The metaverse is a dystopian nightmare – let’s build a better reality | Hacker News Reader

The metaverse is a dystopian nightmare – let’s build a better reality

nianticlabs.com

161 pointsriebschlager114 comments

> Multiply this kind of channel x1000: Mario, Transformers, Marvel’s superhero universe, the world of Wakanda, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bladerunner, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, The Maltese Falcon — all of these and countless more will exist as reality channels that you can turn on, transforming your daily routine into something a bit more magical, intriguing, exciting — and most of all, a little more fun. Importantly, all of these experiences will be shared by countless other people, so that the adventure is a catalyst for spending time together and deepening social relationships.

But even more importantly, none of those people you're interacting with have any agency over those brands or IPs, and their interaction with the metaverse will necessarily be filtered through a set of corporate-controlled allowed actions and responses. Those "social relationships" will be a guided experience.

When replacing or overlaying reality with IP, it becomes necessary to ask the question, "who owns the IP?"

The counter-cultural, weird sci-fi worlds of current platforms like VRChat exist in no small part because the people interacting with them have agency. They ignore copyright, they make whatever they want, they form whatever communities they want. I'm not interested in your vision of an AR metaverse if your vision of the metaverse is that Nintendo or Disney gets to put an extra layer over the real world that gives them even more control over how I can interact with it.

The author keeps talking about culture, but the brands and IPs that they're championing are fundamentally opposed to the free expression of culture outside of their owners' control, and cementing the metaverse in an "official" way that retained that control would result in a world even more restrictive than our current one. Hard pass.

Very good take.

Was about to reply, but this basically sums up everything I was gonna say. Well played, my friend.

My worry is that it’ll be impossible to stop this from happening.

Don't use it then?

More money will allow them to develop vastly superior UI and user experience, better graphics, etc., and it will suck so many users from anything else that the other things will become tiny niche environments or die.

Just like what happened with everything else including most of the open web.

Yeah but, all the interesting stuff happens in the niche corners of the internet.

Let the mainstream play Fortnite, we'll enjoy better games that nobody knows about.

If niche stuff is most interesting to you, then you interests are niche, by definition. The stuff that is interesting to many people naturally tends to become mainstream.

Actually, I think a lot of niche stuff is objectively good, but never gets mainstream attention because it doesn't have a large enough marketing budget. (or never goes "viral")

You do you realize that everything that is mainstream was once a niche that eventually got the attention of millions of people? Computers, for instance.

Don't use whatsapp, instagram, snapchat, tiktok, facebook, etc. and you are missing out on a lot of social life when interacting with younger generations. Which can be your peers.

Same effect can happen for this platform as well. Eventually in order to have a social life you'll have to connect to some future network using brain implants so that they can ensure your thoughts are "safe" and "genuine".

> Don't use it then?

You can't 'choose' your way out of this system (e.g. IP laws), that seems like a somewhat naive take.

Technology and science (or culture in this metaverse case) being commoditized means the working class live with a plundered commons. A commons stripped of meaningful alternatives, and even if alternatives are possible they are quickly turned into a rent-seeking commodity, and the sharing of it criminalized.

In my eyes, you making this suggestion means you're likely not feeling the same level of alienation and you're able to live comfortably? In other words, you can live without it due to your position as labor aristocrat.

The metaverse will be just like Facebook free basics: digital colonialism. [1], [2], [3]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2016/02/10/marc-andr...

[2] https://theconversation.com/facebook-is-no-charity-and-the-f...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-...

> none of those people you're interacting with have any agency over those brands or IPs

But they can with NFTs. This metaverse is currently being built on Ethereum.

We could talk about why this doesn't make sense on a technical level, or how Ethereum doesn't really have that much to do with AR or VR conceptually. Those are separate conversations. What really jumps out at me as odd though is the suggestion that NFTs would give consumers more agency over the IPs they interact with.

If I'm remembering the last NFT cycle correctly, what actually happened was that a lot of existing content got linked to tokens that transferred no rights over that content and that were basically completely pointless. Noticing this, some of the real content owners then looked into taking their content down so that the tokens would seem more valuable to any rich buyers that wanted to claim that they owned memes. It's very difficult for me to see how that result is pro-culture.

I think that a lot of the hype around NFTs is nonsensical and that the tokens are going to be mostly meaningless in the long run, but even in a world where NFTs do work, they're just as bad if not worse than any existing IP system that exists today. The goal of NFTs is to provide a mechanism that allows people to permenently own a non-tangible piece of shared culture in perpetuity for as long as they want until they decide to sell it to another buyer.

That's the complete opposite of what I was asking for above. Nobody is looking at the dystopian potential of the metaverse and saying, "the problem with existing copyright systems is that the ownership eventually expires."

