So I suggest you read my review of the original.

Seriously, there isn't much else to say here. The story is a jumble of ethereal nonsense. The enemies are defeated by rather dull button-mashing. And collecting all the collectables doesn't really do anything. It is gorgeous, and beautifully animated. If you're happy with an expansion pack for the first game, you'll be happy with this.

The puzzles are a little repetitive - but they make good use of the VR system; you'll often use your hands or have to peer behind something.

It's fairly gentle and - although the enemies can be a little frustrating - there are plenty of tutorials. You'll need to remove your helmet to watch them though!

In short, I constantly felt like I was working rather than working out.

If you like that sort of game mechanic; I'm happy for you. But it just turned me off the game so much that I never completed it.

A few years later, I got the Meta Quest 2 VR Headset. Most of the games on it are pretty crappy. Nintendo Wii level graphics, screaming kids on the online experiences, and pathetic battery life. There are a few charming experiences, but it mostly sucks.

Except for Beat Saber.

I think Beat Saber might be my personal zenith of gaming. There are no complex instructions - you slice the blocks in the indicated direction. That's it. Here's me playing a level (with my microphone muted so you can't hear my huffing and puffing).

There are no power-ups to help you cheat your way through the levels. No boss fights. No collecting or spending coins. The only decisions you're ever asked to make are "what song would you like?" and "how difficult do you want this to be?" Much like the fabled L-Game, it is the distillation of ludic perfection.

Best of all, your only opponent is yourself.

As I've previously noted, most games aren't about you getting better at the game; they're about you getting better equipment. Beat Saber is the opposite. You have to physically practice in order to complete a level.

Note - you don't have to "beat" levels in order to progress. This isn't one of those games which holds content back if you can't complete the earlier levels. If you want to skip a song, or try something harder or easier, you can pick whatever you like.

In does have in-app purchases. Far from being the sort of loot-box bullshit most games are infested with, these are brutally honest. You can buy an album of songs for between £10 - £16. If you try to buy a single song, it will warn you that it is probably cheaper to buy the multipack. If you are happy with the base songs, it won't push the premium ones on you.

And, yes, there is online competitive play if you really want to test your mettle against people younger and fitter than you. But why bother? What good does it do you to know there's some kid in Seoul who can dedicate 20 hours a day to practicing? It doesn't.

I don't know if it is making me fitter. I'm certainly sweating more. And I don't know if I'll continue playing it. But, as long as it doesn't change its basic premise, I'm finding it delightful.

You can get 25% off Beat Saber using my referral code.

Labyrinth deLux is brilliant. The puzzle is simple enough - point lasers at mirrors, then align mirrors until they point at the target. You've almost certainly played a 2D version of this.

But it has a mind-bending 3D layout which requires you to continually walk on the ceiling to adjust your perspective. The UI is, thankfully, not chunder-inducing. You point and click at a surface and then smoothly float and reorient to it.

The plot is a bit silly - your spaceship crashes and you have a mysterious destiny or some nonsense. But the voice acting is good and you can ignore the story without consequence.

Graphics are lo-fi charming, which helps prevent the usual VR weirdness. Excessive graphics quality just shines a light on how bad the Meta Quest 2 is. But the Minecraft style helps keep the FPS up.

There are 16 levels of increasing difficulty - which took me about 3½ hours to complete:

At £6, it's probably one of the cheapest games on Oculus - and excellent value for money.

There is very little "game" here. It's barely an interactive movie. Walk forward until you step on a trigger, watch a very slow cut scene, wave your arms until something happens, repeat a few times, roll credits. That's it. There's nothing to explore, there are no choices to make, and no puzzles to solve.

Parts of the game are gorgeous. Up close, the characters have amazing textures and animations. The caves are beautifully rendered. Even the Rancor monster is a treat.

On the Quest 2, it's about PS4 levels of graphics - occasionally jerky animation and dropped frames not withstanding - it is quite spectacular.

