Category: Metaverse (General)

EDITORIAL: Meta Drops the Facebook Requirement for Its Virtual Reality Hardware—And Why I Am Still Wary

Have you joined the RyanSchultz.com Discord yet? You’re invited to be a part of this cross-worlds discussion group, with 685 people participating from every social VR platform and virtual world! We discuss, debate and argue about the ever-evolving metaverse and all the companies building it. You’re welcome to come join us! More details here.

My sole remaining connection to Meta (formerly known as Facebook) is the now-somewhat-antiquated Oculus Rift headset attached to my work computer at the University of Manitoba Libraries, where I work as a science librarian. I do plan to replace it with an HTC Vive Pro 2 kit sometime later this year, the same model I specified in my proposal for a virtual reality lab for the Libraries, a task which took up a significant chunk of my spring.

A bit of background: Librarians at the U of M are members of the faculty union, and have a right and an obligation to pursue research, and I purchased the Oculus Rift to work on a social VR project which I regretfully had to suspend, due to it being wildly overambitious (more details here). Then, the pandemic happened and a monkey wrench got thrown into everything, and I have yet to determine the future direction of my social VR research. (My work on this blog is considered part of my research! Among those tasks I have on my to-do list is the reorganization and updating of my ever-popular list of metaverse platforms, as well as my spreadsheet of social VR platforms.)

Anyway, I bought (or rather, the University bought for me) the Oculus Rift before Meta/Facebook changed the rules two years ago, and insisted that all Oculus/Meta VR hardware users had to set up accounts on the Facebook social network in order to use their devices. That move was unpopular, especially among the VR community, and many complained (including myself, vociferously, in several editorials such as this and this), but to no avail. This corporate decision was the last straw for me, and I publicly declared a personal boycott, from that point on, of Meta hardware and software. (Hence my plan to upgrade my work Rift with a Vive Pro 2.)

When I set up my Rift, all I needed to do is set up a (separate) Oculus account. While Facebook/Meta kept prompting me to link my (non-existent) Facebook account to my Oculus account, by that time I had already fully departed from the social media platform.

Recently, I received the following email from Meta, which I present in full:

Hi Ryan,

We want to give you more choices over how you express yourself in VR, and to do so we’re making changes to our Meta VR platform in August 2022. Along with these changes, we’re also updating our Oculus Terms of Service and related Commercial Terms, and Oculus Privacy Policy. We recommend that you review these updated documents, and the summary below of upcoming Meta VR platform changes:

•A Facebook account is no longer required to use Meta VR devices. Instead, you can update your Oculus account to a Meta account, which lets you log into your VR devices and view and manage your purchased apps in one place. You can set up a Meta account using your email address or Facebook account, and as part of the process we’ll migrate your existing VR information (including apps, achievements, and friends) to this account.

•If you don’t want to set up a Meta account right now, you can continue using your Oculus account until January 1, 2023. After this date a Meta account will be required to continue using your Meta VR devices.

If you continue using an Oculus account, you’ll remain under the updated Oculus Terms of Service and Oculus Privacy Policy. If you use Meta VR products for commercial purposes, then the Commercial Terms also apply to you, which have also been updated to provide clarity on commercial use of Meta VR products for location-based experiences, arcades, trainings and demonstrations.

After January 1, 2023, you’ll need to set up a Meta account to continue using your VR device. When you update your Oculus account to a Meta account, the Supplemental Meta Platforms Technologies Terms of Service and Supplemental Meta Platforms Technologies Privacy Policy will apply to you.

We want to be clear about how our products work and the data they collect, so you can make informed choices about how you use them. Here are the main things to know about the changes to the updated Oculus Terms of Service and Oculus Privacy Policy, which will go into effect on August 9, 2022 or when the Meta account is available, whichever is the later date:

•Name change: We made changes throughout the Terms and the Privacy Policy to reflect the new Meta name.

•End date for Oculus account support: We also added a statement as a reminder that support for Oculus accounts will end on January 1, 2023 and you will need to set up a Meta account to continue using our VR devices thereafter.

…

We’ll notify you when the Meta account is available so you have more choices over how you express yourself in VR. To learn more about these updates please visit our blog post.

The Meta Team

“More choices over how you express yourself in VR” (insert vomit emoji)

Kent Bye (the host of the influential Voices of VR podcast) had this to say:

Meta Quest’s Facebook account requirement to be replaced with Meta Account, which isn’t a social media account, but will also REQUIRE Meta Horizon profile (is a social media account) w a Follower model (can be set to private) & setting options of Public, Friends/Family, or “Solo”.

