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Source: Xinzhiyuan (ID: AI_era)
The Meta headset has only been purchased for 6 months, and it is left at home to eat ashes, and many users still feel dizzy and vomit. Zha’s metaverse seems to be troubled.
Just last week, Xiao Zha finally completed an epoch-making innovation in Horizon Worlds-people in the Metaverse finally grew legs!
However……
Did you feel that the movements of the two on stage were too silky?
Sure enough, after some inquiries from reporters, Meta finally told the ‘truth’ – the team used ‘ordinary motion capture technology’ to drive the avatar movement…
In this regard, a spokesperson for Meta explained: ‘This video is for illustrative and forward-looking purposes. ‘
It can be said that this is another big cake drawn since Meta changed its name in 2021…
However, after experiencing the ‘metaverse avatar’ with the balloon head and dead fish eyes before Xiao Zha, it is not difficult to find out that this is the basic exercise of the ‘cake painting professional’.
Of course, you can draw cakes, but users can also choose not to eat them!
The headset eats ashes for 6 months, and gets tired after 1 month of application
Simply put, Quest’s retention rate has declined every year for the past three years.
Among them, more than 50% of Quest headsets, users have never turned on the machine after 6 months of purchase…
Still, that’s nothing compared to Horizon Worlds, which has been on the cusp since its launch.
Meta initially set a goal of reaching 500,000 monthly active users by the end of the year.
However, not long ago, Meta suddenly lowered this target to 280,000, which can be said to be almost cut in half.
According to internal documents, the already small user base has been in a ‘steady decline’ since the spring.
So far, Horizon Worlds has less than 200,000 monthly active users. If this momentum continues, the target of 280,000 is also expected to hang.
In the survey, users said they couldn’t find a metaverse world they liked, or anyone else they could play with. Beyond that, not only did the avatar have no legs, but the person didn’t look real.
The data shows that most people get bored after playing for about a month…
Carlos Silva, a 41-year-old IT project manager, bought a Quest 2 early last year.
He had hoped to find more social interaction through Horizon Worlds during the pandemic. As a result, after entering a chat room on the first day, I found that there was no one there.
The researchers in charge of the survey pointed out that the sample included only 514 people because the pool of users available for the survey was ‘small and precious’.
You can’t blame users for being too picky, after all, Meta’s own employees don’t want to use it either.
Metaverse vice president Vishal Shah rebuked in an internal memo on September 15: ‘Why is this happening? Why don’t we love the products we make? If we don’t love it, how can we expect users to love it? ‘
Half a month later, the boss believes that the use of employees is still not enough. Since you don’t take the initiative to use it, then I can only force you to use it.
So Shah decided to have the ‘team use Horizon at least once a week’.
To deal with persistent bugs and user complaints, Meta quietly put Horizon in a ‘lockdown’ state last month, which means it will pause the rollout of new features until it improves the current user experience, documents show.
In addition to users who vote with their feet, investors who vote with money are gradually losing patience.
Shares of Meta have fallen more than 60% over the past year.
From the September 2021 peak, the company has lost more than $700 billion in market value.
‘Cyber vomit’
Of course, Meta’s metaverse does not only need to handle the application of pulling the hips.
There is also a common problem with VR headsets to face – the unavoidable feeling of dizziness.
Many players have only been wearing the headset for two minutes before the problem occurs – feeling dizzy and nauseous.
Even trying to keep themselves in the metaverse, many have had to stop abruptly.
What they have is a kind of cybersickness.
Internet disease is a general term for diseases caused by the use of computer monitors. The symptoms are similar to nausea and dizziness during motion sickness.
When using VR, an optical illusion of motion is created. One explanation is that our eyes and ears are connected for balance.
Every time the head moves, the brain predicts how the inner ear, eyes and other parts of the body will react and uses feedback to rebalance. And if the brain’s expectations don’t match what it gets, it can lead to dizziness, nausea, cold sweats, and more.
AR and VR developer Kyle Ringgenberg explained that there are two main sensory conflicts that can lead to cyber sickness in VR.
The first is brain-body mismatch; the second is differences in physiological responses.
Proprioceptive drift due to brain-body mismatch due to visual errorsWhen we look at the world in front of us, our eyes automatically focus on an object based on its perceived distance from us.
VR headsets project images at a distance from the viewer, but when a virtual object appears nearby, it can appear blurry because the human eye is trying to focus on it.
(A) When the person physically rotates her head, this action produces consistent/redundant visual and non-visual information. (B) However, when she also rotates her head in VR, display lag causes a difference in the orientation of her virtual (pink) and physical (green) head, leading to cyber sickness. (C) The perceived orientation of the ground plane (pink) is also biased relative to its true orientation (green).
Both forms of cyber sickness are a headache for users and developers.
Right now, big companies, led by Meta, are betting heavily on AR and VR technology (Meta has already burned $10 billion on the metaverse in 2021).
They all want to find ways to attract more users into the virtual world and keep them there.
But obviously, the Internet disease is a major obstacle to their great cause in the Metaverse.
Speaking of which, it’s a paradox: To make VR easier to use and cheaper, companies are making devices smaller and using less powerful processors.
But the changes introduced dizzying graphics — which inevitably caused more people to feel dizzy.
A growing body of research suggests that cybersickness is far more common than we thought—perhaps affecting more than half of all potential users.
In the 1970s, NASA began researching motion sickness. They invented ways to prevent dizziness by giving patients medication to attenuate the mismatched signals the brain receives; and reprogramming the body’s feedback system (for example, instead of looking down at a phone, look out of the car glass).
VR developers have taken some inspiration from these solutions.
Some people have introduced an artificial “horizon” in VR videos, which does seem to reduce the severity of motion sickness, but it doesn’t eliminate it entirely.
Others will recommend that users take a 10- to 15-minute break every half hour. But for many users, this time is not enough.
A researcher named Garrido did an experiment where his team recruited 92 people to try out a VR program. Through VR, participants need to explore the 3D kitchen and public toilets,
The results showed that more than 65% of people experienced dizziness, and more than one-third of them had severe symptoms. There were 22 participants and had to quit 10 minutes before the end.
This result is amazing. Because all the action in the VR experience is smooth and comes from the user’s own movements, it’s not a thrilling experience like a roller coaster or flight simulation. In short, the user feels worse and worse over time. People will get worse. More than 20 minutes, be careful.
Cyber sickness doesn’t just happen in VR, it’s possible to get cyber sickness when using both hardware (headset) and software (app).
The consoling good news is that technologists have been working hard over the past four or five years to make advances, such as the adoption of predictive head tracking. Although it cannot eliminate cyber sickness, it can minimize the sensory conflict of users.
Headset supports 3 degrees of freedom (3DoF) or 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) head tracking
Meta’s headset made a lot of mistakes. The display on its first headset, Oculus, refreshed at 72 frames per second, which was slow enough to cause dizziness and nausea. It’s hard to imagine why Meta would choose this monitor.
Needless to say, this side effect will keep VR out of most users if no solution can be found. The virtual world can only be played by a small group of people.
References:
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