And then it all falls apart. It might be hard to tell from this shot, but the background is frequently just a static 2D image. It looks like a cheap green-screen effect from a 90's movie.

The plot is pretty good - Vader wants to use a magic crystal to bring Padmé back to life - but your inclusion in it makes no sense. You have magic blood? And Vader trains you? But then fails to kill you? Fine, whatever. I get to use The Force® and a Light Sabre™ right?

Well, ish. The Force is pretty hard to control - vaguely point at something and squeeze the trigger, then shake your hand. There's no real control, you can't easily move things or throw rocks at enemies. It all feels a bit hollow. The Light Sabre is slightly more fun - but it's pretty much Beat Sabre. Move it where you're told to, wiggle it near an enemy and slice them. That's it. There's zero skill involved. Which is fine, because it's impossible to die in the game.

Which, as a tech demo wouldn't be so bad. But Disney have the audacity to split this into three games at £8 each. You'll be able to complete them in under a couple of hours. Which, coincidentally, is about as long as your battery will last.

I is stunning having Vader loom over you in VR. And it is fun to wave a Light Sabre in his general direction. But this is just a lazy game. The cut scenes drag on as if to convince you that you haven't overpaid for a short and vapid experience. Endless rounds of Storm Troopers© attack and you just fend them off by waving your hands.

Considering the price, I was expecting something more. Games like Red Matter show how you can do interesting puzzles and stories, even within a linear framework. But Vader Immortal is an on-rails experience which fails to satisfy.

If your friend buys a 4K laser projector, you can immediately understand the appeal of the massive screen. Even if you only see the photos of it on Facebook, you get what the experience is like.

Games are different. While having a parasocial relationship with a Twitch gamer may be fun, it isn't a particularly good demonstration of what playing a game is actually like.

Back in the days before Internet connected games consoles, we had to rely on demo games set up in shops. Your local video game emporium would have a console and two hardwired gamepads set up - along with a demo cartridge of whatever the Next Big Game was.

Something like this:

Back in the day, those controllers were smeared with the grease - and worse - of a thousand teenage hands. We played until we were thrown off and then ate Sbarro pizza without washing our hands. Grim. But these were the days before hand sanitiser was de rigueur.

How can you reproduce that visceral excitement with VR?

A few years ago, I got to demo the a prototype VR headset at a conference. I queued up behind a dozen people and patiently waited my turn. I eagerly grabbed the proffered headset with both hands and jammed my face into it.

You know that feeling when you go to a public toilet and the seat is still warm from the last customer...?

As well as having to tighten the headset, adjust the eye separation, and make sure the lenses are clean - you have to make sure the unit is wiped down. No, really wiped down. Like with proper cleaning fluid.

I refer you to this delightful paper - "Bacterial Load of Virtual Reality Headsets" - where researchers swabbed headsets to see what dark germs they contained:

The results of these tests indicated that the Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from the headsets possessed high levels of antibiotic resistance.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3385956.3418958

The whole paper is worth a read - unless you're particularly squeamish.

VR is a lonely, plague-ridden experience.

The delete key was hammered mercilessly.

But... As all fans of Jasper Fforde know - there is a "Well of Lost Plots"; where rejected sentences live on in the eternal library...

As I was writing about the Metaverse, and as I love reading sci-fi, I decided to merge my interests!

So, here for posterity - and future inspiration - are some of my thoughts on how sci-fi influences the development of technology.

In "Magic Mirror: The Novel as a Software Development Platform", Mark Pesce eloquently argues that the developments we see in modern technology are predicted (if not determined) by science-fiction stories (Pesce, 1999). As a note of caution, Pesce's chosen examples all display the traits of survivorship bias. That is, there are an infinite number of "inventions" in sci-fi which have not come to pass. Given the long history of the genre, it is not surprising that some of its predictions have become reality. Nevertheless, it is important to remember the "anchoring" effect that mass media has on users' perceptions of what is possible with technology.

