It must have seemed like a good idea. As a taster for a big announcement about Oculus VR on Wednesday, send Mark Zuckerberg on a little virtual reality trip, including a stop in Puerto Rico.
But the reviews are in - and they are not good.
The sight of Mr Zuckerberg using VR to survey the devastation of an island still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria may have been meant to convey Facebook's empathy with the victims.
The fact that he was there in the form of a cartoon seemed to many the perfect visual metaphor for the gulf in understanding between Silicon Valley and the real world.It looks like VR still isn't ready. Surprise!
Facebook, who own Oculus, are one of the industry leaders in VR hardware; with Facebook having a keen interest in making Social VR into a thing (even though it's not going to be a thing), one could be forgiven for assuming that this represents the cutting edge of Social VR:
Cutting edge, baby! Woo hoo!
Why Zuckerberg thought that virtually touring a disaster zone, using other people's suffering to showcase his social VR experiment, was a good idea, will forever remain a mystery. Why Zuckerberg thought that a social VR experience filled with painfully low-fi cartoon avatars would appeal to consumers, even without the disaster zone, is even more of a mystery. Seriously, why would anyone with even half a brain think that any part of this was a good idea?
Apart from Zuckerberg, natch, who clearly thought this was genius, and who still doesn't seem to understand how badly he's stepped in it.
"One of the most powerful features of VR is empathy. My goal here was to show how VR can raise awareness and help us see what's happening in different parts of the world. I also wanted to share the news of our partnership with the Red Cross to help with the recovery. Reading some of the comments, I realize this wasn't clear, and I'm sorry to anyone this offended."You should be sorry to everybody, then, Zuck. Because even those of us who weren't offended by your attempted exploitation of Puerto Ricans (which is already most of us, BTW) can still be offended by the fact that you seem to think we're stupid enough to be impressed by your lame-ass VR bullshit. Empathy, my ass.
You see, Zuck, in reality, VR's most powerful feature is actually the sense of presence that it gives to people who are experiencing it directly. This is why VR evangelists keep saying that it's critical to convince people to try the tech. There are times when looking at a thing through the aperture of a 1080p screen really can't convey the true sense of the scale of what you're looking at; VR, however, can, providing the sense of scale that images on a screen lack.
But that only works for people who are strapped into their own VR headsets; it doesn't work if you stick a carton avatar in front of the thing, and then display it on the same 1080p screen that had already proved inadequate for conveying the scale of, say, a fucking disaster zone, to the viewer. Touring a disaster zone might convey a sense of the scale of the disaster to people who are taking the virtual tour themselves... but that's not something you can share with someone who isn't "there," unless you lend them your VR headet so that they can take the tour, too.
With one small publicity stunt, Mark Zuckerberg has managed to make social VR look profoundly heartless, aesthetically ugly, and fundamentally limited and isolating, all at once. VR experiences aren't easy to share with others... and, thanks to this, the attempt to share them now looks a lot less appealing in every conceivable way. Clippy had lower hurdles to leap over than this PR disaster has now put in front of social VR.
Which was never going to become a thing anyway, but still.
GG, Mark Zuckerberg! GG.