You own an NFT of a Disney character, but that character is restricted to forbid performing the Vulcan salute, because that's from a different IP-verse. NFTs cannot be a fix for that. That's what's meant by not having agency.

The backlash from them trying to keep people from using a symbol that predates the IP it's often associated with would be interesting to watch.

Thank you for this. It's basically a better-articulated version of the gut response I had to that recent Zuckerberg interview about his thoughts on the metaverse.

This is a really good take.

I would be very interested in seeing how a multi-million user AR equivalent to VRChat would play out. Layers of it could be extremely compelling or extremely ugly, like different rooms in VRChat are. Gibson, Vinge, and Stross have all given their takes on what this would look like too, but I expect the reality will be stranger than the fiction.

Excellent take. Corporate "control"/influence creeping into more and more aspects shoupd have all of us worried. The good news is that we right now collectively have a chance to shape our future digital interpersonal relationships and make sure this doesn't happen to an extent that would impact real life more than things like Instagram and Snapchat already have.

"Wow the metaverse sucks..."

"So anyways, we're building a metaverse with Pokemon and advertising, and it will NOT suck..."

The title and content of the article, in which Hanke espouses the virtues if Niantic Labs (an AR company), were cognitively dissonant for me.

> The concept reached one of its most complete expressions in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, where virtually everyone has abandoned reality for an elaborate VR massively multiplayer video game. A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one

I'm trying to understand what Hanke is really saying. Is he saying that VR sucks, and AR, specifically AR that encourages people to interact with the real physical world, is where its at? I assume by "biggest names in technology and gaming" he is referring to Niantic's competitors? Specifically what about those bets does he disagree with?

I think you got it. I'm pretty sure he's saying: VR bad, AR good. VR = escape from reality, AR = richer engagement with reality.

I don’t get why escaping reality is bad. Is theatre bad? Books? Movies?

Providing a good escape from reality can lower people’s demands of reality, which can lead to a more sustainable future. If people can eat beans but be tricked into thinking they’re eating steak it can improve health and lower emissions, for example.

Well recreational drug abuse is bad, and video game addiction is bad, and ignoring your problems forever is bad. Ultimately it's a matter of degree and costs associated with the escape.

I would never make a blanket statement like VR or the metaverse is bad (especially cause it doesn't seem to exist in a fully realized form yet) but the vision doesn't particularly inspire me, and Hanke is trying to appeal to that POV by mentioning dystopian scifi representations of it, where it represented an escape from a disturbing reality.

Trying to trick people into desired behaviour through escapism rather than creating a shared culture of stewardship, responsibility and self-control is exactly what a dystopian nightmare looks like.

I think you should look at the roots of theatre. The principal function of theatre wasn't escapism but Catharsis, the cleansing of one's emotional state to be able to re-engage with the world and to renew and restore oneself.

Good fiction engages a person with the world and prepares them to improve their society and culture. It doesn't produce a bunch of obese Wall-E people who live on canned beans binging Netflix all day.

Such great points. The tech of today is constantly attempting to rerout user back into itself. In a way this is unprecedented. A product that necessitates your constant use. Books don't necessitate re-reads, neither does a flip phone. But, the tech of today is all about consolidating your experience.

And books, tv, gaming, rock and roll? These complaints don’t seem all that new. People do like escaping. I certainly don’t want to spend all my time socializing, and when I do, I prefer part of it to be digital.

I don’t know about “bad”, but any fictional or surrogate reality certainly seems to me like a vice. Whether or not it’s bad depends on if you abuse it too much.

I don't know why you're arguing reality is so great though. Other then us needing to exist in it, there's nothing here to recommend it. Hence caves and then houses.

I'm starting to think my relationship with books might have been unhealthy in some of the same ways as video games. Theatre and movies might be similar for others. Less "escaping reality" and more "passive consumption at the cost of active creation".

Books feed you minimum data ... a string of characters ... completely devoid of any of the senses that you actually imagine you are experiencing: an active colorful audible 3D world.

Your own brain does almost all the work of manufacturing the reality, the author only provides the barest of guides. And your mind also adds layers of meaning onto whatever meaning the author makes explicit.

So I would say the act of reading a book is far from a passive or trivial activity.

In fact, I am hard pressed to imagine another activity so dependent on our own brain's ability for continuous creative production. D&D, scientific research, etc. all happen at a much slower pace.

I think the slower pace indicates more effort and greater levels of integration of different concepts. The kind of creativity involved in reading is like paint-by-numbers, while writing is like actual painting. It takes much more than an order of magnitude more time to write fiction than to read it for me, because it's so much less structured.

