American IT systems expert, Edward Snowden compared Facebook’s Virtual Reality programme to a boring “PTA meeting”.
The controversial Snowden made the comment in a Twitter thread on Tuesday.
Facebook, Inc, now called Meta, owns the VR platform Oculus, which produces the Quest 1, Quest 2 and Rift headsets.
The Oculus headsets are immensely popular in the VR business, claiming a whooping 67 per cent of all VR hardware used on the Steam platform, the largest online distributor of PC video games.
Snowden appears unimpressed, however, noting that the tech giant’s vision of VR is a “derivative, lifeless world full of derivative, lifeless people”.
The popular whistleblower also criticised the humongous sum expended by the company on its VR and AR programmes.
According to the QZ, Meta spent $10 billion in 2021 developing its metaverse VR and AR products which only generated $2.27 billion in revenue.
Snowden noted, “I struggle to understand why you would invest an incomprehensible fortune to produce something so sanitized and boring that the mere thought of visiting it makes people want to log off.
“Nobody wants to opt-in to an endless PTA meeting, Mark. This does not excite.”
In October 2021, the popular whistleblower came down hard on Facebook over the renaming to Meta.
He wrote, “Facebook is Facebook. Don’t write about the name, write about what they do, because that’s what matters.
“Paperwork doesn’t change the nature of a thing.”
Leave a Reply