BREAKING: "Spatial Computing" is still bullshit. Surprise.

I first encountered the term "spatial computing" in a Reddit thread on the topic of VR. My post touched on a theme which should be familiar to anyone who's read any of the other posts on this blog about the subejc: that VR is only good for qualitatively enhancing a limited subset of existing experiences, without enabling anything quantitatively new. In other words, it lacked a strong use case, and would never see widespread consumer adoption until that changed. To quote Palmer Luckey, "No existing or imminent VR hardware is good enough to go truly mainstream, even at a price of $0.00."

One VR defender fired right back, though, declaring my statement to be "simply not true," before going on to list of a bunch of qualitative enhancements to existing experiences like telepresence, social media, and spatial computing, which is defined as "human interaction with a machine in which the machine retains and manipulates referents to real objects and spaces." In VR, specifically, that equates to the use of physical actions in place of other input schemes, i.e. motion controls, which also didn't require VR, and which have stubbornly not replaced other input methods because motions controls suck.

This week in Facebook

It's been a while since last posted one of these.

I mean, with all the COVID-19 chaos currently sweeping the world, it's just been hard to get all that worked up about Facebook's essentially evil nature. It helps that they've had very few major screwups, lately; there have been no more Cambridge Analytica-style scandals, no more Congressional testimony, no major developments on the anti-trust front... It had been so quiet, in fact, that Facebook's image looked like it might be about to recover from years of terrible PR.

And then the Wall Street Journal came along, and reminded us just how awful Facebook actually is:

A Facebook team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company's algorithms weren't bringing people together. They were driving people apart. "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness," read a slide from a 2018 presentation. "If left unchecked," it warned, Facebook would feed users "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform." That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.

VICTORY!!! After waging a very noisy, one-sided war against Google, Valve, and gamers, Epic Games has quietly surrendered

What a difference a year and a half can make.

And, yes, it has been only that long since Epic Games announced the very first EGS-exclusive title: Supergiant's Hades, an early-access game that announced at the Game Awards in December of 2018, and released the same night. That was only a few months after Epic declared that Fortnite: Battle Royale for Android would be side-loadable only from their own digital distribution channel, rather than just making the game available on Google Play like every other developer with an Android app to flog.

Tim Sweeney's Epic Games would go on from there to declare themselves to be so deeply opposed, on principle, to everything about Valve Software's Steam service that they just had to launch a competing service... which offered absolutely nothing to consumers that Steam didn't, and was actually missing a whole bunch of stuff that Steam users were used to. No worries, though, because Tim Sweeney had a plan: to embrace exactly the same platform exclusivity deals that he'd once called evil, back when Microsoft and Sony were profiting from them, and not him.

The message from Epic to gamers was crystal clear: fuck you, pay me. And gamers got the message; they heard Epic loud and clear... and, en masse, gamers refused to pay.