More information on this new Horizon World Profile can (oddly) be found on the Oculus blog, because the Oculus Profile Friends model will be deprecated & replaced by Horizon World Profile with Instagram Follow model, & will also be available on the web (?) https://www.oculus.com/blog/meta-accounts/

Meta making its first moves to manage identity in the metaverse: “Your Meta Horizon profile is your social profile in VR and other surfaces, like the web” includes unique profile username, displayed profile name, and “your profile photo, avatar, and more.”

Kent ends his tweet thread with the following post, referring to Meta’s Mark Rabkin:

The news that Meta was dropping the contentious Facebook account requirement has been thoroughly covered by the tech media, including David Heaney of UploadVR, who reported:

Meta headsets will no longer require a Facebook account from next month.

In August Meta will “begin rolling out” Meta accounts, which can be used to set up Meta headsets. You’ll still be able to link your Facebook account to your Meta account to message and call Facebook friends from inside VR, but this is no longer required.

If your Facebook is currently linked to your Quest, you can choose to unlink it when you set up your Meta account.

Illustration from UploadVR article

Graham Smith, of Rock Paper Shotgun, writes:

You won’t have to use Facebook or Instagram at all on the new accounts, but you can optionally link them if you want to be able to chat or play with friends from those services.

The Meta Horizon account will also let you customize your privacy settings, by letting everyone see your account, just friends and family, or no one at all.

Queenie Wong of CNET adds:

Meta has different deadlines for when VR users will need to create a Meta account, and they depend on how people currently sign in to their VR devices. If you’re a new VR device user or previously merged your Oculus account with your Facebook account, you’ll be prompted in August to create a Meta account and Meta Horizon profile. People who previously merged their Oculus accounts with their Facebook accounts will be able to unlink them as well…

Meta will ask for your name, email address, phone number, payment information and date of birth for age verification when you create this new type of account. Meta says this information will be private and that users will be able to create multiple Meta accounts.

But Sam Machkovech, writing for the Ars Technica website, has some concerns:

As announced, the new “Meta Account” system will correct some of these most glaring issues. But will it be enough?

It’s hard to definitively answer this question. First, the new account system hasn’t gone live, so we can’t test one crucial aspect of the change. According to Meta, anyone who switched from an Oculus account to a Facebook-tied identity will be able to decouple all Facebook identity information while creating a new Meta Account starting in August.

We want to see what this update looks like: how software-purchase transfers will work, what notices may appear on affected Facebook accounts after the transfer, and how aggressive the company will be about asking Quest users if they’re really sure they want to sever Facebook from their headset experience. (Meta has already indicated that it will let users attach Facebook and Instagram credentials if they want.) Facebook representatives have not answered our questions about these concerns as of press time.

It’s a great article which I am not going to quote in full; please go over to Ars Technica to read it.

So, what do I think about all this?

Well, I think this all comes down to one word: TRUST.

And frankly, Meta/Facebook has proven, time and time again, that they cannot be trusted. Past behaviour, unfortunately, is often an excellent predictor of future behaviour. This applies to corporations as well as people.

Their decision to force a Facebook linkage to their then-Oculus VR hardware was ill-advised and poorly-received. I chatted via the RyanSchultz.com Discord with my friend Theanine, who had first alerted me to this news. He said, “Yup, I don’t know anyone who thought the FB requirement was a good move. It’s like they never bothered to get user feedback first.”

Here’s another snippet of our conversation (shared with permission):

Ryan: One thing I will be asking is: well, just HOW different will a Meta account be from the Facebook requirement?

Theanine: That’s the question. There’s people criticizing the move, saying that it changes nothing, because the potential for datamining is still there.

And you can bet your bottom dollar that Meta is going to find any way they can to wring every penny from its users, collecting all the information that it can to sell to advertisers—whether or not you choose to link your accounts on the Facebook or Instagram social networks.

Backtracking on the Facebook requirement might look good, but the fact remains that Meta, still, has an anti-competitive stranglehold on the wireless VR headset market with its Meta Quest 2 product. (And it certainly doesn’t help that, at the moment, its nearest competitor, the Pico G2 4K, is owned by TikTok’s corporate parent, the Chinese company ByteDance. I’m still holding out hope for the LYNX project in France, which has had a successful Kickstarter campaign.)