Technology companies frequently misappropriate terms from science fiction in order to make their products sound innovative and exciting (Newitz, 2021). The original Metaverse envisioned by Stephenson was a dystopian nightmare. It serves as an allegory for how the worst excesses of humanity can corrupt an environment. Similarly, the novel "Ready Player One" presents a world where VR has reduced the majority of humanity to serfdom (Rafif and Munjid, 2022). Given this, the author finds it inexplicable that Facebook chose to rebrand their company around the notion of the Metaverse. It is akin to a military power rebranding to be closer associated with The Empire from Star Wars, or a conglomerate explicitly citing the "Weyland-Yutani Corporation" from Alien as their inspiration.

Perhaps this behaviour should not be surprising as several major technology projects have been named after some of the most terrifying and dystopian fictional products - Skynet, Palantir, Panopticon to name but a few (Levendowski, 2022).

Future-gazing sometimes means imagining the worst-case scenarios which may be exploited by future adversaries. There is an inherent tension in this line of research. If the futurist publishes their research, a malicious user may take inspiration from their research. But if the futurist does not publish, people may not be able to defend themselves against novel attacks.

My final project was a 10,901 word epic about... The ✨Metaverse✨.

Have I gone a little bit peculiar? No. I don't think so. I was advised to pick a project which would sustain my interest for 6 months. So I chose something which would have lots of modern papers to read. And, more importantly, justify me buying a new toy to play with⁰!

I was delighted and overwhelmed that it received a score of 80% - taking my overall grade to a Distinction. Nice 😎

What was it about

Have you ever had a spreadsheet that was too large to fit on your monitor? Have you ever needed to explore a database full of complex relational material, but felt restricted by your screen's size?

That's a problem that we regularly face at work. So what's it like to view and manipulate data in the Metaverse?

Do people enjoy the experience? Do they find it useful? Does it cause them physical distress? What are their attitudes to the Metaverse in general? Is this the future?

The answers were: yes, maybe, not really, mixed to poor, possibly.

Read all about it

I've released the paper as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial.

You can read my dissertation online.

Or, you can download the following formats:

• ePub
• PDF

Or you can grab the MarkDown or HTML from my open source repository.

Publication?

I've no idea how I properly publish something like this. I guess I need a DOI and to submit it somewhere? If you have any experience in this area, please let me know.

Zuckerberg likes causing you pain.

So I purchased the cheapest upgrade strap I could find - £15 on special offer.

• It has a forehead cushion, which reduces pressure on the face.
• The tightness is adjustable with a dial - much easier to use and more precise than the tension straps on the original.
• The angle of the headset can be more easily adjusted.
• Back cushions - again, to reduce pressure.
• Top cushion - can you guess what that's for?

There are loads of straps out there - some with extra batteries, some with built-in cooling and defogging, some with extra headphones, and - of course - some with panda eyes.

On the one hand, it is nice there's a vibrant ecosystem of accessories. On the other hand, it would be nice if Facebook Meta did some testing with human users to make their devices comfortable.

Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars.

The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars.

Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress?

I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

How true is that! If you've worked on any project, you know how easy it is to get most of the way there. And how difficult it is to get all of the way there.

If you remember your classics, you'll be acquainted with one of Zeno's paradoxes - the Dichotomy. Briefly stated, in order to reach a goal, you have to first get halfway there. In order to get halfway there, you must first get a quarter of the way there. To get to a quarter, you need to get to an eighth. And so on ad infinitum. Thus, it is logically impossible to reach your destination.

I kinda feel like that with some of today's tech products.

It's relatively simple to get a microphone that understands 90% of what you say. But to get to the last 10% means making ever-smaller incremental improvements until, years later, it's still not really worth using.

We've had semi-autonomous vehicles for years. But they're still stuck in that last 90% trap. Manufacturers can keep throwing children in front of them to see if the cars know to brake - but the reliability is still suspect.