I agree with that. Creative production and problem solving, accompanied by a strong internal standards pushing us further for higher quality or impact than we achieved before, is the pinnacle.

But reading is far more active form of receiving, than other forms of learning or entertainment.

By the physical world they mean the Coca-Cola vending machine, and the chain convenience store..

How about real-time explanation what plant you are looking at, what bird just flew by, what is interesting about the building next to you, etc?

Look at the web — against all odds, it has tons of content beside ads!

> what is interesting about the building next to you

So, it'll tell me that it has a Zappos™, a Coke™ Vending machine, a Jamba Juice™, and a Wells Fargo™ ATM, with an average retailer Yelp™ score of 4.2?

As far as I know, Zappos has no physical locations.

They do.

And if they didn't, AR can also 'solve' that problem, by putting their virtual storefront in front of your eyeballs.

The Zappos™ storefront overlay is also AR

Those things are nice. but they are mostly built in collaboration with universities. Niantic took all my hard work, photographing places of historical or cultural significance(during ingress beta), and now use them to shovel people into stores.

VR is actually a “subverse” of reality but where people’s reality is subverted in a VR form.

Most of people’s experience would happen in this subverse, work, relationships, etc. Gamification would direct behavior throughout. You would code for FB or moderate for FB via this subverse.

Even physiological necessities would happen in two dimensions: in the subverse and in reality.

You summon the plumber gor the broken toilet in the subverse, they come to fix it within the subverse which is also expressed necessarily in reality.

It’s a potentially very scary proposition for whoever dictates the subverse in effect controls reality.

This is just niantic "talking their book".

Even if it involves interacting with the real world, I've always found Pokemon Go (and other Pokemon games) kind of brutal: basically capturing animals and making them fight until incapacitated. People go to jail for that sort of thing in real life.

Of course there are plenty of game where you do things that would be illegal: GTA built an empire on it. But Pokemon is marketed towards kids.

The Detective Pikachu movie is actually premised on the recognition that battling Pokémon against their will is unethical. It's kinda strange to have that as canon, when the entire rest of the franchise encourages you to battle them and the games provide zero alternative.

On the other hand... I think your concern here is just about the worst example of pearl-clutching over video game violence that I've seen. Kids don't have a problem sorting fact from fiction when capturing Pokémon involves throwing a ball at them and the Pokémon somehow becoming entrapped within.

I doubt kids are getting anything bad out of the games, not clutching my pearls here. It just always seemed like a weird premise for a kids game.

Then again Mario went around killing turtles. Maybe Bowser was the tragic hero there.

>Then again Mario went around killing turtles. Maybe Bowser was the tragic hero there.

Wait until you find out about the bricks...

This is only a rumor, but I've heard that collecting and fighting beetles and other insects is not an unusual pastime for many young Japanese boys.

Not just boys, not just Japanese... I did this with ants long before the Pokémon franchise was created.

Yeah pokemon deeply damaged me as a kid. unacceptable

Yes, I can see the signs: you probably breed & fight pitbulls right?

I really want to gripe about "Ernest Cline's" Ready Player One. There was an element of dystopia to it, yes, but it was only the movie adaptation that came away with the takeaway that the virtual world was bad. In the movie they decide to add in the protagonist making the executive decision to shut down the virtual world on a couple weekdays or something. That pissed me off. That world was people's livelihoods. This kid lived in a poor junky slum and had a great social life and presumably some level of income in the virtual world when the movie starts. At the end of the movie he is super rich and has a hot girlfriend (who's character arc was largely that she perceived herself as ugly?). There's really not that much in the film or the book that says that forcing people to go unplugged made any sense.

The actual book was about a virtual world gone extremely right. The dystopian part was the corporations that sought private control of the platform.

Bonus complaint: The evil corporation in the film literally enslaves people and brazenly murders others in public, yet it's CEO is brought down by some unremarkable local cops? What?

I guess one problem with the virtual world in RPO is that it is centralized, and therefore people are fighting each other to control it.

The world in RPO is pretty nonsensical and the whole thing is a vehicle for nostalgia with a fairly formulaic plot. Nothing wrong with that it’s a fun beach read, particularly if you’re of a certain age. I was mildly terrified by the number of people I met a few years ago whilst working in VR who considered it aspirational. We’ll absolutely get a dystopia if the metaverse is based on teenage fantasy. Particularly with an AR vision that is rushing to put glorified ads for Disney and Marvel into the world.

You'd think the creator would have thought of something like that, but nah, he wanted to leave it to the coolest teen. Or, in the movie version, the teen most able to identify weirdly personal details from the author's private life.

I guess he was certain that anybody so well versed in the 80ies cult products would have to be a good person.

