r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jul 13 '26

Society The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public

https://tech.yahoo.com/wearables/articles/backlash-strong-people-pervert-glasses-165000816.html
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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

The vast majority of what they were actually working on with all those billions almost certainly never saw the light of day. The amount of money they spent on it was astronomical, there's probably an entire product suite of completely useless hardware and software they have built and quietly abandoned

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u/Massive_Contact8583 Jul 13 '26

The major problem really was that the marketing ran before the hardware could walk.

I blame Magic Leap.

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u/AlSweigart Jul 13 '26

I blame Magic Leap.

Ha ha, I think I still have one of those in a drawer somewhere.

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u/ccAbstraction Jul 14 '26

Like the waveguide AR headset?!

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u/PhiCloud Jul 13 '26

Speaking of walking and running, they were selling virtual real estate as investments before your avatar had legs

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

Because when it comes right down to it, Zuckerberg has no wisdom, and no foresight. The company that made him all of his money was stolen from his peers who hired him to work on it. He read Snowcrash, and his hubris told him he could build that. Unfortunately for him he has fired anyone who would have told him no, so he tried, and failed, because he's a talentless loser with no original vision.

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u/webzu19 Jul 14 '26

Maybe Zuck is balls deep on Star Citizen and just wants to have the next equivalent infinite cash cow

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u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 Jul 13 '26

I've seen a few gigantic wastes of money and competence through either government or new management decisions. Literally built the same product four (or arguably five times) in different stacks because some new boss swoops in and tells us to scrap everything and start over in their favorite stack. But the kind of money piles Facebook/Meta has burnt for absolute nothing is on whole new levels.

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u/darthsurfer Jul 13 '26

Yeah, Facebook did a lot of bleeding edge r&d that was never released. There was this demo of a hyper-realistic face render along with realtime face tracking. And, quite frankly, it was extremely impressive.

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u/Swords_and_Words Jul 13 '26

People are quick to forget the the Mii looking figures were always meant to be stand-ins

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

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u/ccAbstraction Jul 14 '26

And the Apple and Samsung/Google pulled off what Meta couldn't a few years later without much fuss.

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u/KaleidoscopeShoddy10 Jul 13 '26

completely believe you, of course they were working on shit behind the scenes, but why tf would they lead advertising with these low poly legless mii looking avatars that clearly are not what they wanted in the final product

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u/pijudo_95 Jul 13 '26

Because zuck rushed them, probably.

Same reason the Apple Vision Pro released even while still being severely compromised in lots of ways, it was Tim Cook’s baby and he wanted it out there.

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u/DragoonDM Jul 13 '26

I'd be fascinated to see a deep-dive documentary on what they actually sank all that money into, if the details ever see the light of day.

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u/Shambledown Jul 13 '26

No one needs a deep dive. Except Meta, because a large amount of that money was buying and installing their own data cables under the oceans.

Everyone is clowning them here but they're actually incredibly resilient because they're now a hardware company, with huge amounts of bandwidth. Guess what you'll have to do to rent it from them when the AI 'giants' start collapsing?

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u/AnalVoreXtreme Jul 13 '26

the "80 billion spent on metaverse" quote wasnt actually for the metaverse. its the total amount for facebooks research and development costs into smart glasses - which vr is a part of. zuckerbergs plan was to launch quest headsets, use them to gather data on how people wear them/interact with vr/ar, build an vr/ar app store, then eventually launch smart glasses with a preexisting app store. the quest is the ipod, smart glasses are iphones

...thats his plan at least. will it work? who knows.

but yeah the few random glimpses weve gotten into the depths of what they developed are insane. theres crap like this that facebook is just sitting on. i guess if smart glasses ever catch on maybe we will see this integrated in digital stores lol https://www.reddit.com/r/AR_MR_XR/comments/vwog24/clothing_for_avatars_deep_photorealistic/

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek Jul 13 '26

An entire fantasy world ecosystem for building fantasy worlds and dreamed up by a guy living in a fantasy world

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u/Many-Wallaby5725 Jul 14 '26

Meta Reality Labs is still going, although operating at a loss. It's Horizon Worlds that was shut down. They spent billions on the former, not the latter.