VR has been going since the 1960s. Meta have successfully strapped an Android phone to a pair of lenses and called it the Metaverse. That's 90% of the way there!

There's an old joke about Zeno's paradox:

A university organised a dance for its students. All the men were to line up on one wall of a dance hall, and an equal number of women were to line up on the opposite wall⁰. The men were told to walk towards the women at a pace of a half the distance separating them every minute.

The mathematicians started weeping - saying that they would never get to meet.

The physicists looked glum - knowing they would only get to meet when time equals infinity.

The engineering students broke into a smile - because within a few minutes they would be close enough for all practical purposes.

And it feels like that's where we are today. Alexa is mostly practical - but not as good as a human butler. Self-driving cars are mostly practical - as long as you're in an area where they've been adequately trained. The Metaverse mostly works - but no one really cares.

There's a distinction between working, working well enough, and working well.

But it gets exponentially harder with each step.

What's it like? Exactly the same as the first. Lots of creepy corridors, a range of puzzles, and a sedate-ish journey. You're exploring an abandoned space-station, looking for clues and trying to figure out what happened.

It's a completely linear journey, and consists of a series of locked-room puzzles. The developers have made sure not to repeat the same puzzles over and over. The story, such as it is, makes very little sense. But it has a great feel to it - you are always learning a little more about the characters off-stage.

There are a couple of things which I found annoying. The developers have introduced a fighting element to the game. It is totally unnecessary in my opinion. You're happily trying to solve a puzzle and then, without warning, there's a jump-scare and you have to point your gun at killer robots.

I get it. The Oculus store is populated with tons of these sorts of games because it feels very natural to point your hand at something and "shoot". I'm not a big fan of those games as they prioritise dexterity over imagination. It feels out of place to have a puzzler descend into "shoot-the-robots-before-they-shoot-you" territory. There's a setting to make combat easier, but it is still a chore.

There are one or two bugs. Try as I might, I couldn't adjust the walking speed - which meant it took a while to move around. A few graphical gliches caused objects to appear in the middle of the surfaces they were resting on. But over all it was a great experience.

Well, it was a short experience. Maybe I've been spoilt by all the multi-hour games you can get for a similar price. Puzzlers like the Broken Sword series are 5 - 8 hours long if you follow a walkthrough. I think Red Matter 2 took me under 5 hours for me to complete. Of course, the Meta Quest 2 needed to be charged 3 times while playing, so perhaps I ought to count that?

Anyway, Red Matter 2 is an excellent sequel.

You can get 25% off Red Matter 2 with my referral code

But Meta gave me £30 in credit for helping people fix their broken Quests. So I bought this much hyped puzzle game. And…

It's excellent! Much better than I expected.

As puzzler, it works really well. Lots of different types of puzzles, some of which make effective use of the VR environment. Items which need careful manipulation, 3D items which need examination, and wandering around a complex interactive world.

The voice acting is superb - although it is reminiscent of Portal's Cave Johnson.

It is spooky - without relying on jump-scares to frighten you. I was worried that I was going to have to get into a fight, or be chased, or have to beat the clock. But, instead, it's an atmospheric puzzler with some very mild peril to keep things entertaining.

The puzzles are moderately difficult - but I didn't have to resort to a walkthrough; they're all fairly logical. It was a great way to spend a couple of hours, and I'm eager for the sequel.

With a few caveats, of course

The first is that it is short. I guess I spent about 6 hours playing before I completed it. You can buy something like Skyrim second hand for the same price and get over a hundred hours of gameplay. Oculus games seem particularly expensive. Presumably because of the small audience.

Secondly, the manipulation can be really shonky. Picking up small items is finickity. Picking up large items sometimes causes unexpected movement in the environment. There are also some severe clipping issues. Your "hands" quite often pass through "solid" objects. As with all VR games, it is fully immersive until something breaks the illusion.

Thirdly, it's impossible to play for long periods of time. I had to stop a few times to recharge the headset. That's not the fault of this game - but of the Oculus. I can't remember the last time I played a PS4 game so long that the controller needed recharging.