Whenever a company describes their vision of "the metaverse" (or I guess "reality channels" in this case) it's always exceedingly vague and never really explains in concrete terms what sort of utility or entertainment a person would derive from it.

I guess it's just the latest vehicle to get investors or stockholders excited without needing to rely upon any work or logic beyond the unclear promise of technologies that themselves haven't even been proven out yet. (And this is coming from someone who does think VR is really cool -- with respect to some of the discrete, packaged, and targeted immersive experiences that are already available.)

It is just a hype cycle, yes.

Propose some use cases for it, preferably ones that involve lots of people throwing money at the people you're pitching to.

Then do the other end - pick a market segmentation and explain why they are going to feel dumb, fat and poor for not jumping in.

4 iterations later, it becomes apparent it has replaced first person shooters, is good for trying on clothes and sex with robots, and is the favored environment for low-end interviews.

The reality of the "metaverse" as far as I'm seeing it, is literally just MMORPGs without a story/purpose, where you hang out with friends, chat, do shared activities, etc etc. Second Life done better, with the world size/style of WoW/Fortnite/Minecraft/Rust/etc (choose your graphics and fantasy genre). Plenty of people already join custom Minecraft servers just to hang out and voice-chat while messing around doing stupid stuff... it's just that taken to a new level.

Everything else is just hype by massive advertising companies to try sell you on THEIR version of that, and make it seem like a universe-changing step in humanity that will raise you to the next level in evolution, so that they can fill it with ads (direct and indirect/subliminal) to make more money.

Actually one of my first experience I can remember on the internet was something called “the 3D village” circa 1998.

A proto second life, inhabited by French and québécois teenagers.

Yeah I remember playing with VRML in ~1996-97 and developing a bunch of "virtual worlds" (tiny by todays standard) for companies then. It never got huge traction but it was definitely around, and there were some really fun 3D virtual chat worlds around at the time.

The metaverse has a consistent definition - at least, if you read Snow Crash. It's just not what any company would actually want to bring to the market.

3D game worlds have value, open systems have value, but in completely opposite and contradictory ways. The value is in the entertainment of playing a well-built one, which means there has to be monetization and centralization. In other words, they have "production value". Open systems are outright allergic to that: while you can monetize, say, a webpage; there's no central WWW server, so there's no technical protection (DRM) against you just reuploading someone else's webpages. This doesn't matter so much for the web, because the cost to produce is low and the web has something the game worlds don't: "interconnection value".

A decade and change ago we had Second Life, a 3D game world built like an open system. This meant that instead of just giving you a bunch of levels with characters and game mechanics, they gave you a sandbox and told you to build whatever. They even released the Viewer source under GPL and at one point even promised to do the same with the Simulator server (which never panned out, although they were trialling grid interconnection with IBM at one point). You could build your own entirely independent Grid via OpenSim. At the same time, the game also had a centralized in-game economy based around selling content to build with. Linden Labs' embrace of openness, as incomplete as it was, wound up totally pissing off a lot of long-time users whose content could now be trivially copied, reuploaded, and resold using Free tools. They also had to deal with malicious Viewer forks, which ultimately wound up with them having an approval process for third-party Viewers, walking back some of that openness promise.

(I'm, of course, skipping over all of the other systems that have cropped up before and since - ActiveWorlds, VRChat, and so on. AFAIK none of them had metaverse pretensions to the same level as Second Life did.)

I've heard people claim Roblox is "the metaverse", and they might be close. However, it's far more of a closed system than even SL's open-viewer, closed-grid approach. They wouldn't for a second tolerate, say, someone writing a custom Roblox client or server. They do have an element of the metaverse that nobody likes to talk about, however: copyright infringement. Roblox has plenty of unlicensed fangames and other content that you wouldn't dream of being able to legally ship in a game world normally. This, to me, is one of the core properties of "metaverse-ness"; the ability for content to just exist in the game world without an associated license.

(Epic, you can use the term "metaverse" when I can design my own Fortnite skins and levels. Just being able to play on my PS4 with Xbox players is only a small part of it.)

Someone might bring up Minecraft at this point. This also has some of the aspects of a metaverse - notably, the block-building lets you go crazy with custom content, and it also allows custom skins. Well... mostly. Custom skins are only present in some versions of the game - notably, all Java versions, as well as Windows, iOS, and Android Bedrock. Other versions replace your skin with the default. There's also some licensed skins that are locked to specific versions of the game, that get replaced with the default skin as well. Cross-play lets you join other player's game sessions, but if you want levels to actually move between devices, you need to have a Realms subscription. There are servers, but custom servers are very new (like, in-alpha new) and not allowed on consoles (or at least on Switch - I don't own the Xbox or PS4 versions to test).

