Meta buys Within, the studio behind VR fitness app Supernatural

https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-facebook-within-supernatural-acquisition-vr-studio/

by troydavis • 5 years ago

47 73 5 years ago

Le_Dook• 5 years ago

And the acquisitions begin. It's clear they're ready to throw big money at making this "metaverse" a thing. They're probably trying to prove to their investors that they're comitted

renewiltord• 5 years ago

The acquisitions have been going on for ages. BigBox VR. Sanzaru.

Guys, you’re just drawing correlations based on when you started paying attention. This is some serious cognitive bias going on.

aierou2• 5 years ago

I really wish we would stop giving so much influence to popular opinion on social media. As of late, it is very undiscerning. Voting websites especially are terrible at selecting for true value at scale.

BoumTAC2• 5 years ago

Do people really believe in fitness VR?

It feel like big over engineering BS, sport is one of such a basic thing.

Just buy a pair of shoes and go for a run. Buy a bike and go for a ride. Practice any sport in a club, take a gym membership and go deadlifting.

Why do they need to spend billion of dollars en VR development and then the user will have to spend hundred (thousand ?) of dollars to buy the VR headset, expensive computer just to have an activity that will be worse than a jog.

sva_• 5 years ago

Just buy a pair of shoes and go for a run. Buy a bike and go for a ride.

It depends where you live, sadly. In some places it can be downright dangerous to exercise outside.

Why do they need to spend billion of dollars en VR

It's a very fresh market and early investors will dominate it. They're probably just trying everything, because even if most of these investments fail, the few that work out may have enormous ROI, I think.

BoumTAC2• 5 years ago

It depends where you live, sadly. In some places it can be downright dangerous to exercise outside.

Where is it so dangerous(or really bad weather) than you can go for a run or to any gym/club ? (and add to that you can still do burpees or jump rope in an appartment)

I don't think they are developing VR fitness for people living in the middle of Sahara desert or Himalaya.

Alex3917• 5 years ago

Why do they need to spend billion of dollars en VR development and then the user will have to spend hundred (thousand ?) of dollars to buy the VR headset, expensive computer just to have an activity that will be worse than a jog.

For better or worse, most athletes even at the college level are more interested in doing entertaining workouts than actually getting better at their sports. And among non-athletes who just want to stay in shape, it's even worse.

I personally agree with you, but at the same time this kind of thing is clearly what people want and are willing to pay for.

gmays4• 5 years ago

Have you ever played Beat Saber? It's incredibly fun and a great workout. I didn't think much about VR until I had a kid. I couldn't exactly bring an infant to the gym or on a run. So I used the headset (Oculus Quest) during naps and was instantly hooked.

VR has evolved since then since now. For example, you can connect it to stationary bikes, rowing machines, etc., compete with others, adding a whole new dimension.

Video games and fitness are multi-hundred billion-dollar industries. So why not combine the two? As someone who used to be an avid gamer but no longer has the time, I would love a way to combine my favorite hobby (gaming) with fitness, especially during the winter or other times when exercising outside is inconvenient.

encoderer2• 5 years ago

It sounds fun and engaging but doesn’t the big headset impact your performance? I couldn’t imagine whaling on a bike or rower to my max ability with this sweaty headset experience. Am I missing something?

gpm• 5 years ago

Yes, I do, absolutely.

The activity is absolutely not worse than a jog. It's easier on my knees (less impact), more fun (as in I'll actually do it), uses more of my body (things like dodging objects requiring engaging a lot more muscles than the few ones I use over and over when biking or jogging), isn't hampered by the weather (as in I'll actually do it in the winter), and has the potential to be more social.

It's like sports in a lot of ways, except cheaper, easier to organize, and not requiring commuting to a shared facility to play them.

All your criticisms could apply to any exercise equipment, not just VR. Your gym membership almost certainly costs more than VR, and at least speaking for myself, I would make a lot less use out of it.

Kiro3• 5 years ago

For me, VR training has been life-changing so it has already proven its worth. Prefixing something that is really hard for me to do consistently with "just..." tells me we're very different persons.

VR training is amazing and after one year I'm still excited for every workout. The recent development in apps such as FitXR shows that we've just seen the start of this movement. In my opinion fitness is the killer app for VR.

mbrundle• 5 years ago

I think that this does fill a genuine gap for people who can’t get out easily, or who find standard exercise to be boring.

