Tag: Meta

UPDATED! Editorial: How the Crypto Crash—and Meta’s Missteps—Are Souring the General Public on the Metaverse

As somebody who writes about social VR and flatscreen virtual worlds on this blog, with a popular Discord server packed with metaverse fanatics and a front-row seat on pretty much everything that has been happening in this space, let me tell you, the past twelve months have been a wild ride. You can even see it in my blog statistics of the number of visitors and views the RyanSchultz.com blog has attracted over the past year:

See that surge from October through March? In October, Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Connect 2021 keynote that Facebook would rebrand as Meta, and would focus on realizing his vision of the metaverse. This also coincided with a crypto speculation boom, where people and companies were frantically bidding for artificially scarce NFT-based plots of land in various blockchain metaverse platforms.

Together, these events sparked a greater awareness among the general public of the metaverse (as indicated by a corresponding increase in traffic to my blog). However, it would appear that the ongoing crypto crash, combined with Meta’s recent woes and missteps, are causing people to sour on the concept. (And by “people”, I mean the general public, not the metaverse fanatics, content creators and world builders whom I tend to hang out with!)

As an illustration of this, I would like to focus on a recent announcement made by Mark Zuckerberg, about the expansion of their flagship consumer social VR platform, Horizon Worlds, from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. into two new countries, France and Spain:

The first thing I think of when I look at this picture is: hoo boy, somebody working in Meta’s PR department is gonna get fired! You’re trying to sell people on Horizon Worlds with this unappealing, uninspiring, and frankly ugly image on Twitter?

The response to this on two different subreddit communities on Reddit, r/technology and r/Buttcoin, proves to be quite illuminating. (By the way, r/Buttcoin is the blockchain, crypto, and NFTs snark community, where we cryptoskeptics and critics love to discuss and dissect the latest shenanigans, antics, and scams in that world!)

Here are some of the better comments on the r/technology post, sparked by Paul Tessi’s biting August 17th, 2022 Fortune article, Does Mark Zuckerberg Not Understand How Bad His Metaverse Looks?

It looks like Mark Zuckerberg watched Ready Player One and thought he would be able to recreate that universe with MS Paint.

“Looking forward to seeing people explore and build immersive worlds!” :: “Work in my content mill, peasants.”

The more money they dump into this dumpster fire, the better chance Facebook finally collapses into the abyss. So keep doing it Zuck.

One much-upvoted comment reads as follows:

No one is building a $1500-2500 PC with [a] dedicated GPU to add a Facebook $600 VR headset to attend work meetings in a virtual space that looks like a kids CGI series from 2004 at a mass adoption level, where the majority of the public would use it daily for 8 hours at work then again for another 4-6 hours “for fun” at home, as the Meta dystopian dream suggests.

Meta has already been subsidizing the costs of their currently meh headset, which they just increased the prices of, as they were losing too much money.

For this to work, the hardware has to be good enough for grandma to be able to buy it on a pension, put it on out of the box and it just works, and it does not make her sick to her stomach in 5-20 minutes due to the low frame rates and quality.

That’s the barrier of entry to the space you need to be able to target… if that old guy at your office struggles with getting their mic to work on MS Teams for a video call every day, as the manager he is not going to order $100,000 worth of gear for your department that is hard to setup and use to meet in the metaverse.

This thing is dead on arrival, but Facebook is also dying/dead in it’s current form, so this Hail Mary [pass] is all they have.

In the August 17th Fortune article which spawned these responses, reporter Paul Tassi writes:

The thing is, this happens all the time with Zuckerberg and his metaverse because Horizon Worlds has looked terrible since its inception and has barely gotten any better over the years, where its avatars still look like Miis from 2012 and they still don’t have legs.

Granted, I understand that showing 2D screenshots of VR is difficult, and that VR generally lags behind traditional console and PC gaming in terms of graphics. And yet that doesn’t change the fact that even within VR, Horizon Worlds is one of the worst-looking offerings I have seen, and that Meta has spent something like $10 billion chasing its Horizon, VR-centric version of the metaverse, even embarrassingly changing their company name to reflect that. And…this is the result.