So that's another problem with the idea of a metaverse - the current system has way too many barriers in play to make it work. Remember how Sony made your Fortnite account a PS4 exclusive so you couldn't use your lootboxes on Switch? Imagine that, but 2000x worse, if someone actually tried to bring the metaverse to consoles.

A decade and change ago we had Second Life, a 3D game world built like an open system.

After many struggles, Second Life achieved social stability. The company has mostly a hands-off attitude and a minimal "governance" group of about half a dozen people. There are landlords and tenants, with grumbling on both sides, in more or less balance. Griefing is rare. The large-scale scams, such as a fake bank, are gone. Copying and uploading content happens occasionally but is not a huge problem. Land use is all over the place, but there are coherent communities. The main viewer is a third party open source system, and Open Simulator still chugs along, offering an option for people who want an environment under different ownership.

Ease of use is a serious problem in many dimensions. Just becoming a new users is frustrating. Upon entry, you go through a basic orientation and are dumped into a transit point full of jerks and scammers. It's like the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. You've been dumped into a large city, and, other than some signs suggesting various destinations, you're on your own. It really is a virtual world, not a game. What you do in it is entirely up to you. The world is indifferent to you. This throws many new users.

Then they discover their default avatar sucks, that the clothing system is really complicated, and the good stuff costs money, or good free stuff has to be searched out.

If they make it to day 3, they'll start to get the place figured out. But the new user experience is harsh.

Most of the people making metaverse noises are not far enough along to reach these problems, let alone solve them.

> Then they discover their default avatar sucks, that the clothing system is really complicated, and the good stuff costs money, or good free stuff has to be searched out.

In snow crash most of the population wanders around with a default avatar to save on cost

This doesn't sound particularly different from when I was active on there a decade ago.

Does Linden Labs still have a weird habit of banning people running large "Internet meme"/chan-culture sims? (Actually, TBH, that almost seems forward-thinking nowadays...)

Here's Luca Grabacr's view of Second Life as the Metaverse.[1] She's the poet philosopher of Second Life. Her quiet, detailed videos of Second Life at its best show what the Metaverse can be.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdvGlwKPVk4

I don't play fortnite, but I get the sense it's closer to the vibe of Snowcrash's metaverse. Interoperability and freedom to create is cool, but stuff like Roblox doesn't strike me as a connected experience. Making games interoperable won't fit the bill unless it's about you, as the player, in the game; as opposed to you playing a character in the game. That's hard to do, because most games benefit enormously from having a structure and plot and characters. Even competitive FPS games to some extent.

You have to do stuff as yourself/your avatar. MMOs are close, but you never feel like you escape the world of the MMO. Fortnite has some purely social stuff like concerts and I feel like that's closer to the mark.

Epic released a very high quality character creator called MetaHuman recently. It's a great free resource to devs. But if they really want this to be a metaverse kind of thing they should be opening up unreal service apis to let players take their character models and port them into games. That would be a big step in the right direction.

I'm really not convinced that what we're communicating on isn't already the metaverse

HTML and HTTP are open standards, but they're not the metaverse. The "metaverse" is supposed to be an open standard for interoperable 3D game worlds.

You could build a 3D game world inside of a browser, and people have been doing that since the 90s. We've had multiple different open and proprietary technologies that allow this: VRML, Java applets, 3D Groove SX/GX, Shockwave 3D, Flash Stage3D, WebGL, and WebGPU. However, most game worlds built this way are less like "websites but in 3D" and more like Facebook. Yes, Facebook uses HTML, but it's not part of "the web" - most of it's content requires a login and can't be scraped or searched by external sites.

An actual "metaverse built on the open web" would be possible; in the same way that comment sections, trackbacks, Gravatar, and so on made blogging into a shared space decades ago. You would need standards for a whole bunch of problems unique to 3D game worlds, including presence, chat, avatars, asset inventories, and so on. All of these would have to also be integrated with existing content-management systems (WordPress, Drupal, etc), which would also have to serve up a viewer application that actually handled our "web metaverse" thing (in the same way that browsers don't need to know about comment sections, they just need to know how to submit a form). That in and of itself has significant UX problems: maybe, you go on one particular metaverse site, and suddenly you have entirely different player movement from the last site you were on, because it loaded a different viewer.

We now have two visions of a metaverse.

The augmented reality version is Google Glass with better graphics. That's what Niantic has in mind: "The Pokémon will finally be able to truly walk among us!" With better hardware, that becomes becomes the famous "Hyperreality" video.[1] That's also Zuckerberg's vision: everyone wearing Facebook goggles and logged into Facebook at all times.