Meta is going to use every tool and tactic at their disposal (including the billions of dollars of advertising revenue the company earns) in order to maintain that market dominance—and part of that dominance includes the strip-mining of your personal data, regardless of how you connect to their products and services.

So yes, I am wary of this move. While I applaud Meta’s removal of the Facebook requirement, like Kent Bye and Sam Machkovech, I want to see the details. At the moment, this is just spin by some handsomely-compensated public relations executives.

So my personal boycott of Meta hardware and software will continue, except for my work Rift, which I will be replacing this year. Once that is done, I will have burnt my last bridge with Meta, and believe me, it’s going to take more that slapping a fresh coat of paint on my soon-to-be-deleted Oculus account to win me back.

Thank you to Theanine for the heads up on this story, for giving me permission to quote him, and for providing many of the news media links I referred to in this blogpost!

RP1: A Brief Introduction

Two weeks ago, I was given a guided tour of a metaverse platform called RP1 (obviously a reference to the novel and film Ready Player One), conducted by its CEO, Sean Mann.

Heretofore, I have refrained from reporting on RP1 because, well, there’s wasn’t much to report on yet! Much of the work on RP1 has been going on behind the scenes, and the platform I visited this week is still not yet ready to launch. However, what I did see impressed me, and I wanted to share it with you.

(Also a personal note: it is so refreshing to see a project where they are actually putting in the work before launch, as opposed to so many blockchain-based metaverse projects are are simply minting and shilling NFTs, with only vague promises and often misleading concept art! I have written about many such projects in the past on this blog, and it is truly beyond annoying. BUILD SOMETHING WORKING FIRST, people, THEN sell it!)

The first thing that you need to understand about RP1 is that is it a platform built to provide shardless scalability as a service to other metaverse platforms. Picture a concert in a virtual world like Second Life or on a social VR platform like Sansar. In both cases, the size of the audience is constrained by technical limits, In SL, you can only pack about 100 avatars in one sim (which is why event stages are often placed at the intersection of four sims, to allow a larger audience). In Sansar, you can get about 30 avatars into one world; the 31st avatar lands up in a newly-spun-up instance of the world, where they are can watch the same performance as everybody else, but cannot communicate with the avatars on other shards/instances.

What RP1 is planning to offer is a single, shardless world with hundreds and even thousands of avatars in one world. Sean tells me, “We have a phase two demo coming out in a few months with 100,000 avatars in a single 20 square kilometer using just a few computers.” Sean’s goal is to have millions of avatars all sharing one space.

There’s no need to to use portals to move from one instance to another; you can walk around the entire festival grounds, see and hear everybody else, and talk with them! To date, the only metaverse companies that have come close to this ideal are the former High Fidelity social VR platform—which used to regularly host large events with hundreds of avatars in a single world—and Sine Wave Entertainment’s Sinespace platform.

I first met Sean in a lounge high above the cityscape (which was one square kilometre in size), then we teleported down to ground level. The first thing that struck me, walking out into the city, was the sound of countless people talking, the background murmur of indistinct conversations. I was surprised to learn that this sound was not one looping soundtrack, but that it was the collective sound of whichever of the 4,000 avatars nearest to me was saying—a collective sound!

The 4,000 avatars were company-generated bots, of course, something which High Fidelity and Sinespace have also done in the past for their stress testing (since it’s far easier then recruiting 4,000 human volunteers!). The avatars are all gesticulating as if they were in VR headsets, and you can see their arms and mouths move. You can adjust the level of detail of the avatars, with the ones closest to you appearing fully, the ones on the periphery of your vision appearing as blue rectangles in the distance, and the ones beyond your field of view invisible. As an avatar walked by you, the volume of their voice would increase as they approached, and it would fade into the background as they walked away, in spatialized, 3D audio. This is a custom, company-built system of which Sean is quite proud, one which is different from the 3D audio offered by Philip Rosedale’s new, non-social-VR iteration of High Fidelity, which has been implemented in a few metaverse platforms, such as Sine Wave Entertainment’s Breakroom.

With the toggle of a switch, you can mute the background talking so that you can focus on who is speaking to you (in this case, Sean Mann, who was leading the tour). He led me into a clothing store, and as soon as we entered, the sound from the cityscape outside ceased.

Finally, we fly up to a high spot overlooking the city, above an animated sculpture of rotating cubes. I turned my level-of-detail up to level 6, and I could see hundreds of avatars walking around the cityscape! It was pretty impressive. We ended the tour with Sean demonstrating a very simple flay-through-the-hoops game, a demonstration of the the game-building capabilites of the RP1 platform.