I can’t run, my knees are too bad. I can’t to the gym easily, since it’s hard to find someone to care for my young kids (my other half works crazy lawyer hours). But I can do an hour of exercise before the kids wake up, and the Quest 2 is much more enjoyable than doing a set of regular exercises (though I do mix those in too). I get a good workout from doing a mix of shadow boxing with FitXR (or the Thrill of the Fight if I have enough space), Beat Saber and Pistol Whip, and it barely feels like exercise while I’m doing it. It’s been particularly helpful during the recent lockdowns.

drvdevd3• 5 years ago

I go running and occasionally do push-ups inside and have an exercise bike. VR exercise really bridges the gap for me between not wanting to exercise or not having time, to feeling energized and/or it being a workout all it's own.

Mostly just a game of Pistol Whip but also the noted Supernatural app helps a lot. I also put on 360 1st person biking videos on YouTube while I ride my exercise bike and the whole range of options expands my desire to work out exponentially...

bko• 5 years ago

I haven't thought of that. What's your setup? Where are the videos? I saw a few on YT but was wondering if there's a different source or I'm not searching for the right thing

Does the sweat mess with the gear? How is the weight of the equipment?

blensor4• 5 years ago

If you want to push it a bit further you can mix in our game VRWorkout [1] [2] (the github version is a bit behind the AppLab version). It's a hand tracking based full body exercise game (crunches, pushups and even burpees included). I'd be happy if you join us in our weekly multiplayer workouts on Sunday

[1] https://quest.vrworkout.at [2] https://github.com/mgschwan/VRWorkout

hasbot• 5 years ago

Many people do. I'm not into fitness VR (yet), but I do like me some Zwift. In times of good weather I prefer outdoor riding but for those cold rainy days, I much prefer Zwift. Some people have given up on riding outdoors and exclusively Zwift.

blensor4• 5 years ago

The big benefits in my opinion are

It's a gateway "drug" into fitness. You just played a game, then you increased the intensity and did it a bit longer and suddenly you did a 30 minute cardio workout sweating like mad and most importantly the endorphins your body releases during exercise are real as well. So you are very likely to do it again, and again. And that's the important part, sticking with it.

The second thing is that in the headset time feels different so you are more likely to workout for longer than you would have while doing crunches staring at your living room wall.

And there are already several multiplayer experiences that can be counted as a workout (Blaston, FitXR, VZFit, Holodia and also our game VRWorkout) which adds a whole different level of exercising together.

Grimm12• 5 years ago

My quest 2 was like 299 and weighs 1lb and doesn't require a computer at all. The workouts especially HIIT and Boxing routines are more engaging to me in VR with my limited on hand equipment and I don't like being in a gym with other people, largely because I want to monopolize the equipment. I think you may be a bit outdated on what VR these days is like.

akeck2• 5 years ago

Has anyone done exercise with a VR headset? My runner friends go through earbuds ever other year, because the sweat destroys them.

gmays4• 5 years ago

Yeah, they have sweat guards you can add and the VR head pads are usually replacable.

hnra• 5 years ago

Tell your friends there are water resistant earbuds nowadays.

Raidion• 5 years ago

Water resistant earbuds still don't last more than a year. I've found ~$30 wired sweat proof headphones have the best value ratio IMO.

I actually could complain a crap ton about running setups. With the 'death' of mp3s and the rise of streaming services, it's becoming increasingly difficult to get music on your runs without some sort of phone/smart watch. I really miss the days where it was just an iPod shuffle. They have the Mighty, which is basically Spotify playlists in iPod shuffle form, but it's poorly made. Smart watches are cool, but needs Bluetooth headphones, which are less comfortable (heavier) than wired headphones and just add complications to something I'd rather keep simple.

Kiro3• 5 years ago

Every day. Sweating is not really a problem for me personally but I know people who buy straps that can handle sweat better.

blensor4• 5 years ago

Yes, for the past two years whil developing our fitness game VRWorkout [1]. I changed the headset once (from Quest 1 to Quest 2) not because it got damaged but because I needed it for development.