The virtual reality vision is less clear, because it doesn't really work yet. Moving around wearing VR headgear still doesn't work if you want to go very far, which is why Beat Saber is still the best VR game. Keyboard and screen, preferably with a big screen, still beats headgear for extended use. Nobody has a really good answer to that problem. VRChat is probably as good as it gets right now, short of the location-based systems.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

I built mirrorspace.net (beta up at https://app.mirrorspace.net/) which is a "mirror space" i.e. a virtual layer ontop of our normal physical space. Users can browse nearby landmarks (currently based on geolookup wikipedia entries) and also upload their own media. But the catch is, for anyone else to view your media and interact with it, they need to be within 50m of the upload location. This mechanic is meant to drive a dual virtual/physical interaction that gives a more holistic and potentially a more meaningful social media experience.

My idea was to add search filters, commenting, voting etc. and allow people to "feel" how people currently interact with any location - so if I fly to SF from Berlin, I can immediately browse the mirrorspace and see what people are doing specifically where I am now, and also get a handle on the social fabric of that place. I wanted to have a platform that records significant events in a temporal way, maybe protests or similar - things that define each city/place uniquely. The monetisation strategy was to allow people to pay the platform to increase the visibility radius of their posts, and/or allow people to pay to view media items from outside the normal radius - where a share of this payment goes to the uploader.

I was fucking around for a few years on this, and now I have another major project to work on so no longer have time or motivation to "finish" it. I might open source it in the future, if anyone is interested. (I haven't looked at the code in months)

This is really cool even in its current form! Was very interesting to learn some new details about the local landmarks (center of Brussels). How did you determine the precise position on the map for the articles ?

I have a long time toyed with the idea of notes-photos-locations-time-internet activity interspersed into a single environment, which would allow to find things by association.

Having this onto a private hosted instance might be a very nice approach to increasing invasiveness of the device manufacturers by just making them thin terminals onto your own “activity content hub”.

Thanks! Actually wikipedia has already a geolocate param in the mediawiki API, and many articles have associated GPS coords.

A rather grim one I found in Sicily last year was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alitalia_Flight_4128, I could see the exact coordinates on the mirrorspace map where the plane went down...

I also think a hosted version, or secure (yeah I know) account for personal geospatial note type things would be useful; e.g. mark a location for a reminder to do something the next time you are nearby (store X has a sale, location Y has live music daily at 1300)

Wow, that’s cool! (and chilling for that flight article…)

I was thinking of an explicit personal instance (which may have selected shared components in a ballpark similar way as the open social does it), because the latest events with Apple triggered me to think again of a deaggregated personal device: a separate unit for mobile internet, a separate unit for GPS, a separate unit for camera, etc., all pushing the data to a “personal network cache NAS”, and replicating to the central personal server. This way the peripheral units can be made quite small, simple and modular, and the complicated logic can sit server side… I suppose it’s quite a drift from what you had as a use case, but FWIW :-)

Hmmm yep, that is interesting. I am going down a similar route, but by replacing my phone with something that will become my primary computing device (either a pi-based cyberdeck, or something like the librem5). I want to effectively just carry around a SD card or small SSD with all my data, all the time. The peripheral to access this doesn't really matter to me. I never call anyone using cell networks, and only rarely use signal if I need voice/video chat which I do over wifi anyway. I guess I could also load English wikipedia onto it and directly run mirrorspace as localhost on my device...

The main blocker for me is that my partner wants to always be able to reach me in an emergency... haven't found a solution for that one yet.

Title doesn't really reflect the content of the article. Niantic is describing how they're going to build their own Metaverse in AR.

It's just a pitch in disguise for their new platform which is years behind major AR cloud platforms. I won't bother paying it any attention.

Putting more flat screens atop the real world has lost it's luster for me.

I'm very much a fan of ubiquotous (& pervasive) computing, still as much of a torch for it as ever. But these days I tend to think more ambient, non-visual modalities & connecting the network fo devices is more interesting. Efforts like Web of Things standards (a web standard for exposing devices) and WebThings (a unrealted semantic-web powered iot engine spun out from Mozilla) talk to creating awareness & control over the seas of devices about us (& afar too). Systems like Eddystone/PhysicalWeb/Bluetooth-beacons provide ambient awareness of local systems & endpoints, and one day I hope people & interests too (that want to be so locally digitally available). These, to me, along with good interoperabile standards (like ActivityPub), feel like the seeds for a Rainbows End scenario, where comment trees hang in the world, where everything is annotateable.

But I tend to think these connective mediums are well served by the screens we put & pull from our pockets, served by watches & vibrations and bluetooth headsets.

