The line I keep coming back to with VR and the metaverse is “No one is asking for this!” No one wants to integrate these things into their lives and society beyond like the three oculus games that are kinda fun to play for 15 minutes until you get dizzy. Nobody but techbros with brain worms talks about these things in anything less than depressing dystopian terms.
But in our current tech landscape, these are the products that they are capable of creating, so they are what we’ll get whether we want it or not. The economy is now structured so that this is what the greatest engineering minds alive spend their time on, instead of finding solutions to real problems.
In a previous generation, this would all make it a complete joke obviously doomed to fail, but I do sometimes worry that these companies are powerful enough now that it’ll somehow just be forced on us involuntarily. Hopefully it goes more the way of google glass and these people learn some humility.
I value your optimism, but I think you may be mistaken.
I have this vivid memory from when my son turned 2. All of his friends and him were sitting around a table, him in front of the cake with the burning candles, and all the adults standing in front while we all sung happy birthday. I sat down by him so I'd help him blow the candles. When the song came to a wrap and the candles were blown, we both lifted our gaze.
I could make eye contact with nobody. I could only see part-hidden faces behind a sea of phones. Not a single person was looking at my son in the eye - in fact, no-one was looking at him at all. They were all seeing him through phones recording videos and taking pictures. It gave me the creeps - I was terrified that he might have felt lonely in that instant, with nobody looking back.
Staring at phones at the height of a 2 year old instead of being _with_ him might have sounded so ridiculous 20 years ago. Why not just get 1 person to take the pictures? But it's not so ridiculous if everyone else is doing it.
Give these goggles a few years to grab a few million users, and you will be like that only guy in the platform that's not staring at a phone. Even when this happens, please be that guy.
I remember the film Strange Days from 1995 where the premise was memories could be recorded and replayed from a tape cassette kind of device... the whole premise of the goggles are eerily reminiscent of the VR memory capture piece
I got off the train with the Watch. Vision has only solidified for me that wherever this future is going I will not be going with it. I'll be here in the forest with my wife and kid. I have no desire to live a life that could even begin to conceive of a need for such a device.
Parenting on the Bleeding Edge
The line I keep coming back to with VR and the metaverse is “No one is asking for this!” No one wants to integrate these things into their lives and society beyond like the three oculus games that are kinda fun to play for 15 minutes until you get dizzy. Nobody but techbros with brain worms talks about these things in anything less than depressing dystopian terms.
But in our current tech landscape, these are the products that they are capable of creating, so they are what we’ll get whether we want it or not. The economy is now structured so that this is what the greatest engineering minds alive spend their time on, instead of finding solutions to real problems.
In a previous generation, this would all make it a complete joke obviously doomed to fail, but I do sometimes worry that these companies are powerful enough now that it’ll somehow just be forced on us involuntarily. Hopefully it goes more the way of google glass and these people learn some humility.
I value your optimism, but I think you may be mistaken.
I have this vivid memory from when my son turned 2. All of his friends and him were sitting around a table, him in front of the cake with the burning candles, and all the adults standing in front while we all sung happy birthday. I sat down by him so I'd help him blow the candles. When the song came to a wrap and the candles were blown, we both lifted our gaze.
I could make eye contact with nobody. I could only see part-hidden faces behind a sea of phones. Not a single person was looking at my son in the eye - in fact, no-one was looking at him at all. They were all seeing him through phones recording videos and taking pictures. It gave me the creeps - I was terrified that he might have felt lonely in that instant, with nobody looking back.
Staring at phones at the height of a 2 year old instead of being _with_ him might have sounded so ridiculous 20 years ago. Why not just get 1 person to take the pictures? But it's not so ridiculous if everyone else is doing it.
Give these goggles a few years to grab a few million users, and you will be like that only guy in the platform that's not staring at a phone. Even when this happens, please be that guy.
I remember the film Strange Days from 1995 where the premise was memories could be recorded and replayed from a tape cassette kind of device... the whole premise of the goggles are eerily reminiscent of the VR memory capture piece
I got off the train with the Watch. Vision has only solidified for me that wherever this future is going I will not be going with it. I'll be here in the forest with my wife and kid. I have no desire to live a life that could even begin to conceive of a need for such a device.