Similarly, wearing a VR headset for more than an hour is just painful.

But these are minor nits. Yes, the end is slightly silly. But it is no worse than most modern movies.

I think I'd feel a bit cheated if I'd paid full price for it but, overall, it was a great experience.

I have an Oculus Quest 2 and wanted to pay money for an in-app purchase. This seems like a normal thing to do.

There's no way to add a credit card while your head is strapped to an overheating Android device. So I emerged into meatspace opened the Oculus app on my phone and typed in my credit card details.

I went through the usual dance of getting a 2FA code from my card provider and was successfully authorised. Nice!

I jacked back in to the Metaverse and clicked the "BUY NOW" button.

This was the message that greeted me:

What - and I say this with all due respect to Facebook's Meta's employees - the actual fuck is this half-baked bullshit?

Why would you let a user add a credit card if you know that you can't accept card payments? Why not warn the user? Why not do five minutes of user testing? Why?!

Anyway, I took off the helmet, found my phone, and added PayPal. The transaction then went through... On to the same card that was just refused!

Look, I don't claim to know the intricacies of all the payment systems in the world. But this just shows an aggressively hostile attitude to usability.

Why would you make it so hard for your potential customers to give you money? Don't you like money?

We all know the Metaverse is a joke. It's just a way for companies to hype up whatever they're already doing. But do they have to make their contempt for users so obvious?

OK, that's a lie. It's a pretty good tech demo of what one vision of the future could look like. But it is making a little bit of my brain itch.

What Government services⁰ could / should be run in the Metaverse?

Obviously, the answer is "none". Sure, you could create a virtual job centre, housing office, or DMV - but would you want to sit in a virtual waiting room for a couple of hours waiting for your name to be called? No. Even if the room was designed to look like a spaceship and the staffs' avatars were funky robots, it would be a pointless experience.

Or would it? One of the worst things about waiting on hold on the phone is the inability to see how fast a queue is moving. Would you like to see a visual representation of how long you had to wait? Would it calm and reassure you if your case-worker looked like a friendly muppet rather than a disembodied voice?

(There's a side issue of whether VR headsets are likely to be owned by people going to a job centre. At the moment, a Quest 2 is about the same sort of price as a mid-tier smartphone - so the equipment isn't out of reach for all but the richest. Many people at the job centre were previously in employment and would have had enough disposable income to buy one.)

The other things which tickles my fancy is the idea of using humans' natural spatial awareness and memory. One of the great things about browsing the Web in the Metaverse is the ability to physically place screens around you. No more alt-tabbing. Twitter is a small screen by your feet, the news is a big screen up and to the left, and so on. It quickly becomes really convenient to remember where tabs are in 3D space, rather than a one-dimensional browser tab bar.

If you're applying for a Government service, and need to provide evidence, would it be helpful for you to have all your files laid out in front of you?

Remember, the youth of today don't understand how file systems work. So having a large visualisation of their documents may be just what they need in order to present their evidence.

People who have played the amazing game "Papers Please" will recognise just how difficult it is to organise lots of documents on a small screen.

Is this sensible?

We shouldn't be recreating offline experiences - turning unlimited potential into a janky skeuomorph. Otherwise you end up with this abomination:

Homo Digitalis

@DigitalisHomo

This is how Walmart envisions Shopping in the #Metaverse.

Thoughts? 💭 pic.x.com/5l7khobse7

---

(OK, that's a 2017 tech demo rather than a real product)

Queuing up to speak to an advisor or handing over documentation are probably the stupidest examples I could come up with.

But there's something there.

It's very easy to go from filling in a paper form to filling in a web form.

And it's easy to go from an in-person chat to a typed-chat or video-chat.

So what are the governmenty things which can go from "X" to "X-but-in-the-Metaverse"?

A few ideas

Here are a few random ideas which might lend themselves to a VR experience. Remember - I am not a VR expert, nor do I have the ability to put any of these ideas into practice.

