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Ew.

Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is – and I cannot stress this enough – ugly.

I’ve been trying to find a way to show you, but (no surprise) you’re not allowed to take screenshots in the normal way. When you take them with your virtual phone, you can only share them with Facebook friends – which, annoyingly, does not include your own self.

So let me describe. The character design of the avatars is poor. Those people in the picture above? It’s worse than that. This isn’t an actual screen shot (their usernames aren’t floating above their heads).

You do not have legs in the Metaverse. You are a floating torso that pootles around like a malfunctioning robot.

The Oculus Quest has multiple cameras to track the position of your head and hands. This means you can look over at people and wave or, like, fake robot dance. But wait! Your hands are also how you control everything. For example, to call up your menu, you raise your left arm and look at your wrist. But it doesn’t pop up unless you catch it just right, so you usually need a few tries.

Yes, that’s right – a whole room of zooming legless robots making gentle wanking motions.

The tracking is so good, it can track individual finger movements (there are some fun-looking games based on this idea). Even better! Imagine if you will an auditorium full of ugly torsos, zooming around waving their arms in the air and wiggling their fingers. Only a man as socially awkward as Zuck could think this would appeal.

One of the reasons the Oculus is so inexpensive compared to most VR rigs is that it can’t handle some of the more sophisticated visuals. But really, that’s no excuse for ugly design. I’ve spent my whole day on this island, which is a masterpiece of a silly VR world the Oculus can handle just fine.

Comments


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 16, 2022, 7:30 pm

Halfway down this Kotaku article, there’s the official trailer for the Metaverse. I’d like to point out how incredibly silly this woman looks both in and out of the Metaverse. If the marketing department can’t do anything with it…

There is simply no way to operate a headset and not look like a moron to observers.


Comment from Mitch
Time: March 17, 2022, 12:18 am

Angry Birds – figures they’d get it right. The older I get the more I distrust computers and the Internet particularly.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: March 17, 2022, 1:13 am

Why have obviously sexed torsos.
This will only encourage some hand signal (like pretending the ok symbol is a white racist sign ) which will mean
“I just groped your (insert body part according to hand sign)”

And the ever offendable will be off and running.

Instead they should just make everyone a cylinder with a round ball on top and two tubes for arms like the OZ tin man without legs or a tin funnel hat.

See I care not, because I will never go to Zuckerverse.

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