Meanwhile, here are some of the opinions of the cryptosnarkers over on r/Buttcoin:

If I was a Meta stockholder I would be selling the minute I saw that screenshot.

He (and many others) are hoping that nobody remembers Second Life ever existed, let alone that it still does. It has a dedicated audience of somewhere between half to one million users and that’s kinda it. I suspect the future for “the metaverse” is similar.

One r/Buttcoin member posted the following detailed comment:

This is the part I don’t understand. Any “meta” style environment will be incredibly limited in terms of graphics and gameplay due to the need to have a high number of players at once. So who is the target audience?

• Someone looking to play a game is going to go with something like Grand Theft Auto V (and continue to move on to the next biggest thing when they come out).
• The live concerts! aspect of the website seems equally absurd given the graphical limitations and that this would be less entertaining than watching a concert on TV.
• Your casual Farmville-style person isn’t shelling out hundreds of dollars for a VR headset.
• For their “practical” concepts like virtual stores, it seems to invalidate the concept of buying metaverse land as either the system will allow for fast travel style movement (making “premium” land a joke), or not allow for this travelling and completely turn off their customer base for this.

I just don’t see where the interest comes from.

And I chuckled at this wag’s opinion:

Second Life managed to survive because it fostered a community of weirdo people who fetishized the environment. I think the only person who fetishizes Facebook’s metaverse is Zuckerberg.

Absolutely SAVAGE! I live. Somebody else posted this gem to the r/Buttcoin subreddit:

Even worse, the cryptobros are starting to dunk on the metaverse, notably Shark Tank billionaire investor Mark Cuban. According to an August 8th, 2022 report in Fortune:

Mark Cuban, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner and avid crypto enthusiast, is not sold on the metaverse.

“The worst part is that people are buying real estate in these places. That’s just the dumbest shit ever,” he told the crypto-themed YouTube channel Altcoin Daily this past weekend.

I’m quite sure that the various blockchain-based metaverses like Voxels (formerly known as Cryptovoxels), Decentraland, Somnium Space, and The Sandbox, all of whom have seen the value and the trading volume of their NFT-based real estate decline during this crypto winter, were not expecting the ridicule and disdain of crypto influencers themselves! After all, the crypto crowd are main target audience of these platforms, not your average non-crypto user. You know things are getting weird when the cryptobros start to turn on each other!

So, what does all this mean? Well, it looks as though the concept of the metaverse, at least among the general public, is going to sustain some reputational damage, at least in the short term (12 to 24 months). Perhaps it was inevitable that there would be such a swing from irrational metaverse exuberance to equally irrational metaverse distaste, even disgust.

I am reminded of the Gartner technology consulting group’s well-known Hype Cycle, where we appear to be rapidly moving from the peak of inflated expectations, to the trough of disillusionment:

The five steps of the Gartner Hype Cycle (source: Wikipedia)

Also, this “trough of disillusionment” means that it’s going to be harder to sell consumers and businesses on the metaverse. This will apply both to behemoth corporations like Meta, Apple, and Alphabet (the parent company of Google), as well as to much smaller metaverse-building companies. As I have said before, not all platforms currently being worked on will survive this rough period.

It is possible, perhaps even likely, that only a handful will achieve dominance in this ever-evolving market, leaving the other firms to fight over the leftover scraps. Of course, some companies will be savvy enough to focus on a profitable niche market, such as the surgical training platform FundamentalVR, which recently received another venture capital infusion of US$20 million.

So, as Bette Davis once memorably said in the movie All About Eve: “Fasten your seatbelts…it’s going to be a bumpy night!”

UPDATE August 19th, 2022: As further evidence of the antipathy towards Mark Zuckerberg’s latest announcement, Zack Zwiezen wrote this scathing report for Kotaku, titled Mark Zuckerberg’s Soulless Metaverse Avatar Has Me Worried About Our Digital Future:

Earlier this week, the alien-wearing-a-human-skin-suit known to us as Mark Zuckerberg posted a VR selfie from inside his company’s metaverse project, Horizon Worlds. The selfie showed off the Eiffel Tower and was meant to announce that his metaverse is expanding to more countries. Instead, however, people immediately began dunking on the terrible picture, the ugly avatar, and how it all looked like it fell out of a 2005 edutainment game…

And that brings us to 2022, where Zuckerberg’s avatar is a legless knock-off of a Nintendo Mii with some really weird buttons and the eyes of a corpse. And this isn’t just how Zuckerberg looks, this is the way all avatars appear in Horizon Worlds. I’ve played enough Horizon Worlds to tell you that the missing legs quickly cease to matter. But the lack of style and the cold, dead aesthetic never goes away.