I don't know what the metaverse might be. But back when ubicomp was younger, I remember being absolutely floored by Steve Mann piping his worn camera sensors over analog TV signal to an SGI box, processing it, and beaming it back to his immersive display. He was reprocessing reality, not simply overlaying digital atop it. I doubt there was all that much really going on on the SGI, but it filled me with the ideas of a world which was visually editable. And I think that's where we've seen little progress.

Some of the hololens & magic leap demos were very compelling... 5 years ago. First Person Shooter type things played in the living room. And there are a steady march of really good phone based demos of virtual objects dropped into a similar camera-view of the world. But really, we need to get much better at having digital systems ingesting the world about us, and we need to start unleashing human creativity that people can redraw & reimagine the physical world. We need procedural toolkits galore to re-simulate environments. An augmentative metaverse needs filters, well beyond what a photo filter is, requiring both that input of the world, and the flexible programmatic world-shaders we can orchestrate & lean on to rewrite the world, before it gets to our eyes.

Have you heard of Dynamicland / Paper Programs? If not, you might find them interesting in this vein.

I have wanted to visit and try it out ever since I heard about it.

VRChat is working pretty well. The interface is a little clunky, but, it's pretty much what I think when I think metaverse. Not sure what Niantic is on about.

Did Pokemon Go make any major progress in AR interactivity in the 5 years since it's release or is Niantic blowing smoke?

They bought out a couple companies who made major leaps, 6D.ai for example.

Depending on how you define AR, they've added a number of features to Pokémon GO over the years (ability to place Pokémon into the world and view them with your phone's camera, real-time in-game weather based on your location, and realistic sky graphics with everything from sunsets to accurate star constellations).

But the common complaint I hear from players is that they don't really care about those developments since the AR additions haven't really altered the basic game play loop.

"This is what the night sky would look like here if you didn't live within 100 miles of a pokestop."

Everyone’s vision of the metaverse seems to be directly tied to their pre-existing business interests.

Call me when you work on several of these projects in a row and debias yourself and your financial interests from what ought to be done to create the best possible future for spatial computing.

If augmented reality leads to neural implants it can potentially lead to an even worse dystopia if the technology is not open source. Limited access to resources may result in the coercion of workers into accepting patented neural implants in order to participate in an idea-based economy in order to accumulate any personal property necessary for survival.

Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors, implants also open up possibility of direct external suggestion to disable the ability of thinkers to consider whether or not they are free.

The highest value of thinkers is freedom of thought. Since thought arises from material conditions and living in a community allows more time for thought by decreasing the time its members spend on basic survival there is always a social \ political \ economic component which must be considered when building better realities to avoid simply accelerating the essential trajectory of a current reality.

> Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors

With the prevalence of cleartext cloud-based workflows (Discord, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Github, ...) many people may already be living in a similar reality.

You just don't enter private thoughts into such systems. The line is pretty clear. The only problem is that if you want to WfH, it becomes nearly mandatory to establish side-channels for unofficial, non-company discussion between co-workers to replace neutral spaces in the office like the break room or cafeteria.

I think the only long term solution is to establish or work for a cooperative which does not patent ideas or which only patents ideas defensively to protect the free use of ideas for its members, to establish public banks, to levy distributive taxes on private land and natural resource holders.

Break room and cafeterias can be bugged, company phones and email addresses can be bugged or monitored. With externally controlled neural implants I'm not sure if there is any means of avoidance, the majority of the human race may simply end up as slaves, to provide extra brain matter and creative visual processing cores to a corporate computer network.

I would be surprised if break rooms or cafeterias could be legally bugged without displaying a prominent notice where I live.

That said, I totally agree about company phones and email addresses - those are under employer control and so could never be trusted, which is why the side-channel would be something like an unofficial WhatsApp group of a few co-workers who know each other well. Brain implants are not part of the threat model just yet, and I was sharing my observations purely in the context of my own recent experience.

The author, John Hanke, raised VC investment from the CIA as CEO of Keyhole [1] before their acquisition by Google in 2004.

At Google, Hanke ran the Geo division while street-view cars were illegally collecting Wi-Fi data en masse [2].

Yet we're supposed to believe that he will build a metaverse that's NOT dystopian?

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20030801175255/http://www.keyhole... [2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/privacy-scandal-haunts-p...

The metaverse is yet another thing no-one asked for but something we're still going to get.

It doesn't matter what anyone thinks or says. The higher-ups have decided it's going to happen, the puppets are going to dance and so it will.

To me the metaverse is more about rules than the technical details.

We need an internet where people are not constrained in what they are allowed to do for earnings.

Open-source is only half the battle as content also need to shift. Open-content?