Grimm12• 5 years ago

I do a 30-40 minute HIIT or Boxing Routine 2-3 times a week in my quest 2. I keep meaning to get the silicone cover but it hasn't stopped me. The real issue is the foam does get sweaty and if I stop working out then decide I want to play a VR game that is not something you want to put back on after you've taken it off without drying it.

rocmcd• 5 years ago

That’s not my experience at all. I’ve been using the included wired Apple headphones every day for running (in the Texas heat, though only ~30 minutes) and I’m going on year 4 with the same pair.

That being said, there are many more contact points with a VR headset, so I could see it being a bigger issue. Plus many of them are padded, which will absorb sweat and are hard to clean without considerable effort.

echelon2• 5 years ago

The elephant in the room is VRChat.

The VRChat team must be salivating.

If they can't buy VRChat, they'll go after the furry VR app Neos.

astlouis44• 5 years ago

Either VRChat or RecRoom at this point.

celdon252• 5 years ago

VRChat is littered with UX and network bugs, design flaws, extreme performance issues on the client-side (poor user experience with anything less than a $2000 GPU), and apparent technical debt. High-severity bugs don't get patched for weeks. Major updates often go out on Friday nights, causing much disruption for anyone who had plans there on those nights. Seriously, who even releases on a schedule like that?

Not to mention its a security nightmare given that by default your client will run arbitrary GPU shader code that is uploaded by other users. People can and do take advantage of that, even as a full-time hobby.

The third-party developer community that claims to combat said security issues, really misses the mark. Their approach is to attempt to centralize the governance of all third-party tools (which are badly needed because VRChat proper fails to protect its users or provide a decent UX). Then they demonize virtually anyone who doesn't get on board with their ultimatums. They even require all users of their third-party tools who want any kind of technical assistance to submit detailed log files to a bot that will sound an alarm if that user uses an "unapproved" program. The criteria for this is, to put it simply, to flag anything that wasn't created by someone named on their whitelist of developers. And if you want to see salivation, there's plenty of it there. It's a spectacle just seeing people jump on these users like dogs, quite rudely at times, for daring to download something that the gestapo didn't approve of. For a community that claims to be about creativity, they do a poor job of fostering it.

Anyone who wants to have an entrepreneurial spirit in the development of such tools better have some kind of copy-protection as the tools tend to only be implemented in the form of distributed binaries that tend to require no server, or a microservice at the most. Problem is, the same group mentioned above is requiring that developers on its whitelist implement process-wide hooks that will break the copy-protection but nothing else. All in the name of keeping the children safe, I shit you not, but what it's really about is control. A determined hacker can easily defeat this measure by distributing a forked version of the mod loader with their own tools. Here's the kicker: Apparently this was all the result of some kind of back-room deal between the developer cartel and VRChat's admins, the timing of which was conspicuously not long before their $80M Series D round.

Timeline of events

March 30: VRChat does a large ban wave of apparently as many mod creators as they can find, by cross-referencing social media and Github names of developers of third-party tools with their own database of users. VRChat demands to the developers to take down their Github repositories if they wish to be unbanned and to get connected back with their VR social life.

March 31: VRChat "admits a misstep". The accounts get unbanned, the developers may put their repositories back online, but now they "intend to start a dialogue" with said developers. https://web.archive.org/web/20210401015645/https://twitter.c... - In the meantime however, the developers are not distributing their software for the time being.

April 8: The list of whitelisted mods completes an overhaul, basically an audit, then distribution opens back up. Additionally on this date, the modding cartel says they won't be sharing any details with the public about the subject-matter of the discussions with the VRChat admins.

April 24: A rogue developer ragequits the community and pushes an update to their software that amounts to prankware. Letting no crisis go to waste, the modding cartel writes a 250 word announcement to signal boost this incident, even archiving the link to the commit so they can show you how much you are at risk if you don't only install what they say you can install.

June 16: MelonLoader 0.4.0 is released, and many of the tools on the whitelist are simultaneously released with 0.4.0. They also spill the news on this very day, that it is no longer backwards compatible with the previous version of the loader. So any developers who weren't colluding with the group were given no time to decide if it was a good idea to switch to 0.4.0. They weren't really given a real choice as the software became effectively unusable without adopting this version. Conspicuously absent from this announcement was the additional security measures I mentioned above, to prevent copy-protection. You'd think it would be a good opportunity to announce the supposed safety measures they implemented, but instead it seemed they were trying to avoid discussing that at first for whatever reason.

