Goodbye AltspaceVR, hello Meta moderation nightmare

Hello! As of this week, I'm back at grad school for an electronics-heavy semester. Hoping to share more of my progress on that front this year online, if you're interested. Ok, onto the news.

Microsoft ends AltspaceVR and more

As details and follow ups to last week's mass layoff news have emerged, it's become clear that Microsoft's waning commitment to immersive tech is more than a HoloLens problem.

Word came via social media that everyone on Microsoft's Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) team was included in the group of 10,000 workers losing their jobs, followed soon after by the announcement that AltspaceVR will be shut down on March 10th. Today, Janko Roettgers reported that staff for the company's Mixed Reality Capture Studio locations were laid off as well.

This is devastating. The people losing their jobs are not just caught in the middle of a layoff spree across tech companies of all sizes (last week Google slashed 12,000 jobs, and Unity also cut close to 300), but one where it's looking like immersive tech opportunities could be particularly hard to come by.

Communities for both MRTK and AltspaceVR are going to face two rough outcomes: an open source project losing its deep-pocketed backer and the erasure of a nearly decade-old social platform, respectively. It's at least possible that MRTK could by its nature be taken up and maintained or built upon by developers in the future, but for AltspaceVR deep losses are essentially guaranteed.

AltspaceVR's users are getting over a month to save their personal data, but what actually gets archived will only represent a sliver of what the platform was. Certain groups will host their send-offs–AltspaceVR Burning Man group BRCvr will have its final event this weekend–and after the end date, those spaces and experiences will essentially become inaccessible.

Looking at the calendar of meetups regularly held in AltspaceVR, many of which are centered around religion or spirituality, it's hard to imagine many of them moving on to other immersive platforms and remaining whole. One of the most interesting things about these platforms today is that they're quite differentiated by the kinds of people who use them. AltspaceVR's overall identity is different from that of VRChat, of Horizon Worlds, and so on. You don't need to look hard to find users remarking that AltspaceVR isn't as active as it once was, but that also means those who've stuck with it have more to lose.

Ultimately, the best thing Microsoft did for AltspaceVR by acquiring it in 2017 was simply give users more time with the platform. Now it has become another example of how being acquired by a giant company is far from a guarantee for platform longevity.

Microsoft will continue working on Mesh, we've been promised Xbox Game Pass on Quest, and I wouldn't take this as the final nail in the HoloLens coffin just yet, but I find myself agreeing with Antony Vitillo: this amounts to a retreat from XR. I got pushback last year when I suggested that Microsoft's pitch for acquiring Activision Blizzard didn't make much sense as a metaverse play, but pulling back from XR so hard in these layoffs really makes that feel like it was just buzzword-slinging without a unifying plan behind it.

Meta, Trump, and trust

The news broke Wednesday evening as I was working on the section above: Meta has decided it will end the Facebook and Instagram suspensions of former president Donald Trump that were imposed after the January 6th, 2021 insurrection. Meta reached the decision independent of its associated Oversight Board, which followed the announcement with a largely neutral statement on the matter. The Board called on the company to provide more info on its new crisis policy protocol while also saying the steps Meta has taken over the past two years are "important" moving forward.

Why mention it in this newsletter? As far as Meta's reputation goes, this might be the biggest decision it has made since the rebranding, one that I doubt will win it much goodwill when it comes to promises of a welcoming and safe metaverse.

I don't mean to say this necessarily outweighs other recent developments, including Meta's stock plunges, its round of mass layoffs, and the self-inflicted doubts raised around the company's readiness for its new direction. Here's the thing, though: if Trump chooses to ditch Truth Social and embraces advertising with Meta and/or returning to anything close to his noxious personal use of those platforms before, it almost doesn't matter what Meta's moderation response is. It's damage done, guaranteed.

For people who bring their lingering concerns about the company's past missteps–Cambridge Analytica, the handling of Myanmar, and the like–to assessing whether or not they can trust Meta with stewardship of what it sees as the future of the internet, the Trump suspension was a counterargument. However large a part platforms like Facebook played in enabling the violence on January 6th, the suspension was a step in a better direction. So long as the question of whether it'd be permanent remained (even if most wagered Trump would be let back on eventually), it was a move that could be held up as an example of Meta doing the right thing in response to violence, an instance where the company finally drew a line in the sand. In the process, it gave some small relief to people who'd been pointing out Trump essentially had free reign to whip up hate against marginalized people and political rivals on those platforms for years.

Now we might be in for a repeat, albeit with new "guardrails" in place. The language used by Meta's Nick Clegg in the announcement doesn't give me much faith that this time around will be all that different.

There is a significant debate about how social media companies should approach content posted on their platforms. Many people believe that companies like Meta should remove much more content than we currently do. Others argue that our current policies already make us overbearing censors. The fact is people will always say all kinds of things on the internet. We default to letting people speak, even when what they have to say is distasteful or factually wrong. Democracy is messy and people should be able to make their voices heard. We believe it is both necessary and possible to draw a line between content that is harmful and should be removed, and content that, however distasteful or inaccurate, is part of the rough and tumble of life in a free society.

Anybody nodding along with Clegg's "people will always say all kinds of things on the internet" defense here is being duped. It's hot air that might have passed for a sober assessment of how the worst parts of human nature can manifest online several years ago, but now it's worthless. There was no denying a link between the festering online abuse and ensuing real world actions once it culminated in Trump's show of praise for those who stormed the capitol that day two years ago. It stood as proof that shrugging off earlier offenses as "part of the rough and tumble of life in a free society" had been horribly irresponsible.