Sure, part of the reason these avatars and worlds look simple and ugly compared to modern video games comes down to the limited VR hardware in Quest 2 and Facebook’s desire to make VR content that can run on as many devices as possible.

On the other hand, I can find Nintendo DS and Sony PS Vita games with better, nicer-looking art and models than what we’ve been shown so far in Facebook’s metaverse. I also don’t think you can blame the people making this stuff, as I assume they are more than capable of doing better and more vibrant things. But more and more, it seems that isn’t what Meta and Zucklehead want. Instead, they are focused on making a product that can be consumed by the masses and which lacks any defining characteristics in an attempt to get more people to dive in.

This is the exact opposite approach we see in more community-driven VR metaverses like VR Chat, which looks better and feels warmer and more inviting. In comparison, Horizon Worlds looks like an animated video I’d walk by in some fancy hospital while I look for the bathroom.

And if this bland and ugly metaverse is the future Mark Zuckerberg wants and is investing billions of dollars into, I’m worried that it could end up winning out over other, better alternatives simply because he has the money and resources to squash or buy up competitors. Well, if it does win out, at least I’ll be able to skip it and not buy a new VR headset.

Yee-OUCH!!!

Also, as further evidence of the distress in the entire cryptosphere, Bloomberg reports that ad spending by the crypto firms has absolutely cratered:

Spending by major crypto firms, including the trading platforms Crypto.com, Coinbase Global Inc. and FTX, fell to $36,000 in July in the US, according to ISpot. That’s the lowest monthly total since January 2021 and is down from a high of $84.5 million in February, when the industry flooded the airwaves around the Super Bowl.

Again, Yeee-OUCH!!! And it looks like things are not going to get better anytime soon, as inflation roars and recession looms. People have more important things to worry about (like keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads) than buying virtual real estate on the blockchain!

In December 2021, Republic Realm spent approximately US$4.3 million worth of land in The Sandbox, setting a record for the most expensive land sale in the metaverse (more about Republic Realm here). It would appear to be highly unlikely that Republic Realm, or any of the other investors who bought NFT-based plots of virtual land at the height of the boom market, are going to be able to earn a profit anytime soon.

Has the bottom fallen out of the NFT-based metaverse market? And what does this mean for the concept of the metaverse in general? Stay tuned!

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!

Mario Gabriele Does a Deep Dive into the Start-Up History, Current Value, and Potential Future of Decentraland

Mario Gabriele (image source)

Mario Gabriele is the founder and editor of The Generalist, a self-described “free newsletter for deep thinkers, serious builders, and imaginative investors”, with over 53,000 subscribers. On January 9th, 2022, Mario wrote a long and wide-ranging article (what he calls one of his “briefings”) about one of the very first blockchain-based virtual world projects, Decentraland (which is, of course, of interest to me!).

I found what Mario had to say so interesting that I wanted to write this blogpost to bring wider attention to his article, which os titled Decentraland: The Metaverse’s Early Mover. One of things I found unique about this article is that Mario really does his homework, delving into the early history of Decentraland and interviewing many key people associated with the project in one way or another. Also, he isn’t afraid to level criticism of the project. This is not some breathless fan-boy take; I enjoyed his writing because it is a multi-faceted, critical inspection of the Decentraland project to date, combined with some analysis of what it all means, including a few educated guesses about the future. And even if you are not all that interested in Decentraland per se, he also touches on other worlds, such as The Sandbox. I learned a lot from reading this, and I suspect you will as well.

