Menlo Park, California - Meta/Facebook reportedly has enough patents in the pipe to saturate virtual reality with advertising, and the way those ads will be targeted sounds like something straight out of dystopian fiction.

Facebook's parent company, Meta, has patents on eye- and even posture-tracking technology that it will use to keep tabs on you in virtual reality, all targeting you with bespoke ads in the virtual realm, according to Financial Times.

The patents include tech that tracks your entire body, including position, facial expressions, eye movements, and even skin texture. Yikes.

But it doesn't stop there. There are also plans for virtual store experiences, product placement, and personalized ads, which all sounds much more worrying as soon as you take into account Meta's atrocious track record when it comes to caring for its users versus its profit margins.

Sure, better tracking of your whole body will likely lead to better VR games, but the many of the schemes reportedly in place really have less to do with the gaming experience than with ever more targeted advertising.

Then there's Facebook's late entry into the NFT game, as the "metaverses" are already shaping up to fleece users for huge sums of money, making them the perfect platform for any number of scams. A quick search on social media suggests virtual reality and NFTs are already being tightly linked, with "drop" events being pushed hard.

In short, the "metaverse" is well on its way to becoming an ad hellscape.