Just Facebook spent $80bn over ~10 years while paying less of their income in taxes than anyone reading this.
The WHO estimates $7-8 billion a year to end world hunger.
Its like no one in charge had ever seen a real video game, much less played one.
Some day, I would love to read a postmortum of where all that money went.
I hate Facebook as much as anyone else but this is like comparing apples to a modern commercial airliner. One of these was only a movie. The other was a combination of several things: a research project to try and find ways to drive the cost of manufacturing consumer VR headsets down (this is a giant black hole for money), an attempt to produce said hardware, an attempt to subsidise the price enough to get people hooked, and an attempt to build a complex piece of software for the whole thing. The software in question had to run on the last several generations of quest hardware not just the most recent one. The hardware in question was some Qolcomm mobile SoCs with questionable graphics that were showing their age running on a battery. To make matters worse this was all in VR so you needed high enough looking resolution per eye at at least 90Hz. If you miss those targets the customer may start vomiting which does not sell product. Oh and you can’t easily increase your thermal or power budget by making the thing heavier becase that will increase fatigue from wearing the product.
The other thing is a 2D movie rendered ahead of time so that time spent rendering each frame doesn’t matter.
The metaverse push was stupid but I don’t find it terribly surprising that trying to pull a whole industry out of your ass so you can have a monopoly on it is a bit very pricey.
The metaverse must have been a money laundering scheme, there is no way in hell an unreleased product like that cost 80 billion.
$80b does not describe the figure that they put into Horizon Worlds, it’s the total of all R&D for their entire VR/AR ecosystem. The first VR headsets had to use screens that were designed for smartphones. Now, panel manufacturers fill custom orders of screens that are specifically designed to be used in VR. A lot of current-gen headsets are using panels that were custom made for a now abandoned meta headset. I could go on and on about the major innovations that they’ve brought to the medium, but it’s mostly nerdy shit that doesn’t sound particularly flashy. When the quest 2 came out, the controller tracking was so bad it would lose the controller’s position if it was near your face, so drawing a bow in VR was a crapshoot. Now, you can serve a ping pong ball behind your back. I don’t think most people realize how insane that is. The headset has no positional data for the controller if it can’t see it. They’ve gotten so good at predictive motion tracking using only IMUs that you can accurately hit a ball behind your back even when the controller is completely obscured by your body, and they did that all with software. There are dozens and dozens of similar small improvements that wouldn’t even be noticed by someone who doesn’t play a lot of VR, and many of them were incredibly complex engineering and software problems which are now solved.
Zuck’s still an evil bastard, and Horizon Worlds is a steaming pile of shit, but I’m a big VR nerd that’s been following the progress of the medium since before Facebook bought Oculus. I am so glad that Zuck was convinced that his metaverse idea was viable. It caused him to dump billions into R&D that would have taken years and years to develop organically. I promise you the entire medium of VR is now years ahead of where it would be if not for Zuck blowing all that money.
Plus now they’re seemingly pivoting to put all that R&D toward their perv glasses, which tragically seem to be catching on.
$80b for a shitty VR version of Facebook would be ridiculous, but that’s not all they spent it on. We went from $800 headsets that required an expensive gaming PC and tracking hardware set up around your room, to a $350 battery powered standalone headset that requires no external sensors and can play games like half life 2 without needing a PC at all within ~5yrs. That’s how they spent $80b.
Fuck Zuckerberg for ruining my favorite cyberpunk novel
Wtf was he thinking?
Suck could have just bought the Kingdom for Keflings series for a rounding error
What’s the top one? I love me some vintage CGI
Speaking of retro cgi, I loved insektors.
That’s the worst rendering of la Sagrada Família I’ve ever seen
You mean the buttplug village?
MAMAAA
