>The story begins in a future world where global temperatures have risen so high that in most of the world it is unsafe to be outside without special cooling gear during daylight hours. In a desperate bid to preserve humanity and ease population burdens on Earth, the UN has initiated a "draft" for colonizing the nearby planets, where conditions are so horrific and primitive that the unwilling colonists have fallen prey to a form of escapism involving the use of an illegal drug (Can-D) in concert with "layouts." Layouts are physical props intended to simulate a sort of alternative reality where life is easier than either the grim existence of the colonists in their marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is prime vacation resort territory. The illegal drug Can-D allows people to "share" their experience of the "Perky Pat" (the name of the main female character in the simulated world) layouts. This "sharing" has caused a pseudo-religious cult or series of cults to grow up around the layouts and the use of the drug.
It doesn't have anything to offer. A world where all you can do is look and listen is of very little marginal interest to almost anyone. We all have televisions and stereos. I don't dream of having larger TVs and louder stereos.
It's a lot easier to have a shitty life online in VR than to have a shitty life in real life. In real life you can have a sandwich, and it's a richer, more fulfilling experience than anything VR has to offer.
It's gamers (and buzzword investors) who love VR, and they'll get bored with it. Not every game should be first person; it's kind of a local maxima and a contemporary rut.
> The vast majority of people in the world live shitty lives.
I'm not sure this is even close to true. How shitty your life is or is not is based on an individual's perception. You can have a person who should be happy - wealth, relationships, fame and are so miserable they nearly killing themselves daily with alcohol and other drugs. You can have a person, who by all abject means of judgement should be miserable, and has somehow found a way to be happy with their life.
> Metaverse doesn't seem so bad for some.
This is probably true, but the question is, will it really be all that different than real life anyway?
Honestly this is pretty akin to the "why do poor people have cellphones?" argument. We're way more likely to be able to give people Oculus Quest's then decent real estate or furnishings.
The Quest 2 is cheaper than the cheapest iPhone or the latest generation of game consoles, so probably quite a few people (if they had the inclination)
Welcome.tech | Sr Rails/Full Stack Engineer | Principal Rails/Full Stack Engineer | Full-Time | REMOTE (all TZs) -or- Santa Monica, California
We are https://welcome.tech, a group of Gen -/+1 immigrants creating a suite of products to help the newly immigrated backbone of America succeed. Our bread and butter is our POPDERcard banking Fintech Product (occasionally, we have hit the top 15 rankings in the iOS App Store under Finance), enabling the unempowered masses to access banking. But we have way more products we have been working on that create exciting network effects. We have a small, intimate, and highly accomplished four-person engineering team. We are looking to scale this team with other skilled, humble, and quirky engineers.
==Our Tech Stack==
-AWS
-Ruby on Rails
-React.js
-iOS/Android (Swift/Kotlin) apps using simple native wrappers
-Lots of Fintech integrations. Right now, we are building a bank from scratch.
To summarize, what https://welcome.tech does would be impossible without a TLDR; which is what this is. We are a group of Gen -/+1 immigrants creating a suite of products to help the newly immigrated backbone of America succeed. Our bread and butter is our POPDERcard banking Fintech Product (currently top 15 in the ios App Store under Finance), enabling the unempowered masses to access banking. But we have way more products we have been working on that create exciting network effects. Right now, we have a small intimate, and highly accomplished 5 person engineering team. We are looking to scale this team with other skilled, humble, and quirky engineers.
Our Tech Stack:
-AWS
-Ruby on Rails
-Vue.js (All of us came from React and we might switch back)
-ios/android apps using simple wrappers
-Lots of Fintech integrations. Right now, we are building a bank from scratch.