I’m going to suggest you to go over to The Generalist and read it in full, but I will pull out and comment on a few quotes which interested me. For example, Mario does a better than anybody else I know in painting a picture of what the early days of the Decentraland start-up were like:

In 2011, Manuel Araoz was a computer science student at ITBA, a university called “Argentina’s MIT.” As part of a cryptography class, he discovered Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin whitepaper. Argentina’s past two decades had been marked by economic volatility and rapid currency devaluation, giving tangible power to Nakamoto’s words. Araoz was transfixed…

Araoz set about trying to make his dent in the new realm, launching “Proof of Existence” (POE), billed as the “first-ever non-financial blockchain application.” POE acts as a notary, allowing anyone to “prove” a document exists by adding an encrypted “digest” of it to the blockchain, where it is timestamped. As its site notes, this is the “first online service allowing you to publicly prove that you have certain information without revealing the data or yourself.”

Araoz also joined BitPay, then a bitcoin payments business. As a technical lead, his remit included opening an office in Buenos Aires. He picked a two-story house in Palermo Hollywood. 

Populated by BitPay engineers, friends from ITBA, and other early crypto obsessives, “Voltaire House” quickly became a place for deep thinkers to gather. In researching this piece, I got to speak to several former residents and visitors, including Esteban Ordano, one of Decentraland’s founders.

Voltaire House became the incubator for a number of blockchain projects. In 2015, Voltaire House’s resident purchased their first VR headset, an HTC Vive, which “opened their eyes to the potential of spatial experiences”. From this sprung the idea of Decentraland.

Mario discusses Decentraland’s crazy Initial Coin Offering (ICO), and in particular discusses how Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address in October 2021 marked a significant turning point for Decentraland and countless other projects, writing:

From one month to the next, Decentraland’s MAUs nearly tripled. The price of MANA went very nearly vertical, jolting from $0.75 to $3.56 and eventually closing in on $5.50. 

(image source)

Decentraland’s fully diluted market cap jumped from $1.6 billion to more than $7 billion in four days, effectively increasing its size from 1-800-FLOWERS to The New York Times over the equivalent of a long weekend. Since that leap, MANA has retreated, along with many other tokens, but it is still multiples higher than before Meta’s announcement. 

One of the best parts of Mario’s article is where he creates an avatar and goes exploring!

Over the past week, I’ve used Sutherland [the name of Mario’s avatar] to tour as much of Decentraland’s world as possible. We’ve fallen down the fountain in “Genesis Plaza,” hit up the casinos in Vegas City, stumbled across a Pride Parade, mined fallen asteroids in exchange for gems, gone to the stables, gawked at swirling spiral homes, browsed art at a Sotheby’s gallery, and tried to fly a dragon. We made it about ten feet before crashing into a wall. 

I have also walked around empty lots and whole neighborhoods without a soul in sight. At around noon on a Tuesday, I stood in Frankie’s Tavern, a virtual dive bar, watching a music video alone. After hearing about District X, Decentraland’s red-light district, I fruitlessly searched for brothels that apparently exist. I hoped to interview the most modern members of the world’s oldest profession. (How does this work? What do people buy? Is VR involved? Is the money good?). Though a failure, I did stumble across “Waifu HQ,” a confusing monument to female anime characters featuring a scantily clad breakdancer.

I had a good chuckle at Mario/Sutherland trying to find escorts in Decentraland! Oh, honey, if you are looking for sex in Decentraland, you are going about this all wrong! 😉

He goes on to write:

Were these outings enjoyable? Sort of, though spending time in Decentraland feels more interesting than fun, per se. Despite spending several hours in the world, I didn’t find a game or activity that captured my attention for more than a few minutes. There is no addictive dopamine vortex pulling me back in against my better judgment. 

I suspect I would feel differently if I were an enthusiastic or competent gambler. Across my various visits, Decentraland’s casinos were almost always the best-trafficked locations. Decentral Games run many, a startup that has raised a reported $5 million from investors like Digital Currency Group and operates as a DAO. Its locations include Chateau Satoshi, The Aquarium, and the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a riverboat casino. 

The result was that I experienced Decentraland similarly to Las Vegas, interesting as an anthropological study even if not a true pleasure trip. 

The comparison between Decentraland and Las Vegas is very apt!

