Tag: metaverse

The Election Was Even Weirder in VR

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Technology has been at the forefront of this election cycle from the start. Generative AI has driven concerns about misinformation and eye-rolling propaganda. Even the campaigns themselves embraced new-ish spaces, like the Harris-Walz-themed map in Fortnite.

The metaverse may not be quite ready for the campaign cycle, but perhaps the political system should be ready for it. For all the chaos and trolling in the room on election night, what soon becomes clear is that the vibe in VR reflects the outside world.

An avatar watches election returns.

Trump support was strong in VRChat.

The venue for the watch party.

First off, the VR election rooms are overwhelmingly male, which will be unsurprising for anyone accustomed to the political manosphere in the US. Most of the people I encounter in both virtual realms seem to favor Trump, and that power imbalance only grows throughout the night as the red wave deepens and the former president’s reelection seems more and more likely.

My colleague Kelly talks with a person dressed in a black Iron Man-esque suit of armor who says they are from Michigan. Ersatz Iron Man calls the state for Trump much earlier than it was officially reported. They say they know lots of people who support Trump, and for whom Elon Musk’s endorsement and posts on X were an important factor to helping Trump win more broadly.

Lots of moments like this happen over the night. At first, the real-world results clash with the absurdity in the Horizon World rooms. People hiding within their brightly colored avatars, shouting over the top of each other, saying the most offensive things possibly to provoke a reaction. But then the room starts to split, a larger group on the Trump side—loud and excited. Then a smaller group on the Harris side, more somber and reflective. Some people congregate outside, talking in low voices and crunching the numbers about how many electoral votes are left.

“We’ll never have a girl president,” I hear a child shout during my visit to MetDonalds, Horizon Worlds’ mockup of the fast-food chain with golden arches. “We’ve got to keep our American traditions!”

“Let’s kill all the old white people in America that are around,” says somebody wearing an avatar that looks like a slinky dog from Toy Story. Then, to somebody else, “I guess if Trump wins you don’t have to worry about your school getting shot up as much I guess.”

Later I watch somebody voraciously defend Trump’s policies while a different person in a knight avatar comes around behind him and starts miming rubbing his nipples while moaning loudly over the top of him. By the end of the night, it starts to feel like the virtual world is just as weird as the real one.

Additional reporting by WIRED contributor Kelly Bourdet.

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November 6, 2024
Meta’s $300 Quest 3S Headset Significantly Lowers VR’s Buy-In Price

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The Quest 3S, Meta’s newest mixed reality headset, will be out in the world soon. If you’re familiar with the features currently offered by Meta’s VR headsets, then the only surprising thing about the new hardware will be the price. But it’s reverse sticker shock: The new Meta Quest 3S is a $300 headset that has nearly all the capabilities of the $500 Meta Quest 3. This much more modestly priced entry into the metaverse is available for preorder today; Meta says it will be out on October 15.

The Meta Quest 3S was announced today at Meta Connect, the company’s big annual developer fete where it typically also announces new products. In the keynote address, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his vision for the company’s latest AR and VR devices and the many, many updates to the AI features being built into its platforms.

The new Quest 3S.

Courtesy of Meta

The hand controllers.

Courtesy of Meta

Like the Quest 3, the Quest 3S is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 platform. It has full color passthrough vision, so you can pipe in a view of your immediate environment (and navigate around your coffee table) without taking the goggles off. There’s even a new dedicated button on the bottom of the headset for this; press it whenever you want to see your real-life surroundings. The headset is compatible with most Quest 3 accessories, but not all of them. The Quest 3S also features Meta’s Horizon OS, which allows for a desktop-like experience where you can cycle through 2D apps and browser tabs and then seamlessly switch to watching a movie or playing a game. And yes, you can play Wordle in it.

The base configuration of the Quest 3S comes with 128 GB of storage, and for an extra $100 you can add up to 256 GB (bringing the price to $400). The only version of the older Quest 3 you’ll be able to buy is the 512 GB version, and the price on that model is dropping from $650 down to $450. Meta will wind down production of its other headsets, too; the company says it will soon stop selling the Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro.

These cheaper prices, along with a diminished emphasis on the premium models, are meant to entice a broader swath of the VR curious. Meta is likely to announce Quest headsets with beefier specs in the future, though for now that higher class of device faces an uncertain fate. Meta is clearly taking guidance from the underwhelming reception of Apple’s Vision Pro headset, and choosing to focus on devices that are cheaper and more accessible.