I made the network protocol: http://github.com/tinspin/fuse

And now I'm working on the file formats: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449

I don't see the value in overlaying the earth with superheroes and tampon adds, but it would be cool to have a subtractive layer that blocks all this garbage from your view.

The biggest artificial universe, created by our smartest and most idealistic techno-utopian hippies, got subverted and then perverted into the internet of today. Now, the sort of people who did a lot of the subverting want to try again, but this time it'll be for profit and full of monetization and tracking ab initio, and I'm supposed to think it'll work out because we have AR glasses now. Yeah, that's what was missing, the glasses.

This really smacks of Magic Leap for me, which is far from a compliment. I think we all know how this story ends already.

I mean, we ve "reinvented" IRC for the n-th time, why not do the same for Second Life. again

There is a good reason to do something and there is a real reason.

Coming from Niantic, who is a proponent of AR, it seems like the good reason is to care about building a better reality, but I'm curious if anyone knows enough to comment on their 'real' reason?

I mean the real reason is clearly to inspire people to work for / with them on their projects, the last section is hardly subtle on this front.

Virtuaverse seems to be describing something similar: https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse

Permanent reality idea could be closer than it looks.

Isn't Ninatic the company funded by the CIA's venture fund? And call me when when VR glasses are lightweight glasses and not head gear. I have a hard enough time using reading glasses as I get older.

I see a potential in using VR as an interface to reality. Or rather, as a more immersive way to build models and test ideas about how we can solve problems in reality.

Let’s do both, a metaverse will always be more interesting in some subset that can’t exist in reality.

Not a fan of VR or AR, personally.

Isn't this post a bit weird, coming from the makers of PokemonGo ?

Please fix Go Battle League

Surely if any metaverse is to truly compete with reality, we’ll need to build it on a federated fabric. Sometimes I wonder if people would invent the internet of today by modeling a company after Cloudflare. The success and resiliency of the Internet comes not from the strength of a single company, but from its focus on federation and interoperability.

No single company could build the Internet and be successful, and the same is true for the metaverse. The focus should be on developers, shared spaces and protocols. How can I connect my server running a game on Unity engine to your server running a Godot engine? Can I walk between them, transport my avatar between worlds? Can I run copies of myself in multiple realms? Can I play Factorio inside the game room of my Minecraft megabase?

I’d like to see more crazy ideas and wild hacks focusing along these lines. In fact I’m surprised there aren’t more “metaverse for crypto” initiatives. I guess we’re probably still 10-15 years away from the first successful application of these concepts.

> I’m surprised there aren’t more “metaverse for crypto” initiatives

There's a few projects working in this space, but individual components. The NFT space will converge onto what I believe will be the winning metaverse vision. Participants own the IP, the land, the characters, the tools, the weapons, etc.

https://decentraland.org/

Another cool one is https://somniumspace.com/

I think the public blockchain is the only basis of a non-dystopian metaverse. With it, ownership over digital assets can transcend any specific proprietary platform. For that to happen, a general consensus needs to emerge that the public blockchain is the canonical source of truth on ownership of works of arts, and a convention needs to be established where platforms respect blockchain-based claims and reserve for possessors of such claims exclusive use of the respective artwork.

Without an open ownership system, people will be compelled by market forces to converge to using a single proprietary platform that can provide a consistent account and set of rules on claims to digital property, and this platform being mutable by the proprietor, will make that proprietor inordinately powerful in a way that disfigures the socioeconomic landscape to make it less functional.

The assumption I don't like here is that we're still fixated on an ownership and scarcity model.

As has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, many of the most exciting experiences are the ones that don't bother playing ownership police. For every one person who says "Oh, everyone isn't celebrating and paying me because that widget is My Special Creation (R) (TM) (C) (GMbH), so I'll stop creating" there are a hundred who use that widget to make to build new and exciting things. Let him leave.

The whole focus on intellectual property, and new IP-adjacent gimmicks like NFTs feels like a tragic Emperor's New Clothes skit. I'm waiting on the kid to point and say "bits aren't scarce" which causes the whole market bubble to come crashing down.

Yes, that is a fair point. One thing I'd note on that subject is that the current market of blockchain-based NFTs does not usually come with copyright restrictions. You are allowed to use a copy of an NFTized jpg, but of course the person possessing the NFT can always cryptographically prove that they own the 'official' version, which confers prestige. The analog world corollary would be owning the original Mona Lisa, while others still have the freedom to create copies. The latter does not diminish the value of the former.

So in some sense, right now with most NFTs, you get the best of both worlds: a way to compensate creators of artwork, by giving them a scarce resource representing their creation that will command market value, and the freedom to use the art others release as you want.

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