I must admit that I came away impressed with the potential for RP1’s platform. Unfortunately, there is as yet no in-world camera, so I could not take pictures to show you here, but I prevailed upon Sean to share an in-world image of his 4,000-avatar testbed, and here it is:

I was impressed by the sheer scope of this test: 4,000 avatars, each talking and gesticulating as if they were piloted by an actual user in a VR headset, all sharing the same single space in a virtual city square.

The important thing to remember here is that RP1 is positioning itself as a B2B (business-to-business) service, providing shardless scalability to other companies who wish to build metaverse platforms that can support a large number of simultaneous users. They’re looking for partners, and looking for investors.

For more information about RP1, please visit their website, where you can check out their roadmap and even request a demo. You can also join the RP1 Discord server, and follow RP1 on Twitter (or Sean Mann himself). I’m quite looking forward to seeing what comes next from this innovative project, and I will be adding RP1 to my ever-growing list of social VR and virtual world platforms.

News Watch: What I Didn’t Blog About in April and May!

I’m constantly on the look out for stories for the RyanSchultz.com blog, bookmarking anything and everything that I or my readers might find of interest—news and announcements about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse (including the blockchain-based platforms).

At the moment, I’m so backlogged with my bookmarks, that today I’ve just decided to share many of them with you, in an effort to get caught up! Each would likely be the seed for a proper blogpost all on its own, but here each one will just get a sentence or two, a brief annotation only. Hope you don’t mind!

Ready? Let’s dig in!

Geekwire: ‘Second Life’ creator shares lessons learned from one of the world’s first metaverses (an interview with Linden Lab’s founding CEO, Philip Rosedale).

Businesswire: Razorfish Study Finds 52% of Gen Z Gamers Feel More Like Themselves in the Metaverse than in Real Life (Razorfish and VICE Media Group released findings from a new research study, titled The Metaverse: A View from Inside).

Road to VR: Virtual Social Platform ‘Rec Room’ Hits 3 Million Monthly Active VR Users (Rec Room continues to rack up some impressive statistics).

The Conversation: Can you truly own anything in the metaverse? A law professor explains how blockchains and NFTs don’t protect virtual property (a thought-provoking editorial by Indiana University law professor João Marinotti)

Medium: World War “M” and the curse of the Metaverse, by Avi Bar-Zeev (an editorial where Avi poses the question: If “The Metaverse” represents our digital future, who decides what “it” is?)

metamandrill: Interview with Founder Adam Frisby of Sine Wave Entertainment (an interview with the man behind both Sinespace and Breakroom)

NFTs are Legally Problematic (a 46-minute YouTube video featuring lawyer Steve Mould and NFT pundit Coffeezilla)

24/7 Crypto: Metaverse hotel for avatars to open in Decentraland next week: “The first ever metaverse hotel (*cough*cough*Second Life*cough*cough*) is being opened next week in Decentraland by Singapore’s Millennium Hotels and Resorts.”

TIME: 6 Lessons on the Future of the Metaverse From the Creator of Second Life (a good overview article, with the writer talking to both Philip Rosedale and Tom Boellstorff about the lessons learned from Second Life).

moOMNI: Around the Metaverse by DrFran Babcock (short but essential reading; Fran shares her thoughts about the community within the metaverse).

Road to VR: A Dating App for Meeting Avatars in VR Aims to Build Very Real Relationships (a review of the Flirtual matchmaking app)

XR Today: Sensorium, Humanity 2.0 Launch Vatican City Art Metaverse (Ultra high-end social VR platform Sensoirum Galaxy partners with the Humanity 2.0 Foundation to build a virtual gallery for Vatican City). “The company’s Sensorium Galaxy platform is currently in beta testing, with a launch date set for later in the year to expand its availability across devices, including VR headsets, PCs, and mobile devices.”

Road to VR: Meta to Merge ‘Venues’ Event Space into ‘Horizon Worlds’ Social VR Platform (starting June 6th, 2022, Horizon Worlds users will have direct access to live sports, concerts, comedy, and user-created meet-ups in Horizon Venues).

WIRED: This VR App Has Legs: Spatial adds support for full-body virtual avatars, giving realism in VR a step up (the Spatial social VR app now had a full-body option).

The Atlantic: Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse (an interview with longtime Second Life blogger Wagner james Au).

