Meta's latest metaverse ad is a cringey pastel nightmare

pcgamer.com:

Personally, I wouldn't open my 9-minute ad for the unproven technology I'd just lost $2.8 billion on(opens in new tab) with a reference to the Titanic, but I'm not Mark Zuckerberg. Meta's latest ad does just that, though, as part of a long segment where hosts Keke Palmer and Vishal Shah (Meta's 'VP of the metaverse') try to sell you on the metaverse's endless potential for creativity.

«Could I reconstruct the Titanic, sail it past an iceberg, and scream 'Not this time, sucker'?» Palmer asks, reading a list of quirky scenarios from a note card. «You can do a version of that now,» replies Shah, enigmatically. That's pretty much the tone of the whole video, which bills itself as the first episode of 'Metaverse 101' series, but doesn't explain much of anything at all.

The whole episode is aesthetically confounding. Shah and Palmer sit in a fake car and make forced banter as it winds its way through places that look like Second Life but populated exclusively by Apple Memojis. To be fair to them, both of the hosts seem fairly likeable, but there's only so much charisma you can exude when you have to act like a giant flamingo and some phantom table tennis rackets are presented as the vanguard of the next industrial revolution.

Shah does an admirable enough job of reciting his prepared answers to Palmer's prepared questions, but I still don't understand what makes this whole endeavour worth dropping billions of dollars on. When you dig into the details—such as they are—of what Shah is saying as he describes the metaverse («We're gonna be able to see things around us, we're gonna be able to touch things»), all he really seems to be describing is a VR interface for the internet we already have. Do we want that? Does that sound