June 28 (just 12 days later): VRChat raises $80M Series D. A major focus of this fundraising round relates to the implementation of a creator economy.

A Machiavellian scheme to exert control under dubious pretenses is not the foundation of creativity. The above scheme did nothing substantial to mitigate the risks of piracy in the context of such a planned market. I'm not sure if a VC would have been wise to it though as it looks good enough on paper to someone who doesn't truly understand the ecosystem or the security factors involved.

This to me is solid evidence that VRChat as a company likely has a top-level strategy of putting lipstick on the pig rather than building a good product. Therefore, VRChat is a toxic, toxic, poison pill, and Facebook would be wise to take notice of this and instead compete with them head on. Otherwise it would be a missed opportunity to break the stockholm syndrome that is currently widespread in its future target audience.

echelon2• 5 years ago

This is fascinating. Thank you!

Is the VRChat dev community angry? Would they consider moving to Neos or another platform?

Duralias• 5 years ago

What does Facebook really gain from buying them?

Facebook is making their own social vr platform, why would they want a separate platform, they cannot make use of the tech and the player base is not large enough to matter.

Not to mention that they would be forced to check every single uploaded piece of content that has ever been uploaded for copyright as they would quickly be hit for those things after being acquired

unclebucknasty4• 5 years ago

Really can't wrap my mind around how everyone just goes along with FB. There's a lot of hand-wringing and exclaiming but, at end of day, it's business as usual. Consumers and investors never punish the company in a meaningfully lasting way.

With existing products built on network effects, I can at least see the rationale: where else can you go where everyone else is at scale? But, for new product categories like this, why would anyone follow them? I understand they have advantages there, based on their existing properties, but it's still an opportunity to say "hell no" to FB.

In particular, with this product: the idea that we are to spend increasingly more time in a simulated universe is dystopic enough. But, one controlled by a man who has proven himself time and again to be immoral at best and sociopathically evil at worst? I mean we're really just gonna' slow walk ourselves into this sci-fi movie?

dontcare007• 5 years ago

Yep, to most people, comfort trumps principles.

azangru• 5 years ago

But, one controlled by a man who has proven himself time and again to be immoral at best and sociopathically evil at worst?

I don't understand this sentiment. Why do we need to care how moral the man at the helm is? A leader is temporary: today's leader can be immoral, while tomorrow's leader can be moral. Or vice versa. Or a leader can be moral in such a way that you would wish he wasn't. If end users can exercise their moral choices themselves, if they can refrain from lying, or bullying, or bragging, or trolling, then so much the better. If they can't, well, then we are screwed either way.

unclebucknasty4• 5 years ago

Why do we need to care how moral the man at the helm is? A leader is temporary

It's interesting that you raise that question in the FB context, because Zuckerberg has very specifically structured his company such that this isn't the case. He can't be removed.

More broadly, we should care because such leaders accrue outsized power and can thus have outsized influence/impact on large numbers of people.

If end users can exercise their moral choices themselves,

End users don't always have the info they need to choose not to participate in immoral schemes or to know that they are victims of the same.

a leader can be moral in such a way that you would wish he wasn't

That argument vaguely evokes nihilism. Societies organize themselves around generally accepted moral principles, many of which are codified. Largely, we can quantify morality.

tchalla• 5 years ago

Really can't wrap my mind around how everyone just goes along with FB.

It's the same way people have gone along with 100s of acquisitions from Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036073

readflaggedcomm2• 5 years ago

Facebook doing Second Life over again was predicted when they started VR, it just doesn't seem like that big of a change to me.

But I've already made up my mind on it, and I can assure you not everyone goes along with Facebook.

kerng• 5 years ago

Antimeta is gonna be a thing. I think that things like SL, Sandbox and Decentraland have a better chance of succeeding in continuing building an open metaverse.

Maybe we need something like an http/html standard for the metaverse?

Heck, even commercial offerings built on top of Ethereum sounds much better then built on top of Facebook.

