This is just a wrapper around "an essay by venture capitalist and former Amazon executive Matthew Ball": https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse
I'd like to see the "metaverse" happen. So would many others. There's work going on in multiple directions. We're getting there technically. As a business, not so much.
There's Second Life, still plugging away. Content looks great, runs slow because the system is not parallel enough internally. Those guys need about a dozen really good C++ programmers and some people who know how to make distributed stuff that isn't web go fast. The original devs are long gone and the current ones are overwhelmed by the legacy code. Usage is up 5% or so since everybody had to shelter in place. About 55,000 concurrent users on a good day, comparable to GTA V Online. All in one persistent world built mostly by the users. Second Life is profitable but Linden Lab blew a lot of money on the CEO's pet project, Sansar, which flopped. A quick overview of SL by a user: [0]
There's a crowd of "blockchain" worlds - Decentraland, Sominum Space, Sandbox. They're about 80% land speculation and 20% virtual world. Mostly, I suspect, so that their internal currency is considered a "utility token" by the SEC, rather than an unregistered public offering.
Tim Sweeney, Epic's CEO, has been making "metaverse" noises since 2017. But, over the last three years, his vision has shrunk. Early plans read like Ready Player One. By this spring, it's only being able to teleport you and your friends from Minecraft to Fortnite as a group. He used to talk about an open metaverse where anyone could build. If someone did that, the margins would be like those of a hosting service.
The whole Improbable/Spatial OS thing seems to have gone bust. They built a back end for big virtual worlds with about $500M of VC money. (Softbank, who else? [1]) They were supposedly valued around $2BN at peak. It sort of works, but the terms are awful - you have to run on Google's cloud, under Google's thumb, at high pay per use rates. No major game company has taken that deal, and the three minor companies that did games for it went bust. 2019 revenue, $1.5M.
There were the "game level loaders" - you log in, you pick a game map, you play in a prebuilt virtual world. High Fidelity (went bust), Sansar (sold to somebody in Marin who buys distressed companies), and SineSpace (limping along, user count in 2 digits). All could be very pretty, but were not that compelling. You can't do much in there.
Headset VR, as John Carmack says, isn't going anywhere until the headgear gets down to swim goggle size. Even then, a sizable fraction of the population can't stand an immersive VR world where your sense of motion and the motion you're seeing are very different. There's a reason that the most successful VR game is Beat Saber, where the real and virtual worlds stay locked together while you slash at approaching objects. This is a big problem with getting to a Metaverse.
Facebook did Facebook Spaces, which flopped. Its replacement, Facebook Horizons, was supposed to have launched by now, but hasn't been mentioned in months.
Ball, the VC, claims Disney should be the power player in this, with games as extensions of the movie franchises. You can read his article series as to why. Movie franchise games have been successful, but they're usually tied closely to a canned story line, which is not the Metaverse.
So right now we don't quite have the technology and don't have a killer app, but what's out there is interesting and useful.
[0] https://youtu.be/H3Z49MOG_xU
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-09/softbank-...
The metaverse will not be AAA budget quality, anything of that caliber, such as Fortnite, can easily be scrapped off potentials. A metaverse is by definition community created content, most of it will be utter garbage.
VRChat exists. It doesn't look pretty, but it works.
Putting a bridge between Minecraft and Fortnite doesn't make a metaverse, it's just a bigger walled garden with a bridge.
There are currently three forks of High-Fidelity which I'll be keeping my eye on. I believe two of them have former/current High-Fidelity staff working on them. An interesting blog post about Vircadia, a FOSS-focused fork. [1] The blog also covers the other two forks. [2][3]
[1] https://ryanschultz.com/2020/04/03/the-project-athena-fork-o...
[2] https://ryanschultz.com/2019/11/17/tivoli-cloud-vr-a-brief-i...
[3] https://ryanschultz.com/2019/05/27/opensim-virtual-world-pro...
This is how Vader Immortal[0] felt to me. It’s an interactive experience rather than a game, and while the graphics are good it still seems like early days for the tech, but it’s so much more immersive than a 2D non-interactive film. The immersion is difficult to describe, but you get to do things like wander around your personal ship, talk to your droid assistant, and of course wield a lightsaber.
There’s three episodes, and I’ve only done the first so far but plan to complete the other two soon. I have no idea how long I spent in the first one, probably a little over an hour. They’re $10 each, which might seem on the steep side for something shorter than a movie, but there’s a little replayability (there’s lightsaber trainer to practice) and I’ll gladly replay the mission a couple times even though I expect the same story.
Second Life is funny - I commented to a friend the other day that the place seemed to get overrun by genitals (not my exact wording.... ROFL) and casinos. I actually worked for a company that got a bit into Second Life back in the day (we made an official port of Tringo to a TV set-top-box games service).
I got the sense that Second Life couldn’t outgrow prims. They were great when bandwidth was low, but game graphics just overtook Second Life and kept going. Content creation was really fun though, especially the collaborative aspect.
