Facebook/Meta announcement

I watched some of the Facebook/Meta announcement and, it was pretty lackluster and disappointing.

As “an old” I remember better versions of what they think the "Metaverse" is from bad sci-fi in the 70's & 80's. The best Zuckerberg can offer is still poking at translucent panels hovering above a desk? Really?

The avatars look like ones Nintendo didn’t end up using on the Wii, but without legs.

Even the future vision stuff was lacking. Mainly aimed at business hybrid working solutions and selling access to services & art.

Back to the future

I remember visiting Olympia London in the 90's and trying a VR headset. I could walk around and battle a dragon. It was fantastic. Tomorrow's World covered it in 1990 and Howard Rheingold wrote a great book on the subject. That was 30 years ago and there's been no real advances apart better graphics and a smaller headset.

I don't see any of this coming to fruition in the next decade, at least.

Name change

The other thing in this announcement was Facebook (the company) re-branding to Meta.

I get the need to distance the company name from the platform (and all its current troubles), but I think this misses the mark. Zuckerberg is putting all of his eggs (and his Millions) into this basket, but this smells more of folly than a sure-thing.