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People complain that the quality of Zuckerberg's Horizon Worlds screenshots is not as good as the game of the 90s.

　　Mark Zuckerberg was teased again on Twitter. On Tuesday, he uploaded a screenshot of his avatar's selfie from Horizon Worlds on Facebook to celebrate the launch of Horizon Worlds in France and Spain. Zuckerberg said: "I look forward to seeing people explore and build immersive worlds here, and Horizon Worlds will soon be available in more countries.

　　Contrary to expectations, people didn't get excited with Zuckerberg's expansion of Horizon Worlds, but instead focused on this "uncanny valley" screenshot.

　　In this screenshot, Zuckerberg's avatar stands numbly in a barren landscape with a scaled-down version of the Eiffel Tower behind him and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

　　This screenshot shows such a bad picture, which has attracted European and American netizens to complain. Worse yet, with Meta spending $10 billion on the metaverse in 2021, why is the graphics quality on par with 1997's PC games?

　　The Metaverse of 2022,

　　Not as good as PC gaming from the 90s?

　　Zuckerberg's screenshots have gone viral on the European and American Internet, and have evolved into a large-scale nostalgic scene of a classic game.

　　Some people compared it with the simulated reality game "Second Life" released in 2007.

　　Some people complain that this screen looks like a PC game from 1997.

　　But some people think that the PC games of the 1990s are obviously overestimated. He thinks that the pictures of the PS1 in 1994 look much better than this Zuckerberg's metaverse.

　　Objectively speaking, it is not fair to judge Horizon Worlds with a screenshot. Zuckerberg himself has taken note of the rants, and on Friday he posted some new screenshots to Facebook and Instagram, showing a more lifelike version of himself and an ancient-looking plaza. "A major update to Horizon and avatar graphics is coming," he said, promising to share more details at an upcoming Connect conference.

　　For the previous screenshot, he admitted it wasn't flattering. “I know this photo I posted earlier this week was pretty basic — it was taken to celebrate the launch. The quality is much better in Horizon — even on the headset,” he said.

　　The Verge's editor offered his own take on his claims, arguing that he personally, if his company is already pouring billions of dollars into building a digital world, should avoid posting crude screenshots -- especially It just announced a $100 price increase on the Quest 2, making the experience of visiting Horizon Worlds more expensive.

　　Although it seems that this incident is just an oolong caused by Zuckerberg's random pictures, after Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021 and devoted itself to the metaverse, it is not rare for similar disputes to occur.

　　The Metaverse is the next generation of terminal platforms, and Meta will play a very important role in it, Zuckerberg has repeatedly touted this idea to people. However, the experience of its new products seems to be far from Zuckerberg's expectations, especially Horizon Worlds.

　　Horizon Worlds is a metaverse social platform launched by Meta in December 2021. In this virtual world, users can socialize with others, explore, and build anything from VR games to whole new worlds.

　　Despite Zuckerberg's constant display of various social interactions in Horizon Worlds, the Avatars in Horizon Worlds are far from being "realistic". For example, once he was talking to American astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson and couldn't get his avatar to make a convincing punch-bump.

　　Horizon Worlds is just a fuse. The further thinking brought by this incident is: Zuckerberg insisted on going his own way, he did not hesitate to fall out with Carmack and others to promote lightweight VR equipment, and fully invest in the development of the metaverse world. strategy, is there a problem?

　　Burned $16 billion in a year and a half

　　There is no doubt about Meta's determination to invest in the metaverse. Even though Meta's cash cow advertising business is affected by multiple factors such as Apple's privacy policy, the rise of Tiktok, and macroeconomic headwinds, Meta continues to increase its investment in the metaverse.

　　When asked how to allocate resources for Reality Labs and various other app products, Meta CFO Dave Wehner said: "In terms of investment, we focus on priority businesses, namely: Metaverse and Reality Labs, investment in these areas will continue, but Investments in other sectors may be more cautious.

　　Many people's investment in Metaverse is still stuck in the acquisition of Oculus for US$2 billion in 2014, but in fact, with the development of the VR business, the real money invested by Meta has already increased by an order of magnitude.

Image source: Visual China

　　According to the financial report, in 2021, Meta's virtual reality division Reality Labs will have a total revenue of about $2.3 billion and a net loss of nearly $10.2 billion; in the first half of 2022, the total revenue is only about $1.15 billion, but the net loss is as high as $5.77 billion.

　　In terms of spending, Meta has spent nearly $20 billion on the Metaverse over the past year and a half. But objectively speaking, although Meta has invested a lot of money in the metaverse business, it is not surprising that VR lags behind traditional game consoles and PC games in terms of picture quality, because rendering a virtual space that the human eye can see. The amount of graphics calculation is much larger than a 2D screen. Even so, Horizon Worlds isn't doing well, especially when Meta has spent tens of billions of dollars on Metaverse projects.

　　For this, John Carmack, the former CTO of Oculus, has publicly questioned many times: Meta invested heavily in the virtual reality laboratory (Reality Labs), and the return rate was much lower than expected.

　　On August 5, in a conversation with MIT AI researcher Lex Fridman, Carmack once again expressed his doubts: "I have a hard time understanding why I invested $10 billion, and I feel uncomfortable thinking about the money spent." He believes that Meta should be 2 to 4 times more efficient in VR research and development. And, he also questioned the price increase of Meta Quest 2.

　　This isn't the first time that Carmack has not been bullish on Meta's existing lines. At the Facebook Connect conference in October 2021, he expressed his disapproval of the technical architecture and ideas developed by Meta with the goal of realizing the metaverse.

　　He believes that building the metaverse infrastructure is not actually the best way to bring the metaverse to users, given the existing technology and supply chain level of GPU microarchitecture, merging shared networks, etc. "because I worry that we may spend Years and thousands of people, and what you end up with doesn't really contribute much to the way people actually use devices and hardware today."

　　Michael Abrash, the current chief scientist of Meta's virtual reality department, also expressed that in order for Meta to lead to a virtual reality that can be "real", there are still some technical problems to be solved, especially graphics computing power. After all, VR puts forward higher requirements for visual presentation.

　　Obviously, with the current level of computing power, Meta has invested heavily in the deployment of a large-scale metaverse platform at this stage, which is destined to be high investment and low return. In fact, at the current stage, games are still more realistic choices. At least from the perspective of user perception, "Beat Saber", "Minecraft VR" and "Superhot" can make them experience the charm of virtual reality.