I haven’t checked it out in a few years actually. Impressive to hear it’s still going, though it’s a shame they couldn’t really jump into VR when the Oculus Rift came out. I vaguely remember something about a VR client, but can’t even recall if it was officially supported. I always remember wondering where they were and why they didn’t seem more prominent. It seemed like VR was what something like Second Life was waiting for, yet they never came to the party. I got Linden’s other experimental thing on Steam (Patterns) and then it disappeared before I got around to really trying it.
I’d add AltspaceVR, Bigscreen, VRChat and Rec Room to your list of what’s currently happening in ‘metaverse-like’ things. As a user I find AltspaceVR frustrating as I’m never quite sure when events are on in my local time-zone. Stuff ends up being on at odd hours and I never seem to catch it. Or something seems promising but then you realise most of the people there are kids and it’s off-putting. As for Bigscreen, it’s great for hanging out with friends occasionally. Never really got into VRChat much, but it seems very much ‘Second Life’ in a lot of ways. I haven’t tried ‘Rec Room’ myself but have heard complaints that it’s been overrun by kids.
The hardest thing though is finding friends that have VR headsets and that are willing to install any of these apps and go to the trouble of setting up accounts. In this sense I think Facebook Horizon will have an advantage over the others when it does finally become available (it’s not the only one that lets you use an existing account; I remember being able to use my Oculus account for one of the others but can’t remember which one off the top of my head).
I also still find that I feel an inertia to entering VR, despite owning an Oculus Quest and being really enthusiastic about it. It’s just easier to pick up my phone and play something on a whim. VR still requires more effort and I think it’s just the isolation from everything that makes it feel like that. Especially when you’re in a place with other people. It feels weird isolating yourself around everyone else, at least for me.
The system can't handle crowds. Second Life is divided into regions 256 meters on a side, and starts to slow down when more than about 40 users are in one region. Regions are usually capped somewhere below 60 users to keep performance acceptable. This is a big, big problem. Anything really good that draws a crowd slows down to an unusable level. On top of that, there's a huge transient when a new user enters a region, and all their asset info is copied into that region's server. For historical reasons, the region servers do a lot of bookkeeping that ought to be handled by per-user server processes, and so, as users move around, they carry with them excess baggage which must be pulled out of the state of one region, sent across the network in the data center, and inserted into the state of the new region.
Sometimes transfers from region to region fail, and, as a result, traveling around in a vehicle results in a region crossing failure that disconnects the user. Typical failure rate is about 1-2 times per hour for a traveler. Much worse with multiple users in one vehicle, which kills travel as a social activity. There's a serious architecture problem in this area - region crossings need to be an atomic operation to work right, yet you can't lock up both regions involved for the time required. It's a difficult distributed transaction problem. So there are race conditions and failures. This alone gets the system laughed at in gamer reviews.
All this is quite fixable, but needs more staff resources than are currently available.
As for "the place seemed to get overrun by genitals", that's not really a problem in practice. That sort of nonsense mostly appears in a few social hubs operated by Linden Lab. Those are default destinations. If you don't have a home location set, you go to one of those on login. Only new users and the jerks who harass them go there. About the only time an experienced user goes there is if the region they're in goes down, which results in being teleported to a random social hub. Everybody else is on private property, their own, their friends, or that of some business, and the owner can eject and ban users from their property. Property rights make Second Life go, in a very real sense.
There's not much need for "moderators". Second Life does have a "governance" group. And what comes up as governance issues? Property problems. Users putting up giant billboards. Users with stuff sticking off their parcels onto public roads. (If it intrudes on a neighbors' parcel the neighbor can remove it, but that's not automatic. Having a tree branch or other landscaping hang over is usually OK. Like real life.) Obstacles to boats and aircraft. Pirated copies of in-world goods resulting in DMCA issues. User harassment sometimes comes up, but not that often, because the property rights system lets you prevent someone from entering your property, communicating with you, or even being seen by you.
If you want to do consensual sex on private property, it's not an issue for Linden Lab. Nor is it much of an issue for users. There's not much controversy in the user community over it.
The perception that Second Life is all about sex is a business problem. Google is anti-sex; you could not host SL on Google Cloud. Twitch.tv, which is owned by Facebook, does not allow video from Second Life. That's a big marketing issue.
SL's somewhat casual attitude on sex is alien to the current state of the web. The system has been running for sixteen years. Today we have a division between the sex-free world and the porno world, and that division has hardened considerably in the last few years. SL doesn't have that division, and that bothers some people. This may reflect SL being run out of San Francisco.
Can't remember which one episode it was, but "Rick and Morty" have definitely played out this scenario when Rick was kidnapped by aliens and they tried to trick him into disclosing some recipe for instant travel/teleportation fuel. It was a mixture of "Inception" and what you wrote.