To me it's like Microsoft in the 90s trying to claim they can build a better proprietary Internet... In that sense its actually pretty scary, so let's hope Zuckerberg and his unethical leadership isn't the one to succeed since given past track record its not gonna be pretty.

aierou2• 5 years ago

Personally, I'm much more interested in technological advancement than paying mind to the plodding conservative narrative from media demagogues.

unclebucknasty4• 5 years ago

You see all of the complaints about Facebook, including those launched by whistleblowers, as simply part of an illegitimate "conservative media narrative"?

farias02• 5 years ago

Who goes along with Facebook? Most tech-enthusiasts I know make a point about not using anything Facebook (Whatsapp notwithstanding). It's just that most people don't care that much about tech-related ideologies, the same way most people don't care about animal rights, or the environment. TL;DR: We have to pick our fights.

unclebucknasty4• 5 years ago

Sure, but many of these issues have very little to do with tech itself (though they happen to be tech-powered). Breach of trust, privacy violations, disinformation propagation for financial gain, radicalization, instigation of anxiety and depression (in teens especially), etc.

Are you saying that the "masses" lump all of these social effects into esoteric "tech issues" since they are enabled by tech?

rvz• 5 years ago

Would you already look at that. Meta is off to the races with acquisitions in VR studios for building an Apple Fitness+ competitor for the metaverse.

So what are you going to do about it to compete or stop them?

Maybe Peloton is next?

uptown2• 5 years ago

Which workplace video conferencing app does Facebook acquire? Zoom? Citrix?

jpgvm• 5 years ago

Zoom is massively overvalued and technology wise doesn't have much to stand on. Why wouldn't they just develop their own as Google did? These days video codecs and special sauce for high scalability calls is (relatively) well understood.

If you were going to buy something Citrix is probably the most cost effective but I doubt you are getting much there either other than existing contracts. There is a good reason Zoom was able to take so much market share from Citrix in the first place.

alexeldeib• 5 years ago

Messenger has video, and given FB workplace I have to imagine that already is their competitor in some form. Also the portal thing.

uptown2• 5 years ago

They'll want business users and to eliminate an alternative platform at the same time. Buying something like Citrix or Zoom hands them an installed base which they can feed into using their Metaverse platform without needing to convince business users that Facebook isn't just to be used for personal social media.

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

They're called "Meta" because their business is selling your metadata.

-- Polychrome @ Mastodon

https://cybre.space/@polychrome/107191019622441552

dymk2• 5 years ago

Facebook/Meta has never sold user data or user metadata

lostmsu2• 5 years ago

I believe this to be a misinterpretation of facts. If store A posts targeted FB ad, they will know when a person clicks it on FB to get to store A. Now store A knows user on their website meets targeting parameters.

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

What Facebook sells is targeted advertising.

Targeting is on the basis of metadata.

Hair-splitting this point is disengenuous.

newacc92• 5 years ago

Think of all the things you can do in the metaverse: fitness, watch sports, watch a movie, work-from-home, virtual cafe. I think they will buy all these entry-points and stitch them together, might just work.

rad_gruchalski• 5 years ago

Think about it: all these things can be done in real life.

void-pointer• 5 years ago

I genuinely feel like I’m losing my mind over this shit.

Just… Do people genuinely think that the average popular party girl/jock you knew in high school who loves going to parties and drinking, or playing sports/shopping with their friends is going to put on a bulky VR headset to do a cut-down, laggy, buggy, low res version of the same thing, getting VR sickness and a imprint on their face in the process?

The way I see it, it any of this meta verse shit is going to succeed with the masses—I.e., not geeks who are already into VR—it will need to:

* Be imperceptible or almost-imperceptible from real life in ALL senses (including things like touch, smell, proprioception etc.)

* Have completely seamless and bug-free Software. a bug on facebook is annoying, a bug in the Metaverse—depending on the hardware—could cause serious injury or death. This is literally a plot point in Hypospace Outlaw, which is arguably the first game about metaverses.

* Have hardware on the AR glasses side that is either fashionable enough for the masses to offset the bulkiness of a micro-computer on your face, or unnoticeable from regular, non-tech-filled glasses. Notice how the Apple Watch is not much larger than a regular one. (Indeed, there are regular watches larger than the Apple Watch—have a think about who wears them.)

* Even if you have perfect AR glasses, some people aren’t going to want to wear glasses, so you’ll need AR contacts. If regular-looking AR glasses would be a miniaturisation marvel, then AR contacts?!…

I feel like an old man yelling at clouds with this stuff, but I genuinely don’t see how it can become anything other than a gimmick.

Meta buys Within, the studio behind VR fitness app Supernatural

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