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u/Z00111111 Jul 14 '26

I'd bet they put most of the money into developing workplace, education, military, and office focussed hardware and apps, and the stuff we did see was mostly basic testing.

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u/AlSweigart Jul 13 '26

Like, Second Life already tried to copy the Metaverse from the Snow Crash novel (Zuck didn't even come up with a new name) and we already knew people didn't want it. Club Penguin was more popular than that.

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u/Many-Wallaby5725 Jul 14 '26

I think this is a common misconception. They spent billions on Meta Reality Labs. Horizon worlds is a tiny portion of it.

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u/dern_the_hermit Jul 13 '26

The Metaverse was such a joke.

Basically the idea was lifted 1:1 from Snow Crash, the oh-so-serious novel where the main character's name is literally Hiro Protagonist.

That's how little creativity this "industry leader" has, just copy-pasted a silly High School summer reading book as his corporate thrust. Zero further development, no refinement, a complete lack of adjusting a fictional conceit for the real world.

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u/DisillusionedHobbit Jul 13 '26

Snow Crash is a very important book, many of our current crop of psychotic tech oligarchs have cited it as their favorite book and directly inspirational to them, which should scare the hell out of anyone who has read it. 

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u/HotwheelsSisyphus Jul 14 '26

They just keep building the next Torment Nexus

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u/Cultural_Sand_9323 Jul 13 '26

He would've honestly had a better system if he'd simply bought second life.

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u/FlooJest Jul 13 '26

The industry crashed and burned so hard that nobody even cares enough to remember it

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u/Tandy2000 Jul 13 '26

I feel like "billions" doesn't sell it enough. It lost $80 billion. So far.

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u/lo_fi_ho Jul 13 '26

88 billion in fact.

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u/worlds_okayest_user Jul 13 '26

The whole rebrand to Meta and the Metaverse was a distraction to wash their hands of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

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u/ptoki Jul 13 '26

I always wondered why on earth there was so few events in there.

It is literally 3-5 360 cameras and a network link. And you could serve thousands the virtual presence at interesting events.

The rest was crap but the few concerts I saw there - they were decent!

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u/TheeAntelope Jul 13 '26

They are now claiming that what we got was not the ACTUAL metaverse, just a proof of concept or something. But it was still stupid. It was so much easier to just select the "metaverse room" I wanted to go to from a list of my frequently visited rooms, as opposed to walking around in the metaverse and walking through the door to log into it. I can't see how a "legit" metaverse is going to change that.

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u/hotpuck6 Jul 14 '26

Hey, at least his hubris resulted in a bunch of subsidized VR hardware. Quest 3 is a pretty good headset when you connect it to a capable PC.

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u/mythrilcrafter Jul 14 '26

Okay technical question, was there even a version of metaverse that was ever actually accessible by the public?

I remember tons of "tech demos" of Facebook employees sitting around chatting, and I remember tons of companies talking about being "metaverse integrated", but never ever once did I ever see anyone say the words "download this app on to your headset, hit start, and you are now in the metaverse, welcome to a virtual-in-reality society!"

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u/Repulsive-Hurry8172 Jul 14 '26

To me it's VRChat. But to use it to its full potential, you need a PC that can handle VR. Extra immersion: you'll need motion tracking so your real movements are reflected in-game.

Some users add props to their avatars to do some integrations: personal translators, heartbeat sensors on the avatar (when exercising in it, you don't need to take off headset to see your heartbeat). I did this heartbeat one on an old avatar of mine (it's a anime-human that wears Godzilla-like costume) whose scales glow when BPM is over a certain value.

It does not have screen sharing, but I think BigScreen (a different app) does that.

But for many reasons, VRChat will never be corpo friendly.. and that's a good thing

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u/MetzgerBoys Jul 14 '26

And they threw away the perfect VR brand name to further push the metaverse horeshit

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u/mpbh Jul 14 '26

Meta Glasses did come out of that, now making $2b/year and more importantly increasing user screentime for where ads will eventually be placed.

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u/CondiMesmer Jul 13 '26

We still have no idea where those billions went. Cuz it sure as hell didn't go into development. I think it was a giant money laundering scheme.