Fabian Giesen, a programmer who was contracted by Valve on two occasions to work on its AR, and later VR prototypes, has spoken out against the technology, saying that it’s “bad news.”
Giesen made those comments a while back through a Twitter conversion, and took to GitHub to explain what he meant when he said that. The email he sent to Valve to quit was titled “I Want Out.”
“With AR, there’s a variety of information display/visualization applications, all of which are at the very least interesting and could turn out to be tremendously empowering in various ways,” he began. “The endpoint of VR, on the other hand – all engineering practicalities of first aiming for a seemingly easier goal aside – seems to be fundamentally anti-social, completing the sad trajectory of entertainment moving further and further away from shared social experiences.
“So imagine a shared universe MMORPG, expressly operated by a company that *already knows all your friends*, that’s trying to maximize your engagement
(“hey, all your friends are playing right now, don’t you want to join too?”).
“Selling your attention to advertisers, and by the way, also building a detailed profile on everything you do so they can do all of this even better in the future. It’s okay, go on doing whatever you want, we just want to watch! (Through your own eyeballs if possible).”
What’s your take on the subject?
Thanks, Gamespot.
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