Medium: Web3.0 Must Be Destroyed (long, but well worth the read).

Harvard Business Review: Cautionary Tales from Cryptoland (interview with Molly White, creator of the website Web3 Is Going Just Great).

Current Affairs: Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire” (interview with UC-Berkeley computer science professor Nicholas Weaver)

Now that I’ve shared some of my most interesting finds with you, I hope that this list will tide you over until I can whip up some fresh new content for you! Expect more blogposts soon. (If people find these news roundups useful, I might continue to write them, as well as my regular blogposts.)

I Was Interviewed by a Business Reporter for The Globe and Mail for an Article About the Metaverse

On March 10th, 2022, I was contacted by Joe Castaldo, a business reporter for The Globe and Mail (which bills itself as “Canada’s National Newspaper”). He was writing up a story about businesses entering the metaverse, and the current metaverse hype cycle, and he asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed.

After checking in with my union representatives at the university, who gave me the all-clear to go ahead, I was interviewed for an hour via telephone. The Globe and Mail had given Joe a Meta Quest 2 wireless VR headset, so a couple of weeks later, I gave him a guided tour of two popular social VR platforms, VRChat and AltspaceVR.

Well, Joe’s article was published in The Globe and Mail today, titled Is the metaverse the future of the internet? A Globe journalist steps inside to find out (if you should hit a paywall, here is an archived version).

I’m not going to reproduce the entire newspaper article here; I was mentioned in the final few paragraphs:

For Ryan Schultz, the widespread interest in the metaverse is a little weird. “My obscure, niche hobby has suddenly gone mainstream,” he told me. A reference librarian with the University of Manitoba, he spends a few hours every week strapped into a headset or exploring desktop-based worlds, and has been blogging about it for years.

Mr. Schultz finds the speculative nature of the digital land rush in some worlds off-putting. “People are investing in this basically as a flex and as a boast to their friends that they can afford these artificially limited items,” he said. Businesses with virtual office space, meanwhile, are likely spending money on a “really fancy three-dimensional brochure.”

He’s seen much of it before. Corporations flocked to Second Life when it took off in the 2000s. Coca-Cola installed soft drink machines, Toyota set up a car dealership, American Apparel built a clothing store, and IBM established an island for employee recruitment and training.

It wasn’t long before the corporate enthusiasm died. “Nobody came to visit these locations, because the people who were already in Second Life didn’t care,” Mr. Schultz said.

He understands the appeal of virtual worlds, though. When he first discovered Second Life, he spent hours there each day. Away from the computer, he has jokingly called himself an “overweight, divorced, gay librarian with diabetes.” At 58, he feels his body growing older, and he’s struggled with depression so bad he’s taken leaves from work. “I kinda suck at this whole reality business,” he wrote on his blog.

In Second Life, Mr. Schultz loved building avatars – angels, supermodels and a Na’vi from, well, Avatar. There was solace in becoming someone else. During the pandemic, he’s met his social needs through virtual reality, and a mental-health app became a lifeline. “I can put on my headset, join a group, and use cognitive behavioural therapy techniques to work through issues and problems, and it’s extremely powerful,” he said. “You feel like you’re really present.”

For those of us who are not already immersed, such moments are likely a long way off. I searched high and low for meaning and connection in the metaverse, but mostly found empty branding experiences, a speculative frenzy around digital assets, and people who were just as curious as I was to find out what this was all about, and were still searching for answers.

But given the relentless enthusiasm of those trying to turn the metaverse into some kind of reality, there will be plenty of chances to try again, for better or worse.

I think that Joe did a good job of describing the metaverse in a way that newspaper readers could easily understand, and there are a couple of videos included in the digital version of the article which made me laugh at certain points, as Joe and his producer Patrick Dell navigated Decentraland and Horizon Worlds!

I also appreciated that the online article linked out to my ever-popular list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds. I’m not really expecting a spike in traffic to my blog (I didn’t get one when I was interviewed by a writer for New Yorker magazine in 2019), but it was an interesting experience, nonetheless.

(By the way, I do receive more and more requests to be interviewed lately, because of my blog. I turn most of them down, but I said yes to this one, because The Globe and Mail is a major Canadian newspaper, and one which I read often.)

The Globe and Mail newspaper interviewed me for an article on the metaverse

P.S. The mental health app mentioned in the quote above is called Help Club; here’s the blogpost which I wrote about this self-help social VR app for mental health.