Lighting, textures, transparency, and many of the effects that make things look good in modern games, at the resolution and framerate required for smooth VR, can't currently be done on a $400 headset.

At least in terms of the cartoonish graphics, it seems to me like a case of "fast, cheap, good, pick two".

[1] https://chipguider.com/?gpu=adreno-650-645-mhz

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090...

I don't think this is a particularly good argument in Meta's favour.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...

I think they are making bad choices.

So for example, yes its hard to animate feet walking around on the ground, but it was a weird choice to just cut everybody off at the waist. You could have given everybody hover shoes, or a chair, or a Segway or really a lot of things.

Also, if you can't afford lighting, you can at least paint some shadowing on and around the character faces. There _are_ textures on the characters, Zuck has weird rosy cheeks, I think whoever is creating these characters is just doing a bad job of it.

But I would be very surprised if you couldn't at least have 1 key light in the scene.

This is a good point. You would think Facebook would choose "fast, good" not "fast, cheap"

The size of the video game micro transaction market is enormous, growing, and consists almost entirely of ways to extract money from individuals for goods which don't exist or provide utility.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/online-microtransaction-globa...

You may not think it provides utility. If someone else is willing to pay for it – whatever 'it' is – then by definition they do.

I think people are bananas for spending $200k on a car when you can get the bus. But hey, not my money. You do you.

Not to mention NFTs.

Oubliette, a PLATO graphical (well lines :)) multiplayer RPG had a secondary market where people would in-game items for real-world cash.

It’s already a billion dollar industry.

Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/07/apple-earns-close...

Maybe we can make our own neo-luddite community, where people do real things with real objects.

I suspect the development team ditched most textures entirely as you can reduce virtually all rendering to a very small number of draw calls by having everything share a single texture. This saves the engineering teams (which must be quite large) a lot of time consuming issues with optimization

It could certainly look a lot better. I mean DOOM 3 runs on the Quest 1 and has normal maps, shadows, and nicely baked lighting.

If I were to guess, it comes down to probably one thing -- too many people are probably working on the project, and high level decisions like "adding legs", or using normal maps and non-shitty textures are simply too difficult to coordinate. It's the mythical man-month problem. That's why when you want to start off a game dev project, you need like 8 skilled people, not 160 headless chickens.

playstation home had the quality of the metaverse in 2008. lol

Either that or Zuck / Facebook execs are just in a massive echo chamber. Just like crypto enthusiasts. Yeah it looks bad to us but they're so deluded they literally don't realize.

I know people who work at Facebook, and based on my conversations with them, it is definitely this one.

It's not a hivemind just because people have strong opinions you disagree with.

Imo the biggest thing is that the current stage of the platform is barely even a beta, but is being pitched very officially.

Unrelated to the above, I think their whole vision is incredibly bland and boring, which is, above all else, what will be the biggest downfall.

It reminds me of IMVU, which is surprisingly still alive and well.

I suspect that a lot of the content creation has to do with that.

For example:

- Art director? Most of the content is user generated.

- Game developers on the team? Why? Their goal is not to make the game themselves but to make tools that let other people make stuff.

- Lack of user uploaded texture. Well, that can be easily abused so better to not allow user uploaded textures at all.

- No way to sculpt custom shapes. Well... that would be hard to do at scale in pure VR and allowing them to upload models from computers essentially creates two classes of creators. The regular people and the pros.

Etc.

I don't work for Meta and have no idea if any of this is accurate but I think it seems plausible.

But perhaps this was only an issue from a first-person view, and the actual users of this, uh, abomination don't see their own elbows?

Anyways, more on topic, I agree that specs should be fine for much nicer graphics and it's baffling that with all their investments and even changing the name of the company, they produce this...

I assume their wrists are held up like that because in the real world, everybody is holding up their controllers. Maybe they're all sitting at their desks in this call and are resting their hands on their desks with the controllers in hand?

These all seem like basic UX and aesthetic issues that someone could've seen early on and corrected. If nobody caught these issues, then that's troubling. Or, if somebody caught them but couldn't do anything about them, that's also troubling.

Open VRChat if you want to see a real metaverse.

[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/we-dont-want-the-metaverse/

Too bad Epic isn't making a metaverse platform play.

I think it only LOOKS like the clouds float into their heads because that one guy on the far right has hair geometry that makes it look like the background is clipping through it.

Earnest question: I’m not a gamer nor would ever consider buying a VR thing.