• Does an inspector need to visit an abattoir, farm, or factory? Would it be easier to ship a robot to the location and have it controlled by inspectors in a remote location?

• How do you test whether people know how to perform an emergency drill? Running an exercise in a Nuclear power station is expensive - so strap everyone in to a headset and have them play in a Digital Twin.

• UK driving tests already have a video-based hazard perception test. Could the entire driving test take place in VR?

• If you are offered council housing, would you like to be able to view the property in VR before deciding if you wanted to move?

• Would hustings and other public discussions benefit from being in the Metaverse? A remote video call is good - but being able to collaboratively look over a 3D model of proposed designs for a new shopping centre might be helpful.

• Should a jury in a trial use the Metaverse to visualise where a suspect was found? Or to see a visualisation of a reconstruction of a crime scene?

Some (most?) of these ideas are ridiculous. Some could be commonplace in the future. The Metaverse might explode like the Web or collapse like MySpace. But I think it's a good idea for any organisation to play with new technology and explore ideas. You never know what the future will bring.

I bought a Meta Quest 2 second hand from a child who was bored of it. The Quest was in excellent condition but, after a few days use, it became clear that the physical volume up key was broken. There are lots of tips and trips for fixing this. One of which is factory resetting. I turned off the Quest, held volume down and power, and got into the factory reset screen. In order to confirm the reset, you need to press... Volume up!

The Oculus chat team were very helpful. They took me through basic troubleshooting and agreed it sounded like it was broken. After confirming the headset serial number and some other details, they sent me an RMA label which was valid for the next 30 days.

I packaged the Quest headset in the original box, taped it up, slapped the label on it and dropped it at a local DHL point. 48 hours later and it was delivered to the Czech offices of Meta. 12 hours later I got confirmation Oculus had accepted it as defective and, a couple of hours later, I got a shipping confirmation for the replacement from Ireland. The replacement was due a week after I handed over the defective unit. I thought that was pretty good going!

Then, the next day, I got a delivery notification and the refurb was in my hands that afternoon.

So, I handed it over on Tuesday, got the replacement on Saturday. Outstanding service!

But it didn't work. I couldn't get through initial set up. It wouldn't connect to the controllers and couldn't pair with the app

After a few days of bashing my head against a wall, I finally found a solution.

Instructions

1. Download the latest firmware file
2. Rename it update.zip
3. Power off your Quest 2
4. Hold Volume - and power until the device boots into a bootloader screen
5. Using the Volume buttons, navigate to "Sideload Update" and then press power
6. Connect your Q2 to your PC via the USB-C cable. Use the cable which came with the Q2 if possible
7. Install the Android Debug Bridge (adb)
8. If you're on Windows, move update.zip to the same folder as your adb installation.
9. Run adb devices, you should see something like List of devices attached: 123456789 sideload
10. Run adb sideload update.zip
11. After a few minutes the file will have transferred and your Q2 will begin updating
12. Once updated, you should be able to pair the app with the handset

If that doesn't work, ask Meta for a refund of their crappy product!

The current range of VR headsets have to be strapped tight to your face. In order to prevent your eyes going out of alignment with the lenses or the focus suddenly changing, the mask clings tight to your face. Sure, it has a foam/rubber seal to soften the pain, but it can still be pretty uncomfortable.

Take a look at most promo photos of models wearing a VR headset - their mouths are open in delight and surprise, but they're rarely smiling.

Here's 100% human Mark Zuckberg showing off the next generation of headset. He's smiling, but look at how his dimples are squashed

It doesn't look comfortable, does it?

Perhaps I just have an oddly-shaped face and I ought to get cheek reduction surgery? Or plenty of Botox? I'm sure Mark's perfectly smooth and motionless face is the target demographic for these face-clamps. The technology will mature until it's no more uncomfortable than wearing a pairs of specs. But, for now, it is physically limiting in all sorts of weird ways.