Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

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Epic Games has a $1B investment for the metaverse

Nvidia has Omniverse

Roblox hit a $58B market cap in June

Unity has VR chat

And there are a zillion startups/indie games that claim to be "The Metaverse". Of course, for the metaverse to be successful, we need a common protocol, not walled gardens - but this is deep topic, and I don't want to type it all.

Media is moving to the metaverse - Fortnite concerts, Roblox concerts, Porter Robinson's virtual event, Tomorrowland, Lost Lands (couchlands)

Enterprise is moving to the metaverse - Microsoft/Epic games partnership for global 3D info (can't remember the name), Nvidia's Omniverse, just go google search "digital twins"

Rocket League, Fortnite, and Roblox are partnering with big brands

The metaverse is taking shape before our eyes. What we're missing is a common interop format, and the leading contenders are USD (Pixar, Nvidia) and gltf (Epic Games, Mozilla).

I'm building a business for the metaverse at the moment, and there is something real if you look past the hype. The problem is that it doesn't quite look like the metaverse of _Ready Player One_ or _Snowcrash_. So it's easy for people to dream in the wrong direction. As you might expect, much of this is pretty incremental progress, but that doesn't make as great of a narrative, and the conclusion of the available incremental progress is monumental - but there's a ton of work to be done.

I love talking about this stuff. If you want to work with us, or just trade thoughts, feel free to reach out to me about it.

"I'm building a business for the metaverse at the moment, and there is something real if you look past the hype. The problem is that it doesn't quite look like the metaverse of Ready Player One or Snowcrash."

I will say I think it's a bit of an antipattern to get too stuck to a particular fictional representation of something. It doesn't seem to be too common, but it tends to blind people to the real possibilites because they're too busy trying to jam it in a mold created by someone 30 years ago. Kinda reminds me of what I call the BOAC fallacy: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916 although it's not the same. Just because someone wrote about it in a particular fun story doesn't mean that it's going to end up that way, and I'd bet it won't.

Most fictional universes tend to ignore business fragmentation, which takes us to...

"What we're missing is a common interop format"

Perhaps it's my own limitations, but I can't even dream of what a "common interop format" would look like, or more importantly, why any player would agree to use it anytime soon. There's a lot of business case studies as to why everyone will be happy to agree to an "interop standard" of their own control and let other people's content into their walled garden, to be subject to the constraints of their walled garden, but will not do anything to let content out of their own walled garden, the net effect being no interop. This smells of Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL/etc. all over again.

Unless you just mean simple avatar interop, although the lowest common denominator is going to be pretty low for a while. Roblox probably runs entire gaming worlds with the resources an Unreal 4 avatar designed for a high-end computer could demand.

I believe a counterexample to ignoring that fragmentation is Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End, which I have not read, but I believe there is no single AR "metaverse" in that, but the technology is used for all sorts of things; you can opt in to the "fantasy" "metaverse", or the sci-fi one, or the Victorian England one, etc etc.

The concept of digital twins is important in IoT. To capture all your factory floor data and make predictive maintenance decisions based on, say, excessive vibration on a coolant pump is quite appealing.

VR Chat is made with Unity but not owned by Unity FYI. So are almost all other social VR apps (RecRoom, Facebook Horizon, etc)

3D TV syndrome

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