollars of investment, its like looking at
| something out of the mid-90s.
| mrandish wrote:
| It took a minute but I found the hugely elaborate and expensive
| >hour-long video Meta showed in Oct 2021 to announce and pitch
| the Metaverse concept (along with renaming the company). Almost
| everything in it is simulated by pre-rendered mock-ups. It's
| interesting to skim through and compare the vision with what's
| shipping today after 4 1/2 years of intensive development and
| >$100B. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8
| pram wrote:
| During covid, my manager (also personal friend) was legitimately
| excited about trying out the "metaverse" to have meetings. Never
| before in my life have I immediately lost so much respect and
| trust in someone. It still haunts me!
| strix_varius wrote:
| Ironically, a work meeting was my best experience with VR. I
| enjoyed it much more than video calls (at least once a group is
| > 4 people)
| yoz wrote:
| When I worked at Second Life we'd often have work meetings in-
| world. It was fun, often silly, but also productive.
| Ultimately, it was a voice conference with decent audio and
| tinker-toy visuals, and we could dogfood and demo our work.
|
| But this was around 2010, when most internet video conferencing
| tools were still terrible, so Second Life was decent
| competition. For doing work meetings in 2025, the only virtual-
| world-like competition to Zoom & co that I can think of is
| _maybe_ Apple 's Spatial Facetime, and that's thanks to
| expensive hardware designed to solve or hide the usual VR
| usability issues.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Metaverse always felt like they were trying to invent a new thing
| for the sake of inventing a new thing.
|
| We have all of this money and no ideas, so let's try...
| productivity-oriented Second Life in VR?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I took it as trying to corner a hardware device market they
| owned. Not limited by whatever telemetry Google and Apple are
| willing to share.
| quitit wrote:
| Maybe I'm a bit too cynical, but I always felt like its entire
| reason for being was to be the optimal data collector.
| Everything Meta does is driven by that need, and this never
| revealed itself as an exception.
|
| That view also felt like the simplest explanation for why they
| re-implemented things we can already do extremely efficiently
| without a virtual world, while largely ignoring the
| efficiencies and innovation that a virtual world can bring.
| yoz wrote:
| Horizon Worlds continues to look like a product with leaders who
| don't actually want to use a virtual world, or understand the
| appeal. There is no amount of money which can fix that.
|
| Until that changes, it won't be anywhere near as good as Second
| Life (which I worked on) or VRChat, despite those systems costing
| a tiny fraction of what Meta has spent on Horizon Worlds and
| related projects (Facebook Spaces, Oculus Rooms, etc.). Ex-
| colleagues of mine worked on this stuff at Meta for years,
| eventually giving up because of leadership's continual failure to
| grasp fundamentals of why people like and use virtual worlds.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Horizon Worlds continues to look like a product with leaders
| who don't actually want to use a virtual world, or understand
| the appeal. There is no amount of money which can fix that.
|
| Hmmm people worth millions of dollars, who basically won in
| real life and can experience/afford pretty much anything they
| desire don't see the appeal in locking themselves up in some
| sort of virtual wii sport looking universe
|
| Perplexing...
|
| Everywhere I look I only see desperate techbros trying to keep
| the money printing machine running. I'm still not convinced
| anything good came out of tech after google maps
| fullshark wrote:
| A fascinatingly horrible advertisement, revealing what they
| likely know about their user base: lonely people looking for
| company, but failing to understand how any of this would be
| appealing to such a person.
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