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Meta might soon want everyone to hop into its playful virtual realms, but some users are set up for a shock.
In the service of pushing people to socialize in Horizon Worlds, the virtual social network has voice chat enabled by default. As anyone — particularly any woman — who’s played an online multiplayer game in the last decade can attest, chatting over live audio with people you don’t know is often a harrowing experience, and one that opens the floodgates for harassment and hate.
Nonetheless, Meta’s virtual social world doesn’t disable the voice chat options off the bat, a strange decision for a company that should be at least a little self-aware that its online platforms have, time and time again, been used to spread hate.
Now the company is adding Voice Mode, a new set of controls for voice chat that will be rolling out in the coming weeks. Voice chat is inexplicably still enabled by default but will soon come with some more granular options that let users opt in to disable audio from nearby strangers. There’s also a new option to “garble” strangers’ voices, turning them into “unintelligible, friendly sounds” (basically Meta’s version of Simlish).
Image Credits: Horizon Worlds
Image Credits: Horizon Worlds
With garbled voices on, avatars around you will be able to see that you can’t hear them via a mic icon with a strikethrough. You can raise a hand to your ear to hear what they have to say without needing to add them to your friends’ list, but really…why would you?
In March, Meta introduced a feature called “personal boundary” to keep a small 4-foot buffer of space between avatars in Horizon Worlds. The option, which was presumably implemented to address obvious concerns about spatial social networks and sexual harassment, is on by default for strangers.
During a short onboarding sequence, the platform also tells users that they can activate a “safe zone” setting to mute or block users at any time. The onboarding touches on the safe zone settings and various motion controls, but quickly funnels you into an immersive live voice chat setting with total strangers and leaves it up to the user to make that space feel safe for them.
Horizon Worlds maximizes interaction by default, which is really sort of puzzling given the inherent risk of setting people loose on even more immersive social platforms without thoroughly thinking through all the ways things might go wrong. And Meta is already growing its core metaverse product, expanding to users in the UK this week.
On the one hand it’s good that Meta is adding new voice controls into Horizon Worlds just like it’s good that they added a small spatial buffer between avatars. But it’s impossible not to wonder why these voice chat options weren’t baked in from the beginning — and why Horizon Worlds doesn’t default to the safest, most private settings across the board.
Ultimately, it’s a telling sign that with Horizon Worlds, Meta is yet again building the plane as it flies. What that will mean for users and society as a whole we’ll probably only learn once the virtual world is stuffed with passengers.
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蘋果於九月推出今年iPhone 14系列。（圖／彭博）
三星全球手機出貨量市佔持續穩居第一名冠軍寶座，不過，今年第三季度的最新數據統計，隨著蘋果iPhone 14 系列於9月推出上市後，為iPhone手機於全球的出貨量帶來提升的動能需求，相對地，蘋果與三星的手機市佔率差距，正更進一步縮小。
據調研機構 Omdia 發佈的最新調查報告，今年全球第三季的手機出貨量總計達3.012億支，跟今年第二季的手機出貨量來作比較，呈現小幅度的2.5％增長。不過，相比去年同期第三季度來說，今年手機全球市場的第三季出貨量卻是明顯地下滑、跌幅約7.6％。
今年全球第三季手機出貨量市占前十大排名。（圖翻攝Omdia）
就全球十大手機品牌的出貨量市佔排名榜單來看，今年第三季度的手機出貨量呈現衰退趨勢，首當其衝受影響最大的就是來自中國手機品牌，包括：小米、OPPO、vivo、傳音、收購手機Realme，出貨量都低於去年同期且均呈雙位數下滑。
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