Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.
But you don't need to put on VR helmet and you don't need a fibre and you don't need to ride a VR motorcycle to get to HN, but on the other hand, you can hang out in multiple bars simultaneously from a tiny, wireless multiverse terminal that you carry in your pocket everywhere. In many ways, we're far beyond the metaverse imagined in Snowcrash.
Remember to slow down when crossing sim boundaries. There's a big bump as the avatar is handed off from one simulator to another. Physics engine handoff is a tough problem.
I would like to try a virtual world with facial feature tracking, like the new Animojis on iPhone X. It would be interesting to play a multiplayer game where you communicate with voice, body language, and facial expressions.
A VR headset obscures the eyes, so you couldn't use a 3D camera. Maybe a combination of 3D tracking and sensors inside the headset.
Simple applications already exist; look at Rec Room for example. That's got voice, limited body language (mostly hands) and I think even simple facial expressions that it infers from... idk, something. Voice chat too.
Letting people use their devices without looking at or touching them would be a huge improvement over what we have now. Input especially is terrible, I'm typing this on a phone and a part of me hates every second of it. Someone, anyone, fix this crap!
Not really! Watts does something a lot closer to what you describe with "ConSensus" in Blindsight, and handles it deftly enough. I think it's more just that the idea of VR as virtual space was the dominant metaphor of its time, and contemporary fiction reflects that time every bit as much as Watts's ConSensus - thought-controlled wireless information access, rendering to the optic nerves - reflects its own.
I think the persistence of the older style has to do partly with the fact that we can't yet implement the newer one no matter how much more useful it would actually be, and partly with the fact that VR metaverses look really cool in demos.
I never got the value proposition of Second Life. It wasn't game-y enough to be a game and, for me at least, it didn't really add much over more "traditional" collaboration/communication/socialising methods like text and video chat, social networks, twitter etc.
The idea isn’t terrible, but the implementation had some horrific flaws, and Linden Labs became notorious for infuriating users.
SL might have taken off if both servers and clients were fully open-sourced, and LL had concentrated on building a global system for connecting open servers together.
I strongly suspect someone will rediscover the idea 5-10 years from now, do it properly, and replace today’s web.
Very likely, also happening in VR.
> and replace today’s web.
Not likely. It's just not going to happen. Pretty sure there have been multiple attempts at a 3d internet, but, nope.
They tried, but so far it has failed to catch on and i predict more of these projects will go abandoned , including second life's own experiment, Sansar. IF anything the side-detour in VR has stalled the progress in virtual worlds for a few years.
Another problem is underpowered laptops with intel HD graphics and tablets.
I don't think the idea of metaverse is going away per se, it's a freeing and creative experience . I do think the focus on VR has held it back for 2 years now.
Notice how all the sf implementations have a lightweight & fully immersive interface? You need tgat tech - and at a cheap commodity price - before you’ll see virtual worlds be a thing.
Until then you just have MMPOGs with some more creative options.
I dunno, ten years ago a lot of people were predicting that Second Life would be the Next Big Thing, and assuring me that I should really be buying up Second Life real estate with my hard-earned real-world money because soon it'd be worth a lot more.
Second Life has survived, but it certainly hasn't gone mainstream. It's just another weird corner of the internet with its own community, and good luck to 'em.