Mario also talks about companies such as Ed Radion’s Squiggle School, which was founded to help teach people how to create content in both Decentraland and The Sandbox. Ed is quoted by Mario: “We’re all-in on The Sandbox. Their no-code game engine and design tool are easy to pick up, meaning the ecosystem will have more fun experiences than Decentraland…Decentraland struggles to engage non-landowners because their experiences have to be built in production-grade tools (Blender, Unity). Most people don’t have a clue how to do that or have the time to learn how.”

Mario also looks under the hood, talking about Decentraland’s three-layer protocol and peer-to-peer architecture in an accessible, easy-to-understand way. He also discusses the project’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO):

In early 2020, Decentraland completed one of its initial goals – to hand control of the project over to its community. It did so by formalizing a DAO and handing it power over the essential smart contracts controlling LAND, wearables, the marketplace, and more. If these were ever to change, it would be because the community voted for it, not because a single developer decided it was a good idea. 

Near the end of his report, Mario compares Decentraland to Roblox, talks a bit about Meta, and even namedrops a few competitor platforms already (or soon to be) in operation, mentioning The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels, and Somnium Space (all of which I have written about previously). He adds:

A score more is on the rise, with some oriented explicitly as games and others going after multipurpose use. The first category includes Ember Sword by Bright Star Studios, Meilich’s Big Time, Faraway, and Defi Kingdoms. The second includes NFT Oasis, NFT Worlds, Nifty Island, and those that adhere to our real-world maps, like SuperWorld and Upland. Each new project can bring fresh ideas to the task of constructing the metaverse. 

Which means, I have a whole new bunch of blockchain-based virtual worlds to explore and write about!

In summary, Mario Gabriele has provided a well-written, insightful deep dive into the past history, current value, and potential future of Decentraland. If you want to learn more about Mario and his thoughts on a variety of tech topics, you can join his free mailing list via his website The Generalist, or follow him on Twitter (I just did!).

I do have a number of other thinkers whom I have been following on various social media in the virtual worlds, social VR, and metaverse space, and I hope to introduce you to more of these people over time (as well as any new metaverse platforms I come across in my travels!).

After News Reports of Sexual Harassment, Meta Implements a Four-Foot Personal Boundary for Avatars in Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues

Unfortunately, sexual harassment online is pervasive, happening in such disparate venues as social media, chat rooms, Discord servers, and role-playing games. Virtual worlds and social VR are no exception. Again, this is not a new problem; I have been writing about trolling, griefing and harassment in the metaverse, and how companies are responding to it, since May of 2018 on this blog.

There have been several recent news reports about women who reported being groped or otherwise harassed in Meta’s social VR platforms Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues. For example, the U.K.’s Daily Mail had this report about a women who was assaulted after logging into Horizon Venues:

Nina Jane Patel watched and listened in horror through a virtual-reality headset as her avatar – a moving, talking, computer-generated version of herself – was groped aggressively in a sustained attack by three realistic male characters.

…

On a visit this month, the mother-of-four entered the ‘lobby’ – a virtual space serving as an entry point. But within seconds she was pursued by the men’s avatars, who groped her, subjected her to a stream of sexual innuendo and took screen shots of the attack for several minutes as she tried to flee.

Alex Heath of The Verge reported on December 9th, 2021:

Earlier this month, a beta tester posted in the official Horizon group on Facebook about how her avatar was groped by a stranger. “Sexual harassment is no joke on the regular internet, but being in VR adds another layer that makes the event more intense,” she wrote. “Not only was I groped last night, but there were other people there who supported this behavior which made me feel isolated in the Plaza.”

[Vivek] Sharma [Meta’s VP of Horizon] calls the incident “absolutely unfortunate” and says that after Meta reviewed the incident, the company determined that the beta tester didn’t utilize the safety features built into Horizon Worlds, including the ability to block someone from interacting with you. (When you’re in Horizon, a rolling buffer of what you see is saved locally on your Oculus headset and then sent to Meta for human review if an incident is reported.) “That’s good feedback still for us because I want to make [the blocking feature] trivially easy and findable,” he says.

This event was widely reported by a variety of news sources, ranging from the New York Post to the MIT Technology Review. Victor Tangermann wrote in a Dec. 16th, 2021 Futurism article titled Sexual Assault Is Already Happening in the Metaverse:

Rather than ensuring Horizon Worlds doesn’t foster a culture of strangers groping each other in VR, Meta is hoping to make the problem go away by making adjustments to its tools. The company says users can turn on a feature called “Safe Zone,” which creates an impenetrable bubble around the user when they want more space.