Courtesy of Meta

Courtesy of Meta

The day before the announcement, Meta offered a 40-minute demo of the Meta Quest 3S at its headquarters in Silicon Valley. I played a demo of the VR game Batman: Arkham Shadow, which comes installed on the Quest 3S if you buy it before April 2025. (If you’ve ever wanted to feel what it’s like to crouch around in a sewer while dressed as Batman, this is a game for you.)

But ultimately, the Meta mixed reality experience felt like most other immersive headset experiences. Sprawling, ambitious, blurry, and occasionally disorienting. The headset is light and easy to wear, but still makes you sweat if you keep it on your head too long. The apps it offers are fun, but can be experienced more comfortably on more traditional devices. (I will play Wordle on my phone, thank you.) Horizon Worlds, Meta’s virtual meeting and hangout space, could be a neat place to stream a concert, but all the different realms still feel disconnected and strangely thrown together, like if you could shove your head directly into a random subreddit.

Courtesy of Meta

Courtesy of Meta

That said, the weirdness also makes for some of the more interesting moments. At one point during my Quest 3S demo, I navigated, to the chagrin of my Meta press handlers, to a user-created realm in Horizon Worlds called MetDonalds. This turned out to be a VR rendering of a McDonalds restaurant that was exclusively operated by children. Nearly every person there was on mic, and every one of them sounded like a child. I tried to order a digital Happy Meal, and was immediately called out. They asked me how old I was, and when I told them my age there was a great chorus of laughter.

“You’re 34?” One of them shouted, her tone a combination of teasing and astonishment. “What are you even doing here?”

Good question, kid. Good question.

Ultimately, the Meta Quest 3S is here to serve up the same kinds of VR features that its VR headsets have offered for a while. The metaverse isn’t fully here yet, and Horizon Worlds still feels janky and disorienting. But hey, if these untamed experiences are your thing, then at least the Quest 3S will lower the cost of entry. The toddlers running the VR McDonalds in Horizon Worlds are having a blast, so maybe this is just their world now.

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September 25, 2024
The Tech World’s Greatest Living Novelist, Robin Sloan, Goes Meta

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So, inevitably, we talk a lot more, and meta-ly, about language, words, meaning—though Sloan doesn’t think it was inevitable that language would be the breakthrough AI technology. Could’ve been vision, he says; could’ve been something else. But now that it is language, and now that it can write, he’s excited to be the kind of writer the machines are not. Just take a look at Moonbound, which comes out today and is Sloan’s first proper work of science fiction. He thinks it’s his best-written, most human-sounding book so far—by far. It’s certainly his most ambitious: thematically, characterologically, even punctuationally. I point out his creative devotion, in it, to colons: and he launches into a defense of sentences that contain not one but two: which ChatGPT, of course, would never.

Earlier that day, at a nearby salvage yard, in a section devoted to hundreds of old doors, Sloan told me about the various paths his writing life could’ve taken. (Surrounded, I repeat, by doors. Sliding doors. Narrow doors. Glass doors. Meta doors, metaphors.) Back in 2010, the same year he started at Twitter, Sloan self-published three short stories on his website: one fantasy, one sci-fi, and one set in modern-day San Francisco. The one that happened to take off—and then formed the basis of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which came out two years later, shortly after Sloan left Twitter—was the nominally realist one. So he thought, for a time, that that’s the kind of writer he was. Sourdough, which followed five years after that, in 2017, was also set in SF. He gave a talk at Google somewhere in there, became kind of a thing in these parts, beloved by literate techies who saw in him a writer who understood both the incredible happening-ness of tech culture and how to novelize it.

I use the phrase “nominally realist” because: Sloan never entirely qualified. Penumbra’s gets pretty technomystical about books and history and the power of Google. The climax of Sourdough involves a massive bread monster at a futuristic food fair (a few years before the baking craze of the Covid era). There were, in other words, sci-fi stories in both books straining to break free. In Penumbra’s, multiple characters are literally reading books about dragons, and there’s a scene in which one character challenges another to imagine a sci-fi story set many thousands of years in the future.

Moonbound is set many thousands of years in the future, and there are a number of dragons in it. There are also wizards, talking beavers, sentient swords. Sloan’s hero, Ariel de la Sauvage (a “dorky name,” Sloan writes; it’s self-awareness all the way down) is an orphan boy who lives in a castle and is destined to pull a sword from a stone. “I knew this story,” says the AI narrator, but “it was different-shaped here, compressed and remade.” It loops. It layers.

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June 11, 2024