It took no time at all for people to see this suspension repeal as a deal too good for Trump or Meta to pass up. With the ability to reach tens of millions through those platforms, it seems practically guaranteed that the ad dollars will soon flow in hopes of boosting Trump's 2024 campaign prospects. Looking beyond that, this is one more reason–a huge one–for anyone who has refrained from hopping onboard with Meta's immersive products because of its approach to safety on social media to continue staying away.

Bicycle for the mind or phone for the face?

This week's dose of Apple headset reporting from Mark Gurman, an infodump on the user experience and content the device is expected to offer, is a compelling read. The details in the piece go a long way toward tying together some previously reported features and ideas into a whole that sounds more like a product that could be spared further delays.

That doesn't mean it sounds like a revolution for headsets, however. Separate from the hardware swings it's taking, Apple might be headed toward too-familiar territory with software.

Personally, I'm finding it hard to feel all that excited for the interface being described and apprehensive about the input method Apple has reportedly chosen. A lot has been made of the headset's interface being "nearly identical to that of the iPhone and iPad," a grid of icons to be controlled with eye- and hand-tracked gestures. This frankly doesn't sound all that dissimilar from the menus and controller-free interfaces found in other headsets. When I think about how much better those experiences would need to be for them to feel anywhere close to the ease and reliability of using an iPhone, it doesn't strike me like a gap Apple is guaranteed to cross.

If we're just talking about menu design, one of the major strengths of the iOS interface is that it makes a lot of information glanceable, great for taking in little snippets between other tasks. That's also been pitched as a major direction for AR interfaces to go, but I'm having a hard time coming up with a reason why someone would pin a stock ticker to the home screen of a headset they'll need to slip over their eyes and equip a 2-hour battery pack for. It feels to me like solving a problem that other Apple devices have already tackled, and that the energy would be better spent designing such that the headset makes using other devices easy in a pinch (unlike all the times I've struggled to peek at my phone using other headsets).

An aside: as conceptually slick as I find the idea of using a mixed reality headset to turn surfaces into touch screens, which has floated around for a while, just imagine telling someone the main appeal of a headset is you can pretend you're using an already portable phone or tablet. How much better does that experience need to be to justify the expense and wearing the device?

As for the immersive video content in the works from companies like Disney and the promise of realistic, 1-on-1 conferencing? There's no doubt that a lot of time, artistry, and money can produce work that'll out-do the 360 video content companies tried to build headset ecosystems around a few years back, but good luck making a sustainable pipeline for that stuff supported by a headset that most people can't afford. I have a hunch about what Apple's approach to conferencing could be, and let's say it ends up being the headset's shining feature–it'll still be a communication feature that only pairs of headset owners will benefit from regularly.

With Gurman adding that Apple's next headset after this might cost around $1,500, it's also worth reminding ourselves that some of what could set this first device apart may not be supported by its more affordable followup.

More news:

• Niantic and partner developer Hyp Games launched NBA All-World on Tuesday. Players of previous Niantic games like Ingress and Pokemon Go will find plenty of mechanical similarities, but All-World is also leaning deep into basketball culture for what's made to be an accessible and fairly casual game. In a preview event, Senior Producer Marcus Matthews told Virtual Vector that Niantic is "aggressively looking at camera-based gameplay and interactions for the game's future. [Official site]
• Two pieces of Quest 2 update news: the version 49 update rolling adds new Home environments (including a welcome departure from the norm in Abstraction, a distinctive non-realistic setting), a do not disturb feature, and more parental control options. For developers, Meta posted an overview of improvements to hand tracking delivered in the system's 2.1 upgrade. [Official v49 blog, official hand tracking 2.1 blog]
• Among Us VR crossed the 1,000,000 units sold mark as of this week, just over two months since its release. Schell Games and Innersloth shared some additional stats with the milestone announcement–at an average of 44,000 matches per day, Among Us has to be up there in terms of VR game popularity at the moment. [Official blog post]
• Gorilla Tag probably has those astronauts beat, though. Developer Another Axiom says the game has brought in over $26 million through in-app purchases to-date and achieved a peak monthly active user count of 2.3 million. [Rachel Kaser / VentureBeat]
• Rec Room announced that work is under way on full-body avatars for the platform. That'd be a big shift, but the company is promising two things upfront while also sharing work on the avatars early: the choice to use the new model will be left to users, and existing avatar cosmetic items will be supported by full-body avatars on release. [Official blog post]
• Highly recommend this piece on VR games making the leap across PlayStation VR generations. Great tidbits on the business of publishing for PS VR and on uses of the new headset's features, like Enhance Games adding eye-tracking activation for Tetris Effect's "Zone" mechanic. [Alan Wen / GamesIndustry.biz]
• Dreamscape Learn, an offshoot edtech venture born of collaboration between Arizona State University and Dreamscape Immersive, raised a $20 million Series A round. [Jeff Gifford / AZInno]
• VR corporate training company Gemba closed an $18 million Series A round led by Parkway Venture Capital, valuing it at $60 million. [Scott Hayden / Road to VR]
• L'oréal and The VR Fund are investing in Digital Village, an upstart "metaverse-as-a-service" platform focused on beauty and fashion. [Myrto Katsikopoulou / designboom]
• TRIPP announced a new partnership and pre-seed investment in Equa Health, makers of a mindfulness app that began as a project at Carnegie Mellon's Health and Human Performance Lab. [Jessica Hagen / Mobi Health News]