But personal space is likely to be a galling problem for social VR applications.

“I think people should keep in mind that sexual harassment has never had to be a physical thing,” Jesse Fox, an associate professor at Ohio State University, told MIT Technology Review. “It can be verbal, and yes, it can be a virtual experience as well.”

Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson also wasn’t exactly impressed by Meta’s VR experience, either. Once in the VR lobby of Horizon Venues — Meta’s VR events platform that is serving as Horizon Worlds’ precursor — she was being surrounded by a “group of male avatars” who started taking pictures of her.

“One by one, they began handing the photos to me,” Olson writes. “The experience was awkward and I felt a bit like a specimen.”

Meta may have thought they would have avoided these kind of problems by deliberately designing their avatars to have no body below the waist. No genitals, no problem, right? WRONG. It’s not what the avatars look like that’s the issue here; it’s how the people using the avatars behave towards each other.

Note also Parmy Olson’s incident in the previous quote: in her case, the group of male avatars were using Horizon Worlds’ built-in camera feature to make her feel uncomfortable. Harassment can take many forms, and may involve the abuse of features which the developers never dreamed would be so misused.

On February 4th, 2022, no doubt in response to these and other news reports and the negative publicity they generated, Meta announced a Personal Boundary feature:

Today, we’re announcing Personal Boundary for Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues. Personal Boundary prevents avatars from coming within a set distance of each other, creating more personal space for people and making it easier to avoid unwanted interactions. Personal Boundary will begin rolling out today everywhere inside of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, and will by default make it feel like there is an almost 4-foot distance between your avatar and others.

This Personal Boundary feature is hard-coded, at least for now; you cannot turn it off or adjust the distance. According to the press release:

We are intentionally rolling out Personal Boundary as always on, by default, because we think this will help to set behavioral norms—and that’s important for a relatively new medium like VR. In the future, we’ll explore the possibility of adding in new controls and UI changes, like letting people customize the size of their Personal Boundary.

Note that because Personal Boundary is the default experience, you’ll need to extend your arms to be able to high-five or fist bump other people’s avatars in Horizon Worlds or in Horizon Venues.

Adi Robinson of The Verge clarifies that “it gives everyone a two-foot radius of virtual personal space, creating the equivalent of four virtual feet between avatars”, adding:

Meta spokesperson Kristina Milian confirmed that users can’t choose to disable their personal boundaries since the system is intended to establish standard norms for how people interact in VR. However, future changes could let people customize the size of the radius.

If someone tries to walk or teleport within your personal space, their forward motion will stop. However, Milian says that you can still move past another avatar, so users can’t do things like use their bubbles to block entrances or trap people in virtual space

Contrast Meta’s approach with other platforms such as Sansar, which gives the user control over whether or not they want to set up personal space between themselves and other avatars, allowing them to set up one distance for people on their friends list (or to turn it off completely, and set another for non-friends and strangers (see the Comfort Zone settings in the image below):

And, of course, VRChat has an elaborate, six-level Trust and Safety system, where you can make adjustments to mute/hide avatars, among other settings.

A few thoughts about all this. Because Meta is such a large, well-known company, it was perhaps inevitable that such reports would be considered newsworthy—even though sexual harassment has been around for decades in virtual worlds, dating back to Active Worlds, founded over a quarter-century ago!

Also, the immersive nature of virtual reality can make such harassment feel more invasive. Jessica Outlaw has researched and written at length about women’s experience of harassment in virtual reality (here and here).

Finally, like all the metaverse platforms which came before it, Meta is learning and making adjustments to its social VR platforms over time. This is common and is to be expected. For example, Second Life has had a long history of discovering and addressing problems which arose during its 18+ years of existence. Some fixes are good; others cause their own problems, and require further tinkering.

I personally believe that the best solution to the continuing problem of sexual harassment in the metaverse requires a deft mix of social and community rules and expectations with software solutions such as the Personal Boundary feature, and muting/blocking avatars. There is no easy fix; we learn as we go.