Bad VR trip; Chromeflex; Wordle obsession
Written with a fountain pen to honor a nation's early presidents
Bad VR Trip
You can't make something a thing. That's a rule. But Facebook and its partners won't stop trying and, sometimes, they fall flat on their faces.
The idea of the Metaverse, spawned in large part by Mark Zuckerberg and his insistence on changing the company name to Meta (and maybe blowing $500B on the effort), is that we will live, work, and play (at least part-time) in a virtual world accessed through his VR hardware (and other hardware and services). One study predicts 25% of us will spend an hour a day in the Metaverse by 2026, though this seems unlikely to me.
We do have some pretty decent hardware already, but mass VR gatherings and big shared experiences don't appear ready for prime time.
Last week, right after the Super Bowl, Meta held a special, not-quite-live Foo Fighters concert inside the company's very Version 1 metaverse environment Horizon Worlds. I've tried out this platform. It's fine, though not inspiring. In any case, the whole event went poorly. They couldn't accommodate all the people who wanted to virtually enter (isn't that the point of virtual space? It should be easy to let a million people in), and the concert was sort of pre-tapped and canned.
This was nothing like Ready Player One. More like Ready, play....um...
Back from the dead
Google is testing something called ChromeFlex, which is basically ChromeOS but for all your old laptops and desktops (Mac and Windows). I have literally stacks of old laptops that won't update (they barely run) but I wonder now if they'd run this stripped-down OS, which is mainly a portal to all your cloud-based GSuite apps (Mail, Docs, Drive) and files.
It's obviously not just for me, but for countless other people, small businesses, and schools that can't afford to upgrade to the latest new hardware. Or maybe their still relatively new PC can't handle Windows 11 (Yup, that's a thing). Basically, this is kind of a thumb-in-the-eye to Microsoft.
I might just give it a test run myself.
Wordle obsession
Yes, this is now the Wordle Newsletter. Not, really, but I, like most everyone I know am still fixated on the simple online game. So much so that now it's spawning other variants that take some interesting liberties with the core idea. So far, I've seen "Worldle" (yes, you read that right), which asks people to guess geographic location words. Another, called Poddle is to guess podcasts depicted in a blurry cover image.
It's all good fun, but this glut of brand hijacks and variations might soon put out the Wordle flame. Not that interest is waning. Every little change by new owners New York Times is being watched closely. They've been called out for accidentally losing Wordle streaks (before reinstating them), and now they've gone deeper into the game to make some substantive changes.
Last week, The New York Times removed words deemed offensive (good move) and Anglo-centric ones. The game did originate in the UK, after all, so there are some terms that simply escape the U.S. audience.
I think this is a shame. I like having to stretch myself to find if it was a word less common to people in Poughkeepsie than Bath (I also work with a lot of Londoners, so maybe I have a leg up).
In any case, nothing the NYT has done so far has ruined the game, so I think we're just GREAT.
P.S. Someone turned me on to Quordle. I'm currently cursing them.
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See you soon