What is the metaverse?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
In some ways, Metaverse appears to be simply a new way of describing what we already have —- aren’t social networks themselves already metaverses? In others, the likes of FB and Apple are pushing technologies to enhance “Metaverse immersion” (made that up), none of which is gaining significant traction.
VR and AR headsets continue to improve, and yet still fail to extend beyond the realm of tech demos for most people. (I understand AR has decent uses in industry: hardly a metaverse.) This criticism is coming from someone who was an enthusiastic early adopter with Oculus, and who currently owns a Quest 2, which is excellent at gathering dust, and at occasionally wowing VR noobs (who are amazed but never end up buying one).
Then you have iOS AR, another technology devoid of practical and compelling uses. I love the Measure app with the LiDAR sensor —- is that a metaverse, an electronic tape measure? I guess so.
My take: the Metaverse is the new chatbot.
Less so for AR but Pokemon Go still has users an I see ARish features integrated by default into my default Samsung camera, and ARish stuff into meeting software, streamers etc. It's not super advanced yet but hardly dead and I wouldn't be convinced something big won't come out of it.
>My take: the Metaverse is the new chatbot.
I'm not a fan of most chatbots but they've been very successful, improving and you see more of them. An apt comparison even if made for the wrong reasons.
They seemed to be using the term to mean "the web, but fully monetized on an NFT-like basis" but in some way that seemed to denote an ideological significance on par with the concept of the Trinity.
If I heard either term being used like this at a conference, I'd be wary of the kool aid.
Will Metaverses take over our lives? Probably not. Will they become wide spread for a specific use case? Probably.
Anyone remember 3D films and TV? Apparently the real killer for that was that people didn't like sitting wearing glasses, and those who have to wear glasses all the time anyway couldn't take part.
So can we expect 4 year old kids to patiently wear an expensive VR headset to chat to granny? I doubt it. People can't even be bothered to turn their webcam on for meetings - they're certainly not going to bother putting on a VR headset and grabbing controllers for a 30 minute status update meeting.
That said, I am intrigued by using a VR headset for a virtual display (rather than monitors). In my limited experience of using VR stuff from 2 or 3 years ago the per-eye resolution sucks though and there is no pupil tracking so I can't imagine it being a great experience, but perhaps that is solved now?
Wrong incentives at play. It's not that people want it, they force 3D movies on you and charge you for the glasses. Easy money.
In Japan, where I live, they do, and it's typically another 6-8 USD to shell out.
In my experience, 3D provides a whole extra dimension. (literally and figuratively).
A surprising number of people can't see in 3D though. (For instance, I've met people who thought that autostereograms are some sort of trick gimmick). Is that the case for you perhaps?
I had to settle for 2D in non-IMAX screening, but at least I could find a screening in English and without German subtitles...
Anyway, I dislike 3D cinema even when properly done. It only looks good at high framerate and with deep depth of field. I prefer my 24fps and shallow depth of field.
It's a problem of a lack of standardization and studios who have been producing 3D blockbuster movies jealously guarding their content to the point that the vast majority of 3D TV owners would have an extremely hard time getting their hands on it.
VR/AR has the same problem. Build it and they will come does not work. It's going to be an empty room with nothing interesting happening until somebody fixes the content side.
For something like the metaverse to work, basically it needs to be compelling and addictive. The novelty factor wears off quickly otherwise. Second life briefly had that but it was a bit too weird for a lot of people and also required a lot of patience, bandwidth, and was underwhelming from a technical point of view.
Yet, even overhyped as it may currently be, the actual short term impacts will still be significant. Real Time Edge Rendered Cloud Pixel Streaming, Digital Twins, AI/ML/ Computer Vision, and social platform avatars etc are the escape velocity needed to extend XR beyond the gaming community into ordinary personal and business interactions. In so many cases, just adding an interactive layer of 3D imaginative space can make the things we do better.
People who are in the space have experienced several false dawn episodes but the intersection of hardware capabilities and software use cases has never been so virtuous as they are now so strap in & hang on to your hats folks !
I can see how it can solve real problems, I just never hear it doing so. From my observation (correct me if I am mistaken), these projects add a lot of features continually, which is what devs are great at. But I don't see work or an investment being made in quality,reliability and performance. They desparately need central servers that use the metaverse behind the scenes but invest heavily on good UX. Is mastodon inherently better quality than fb? Is matrix more reliable than signal and whatsapp or better performing/moderated than discord? For most people , the decentralized and privacy sensitive features are merely the decoration on the icing of the cake.
We already had, at least one, "metaverse" in Second Life, right? What's the difference this time?
VR? - not with the current delivery mechanisms. Too uncomfortable for extended use and not enough value provided. Another decade maybe. Did second life lose popularity because it wasn't a VR-first experience?
NFTs? - game developers are not going to spend their time recreating your NFT as a custom asset in their game world. There aren't great inter-op standards for taking assets between games. We have fbx as model format, kind of, but then how that's rendered is going to vary. There's also all sorts of potentially liability issues in regards to taking a random image / asset off the internet and injecting it into your game. Unless the game world itself is decentralised. I don't see this going anywhere. "Crypo-gaming" sure, some kind of "metaverse" no.
If the "metaverse" is some AR stuff with your phone then sure, that's coming - putting down virtual furniture in your home, trying on virtual shoes or clothing etc. But that doesn't sound anything like what Facebook is pursuing.
I'm not saying it's not possible and maybe this post will look archaic in five years but I don't see it on the horizon at the moment.
This "metaverse" is some kind of deranged trap. Social media is a hellscape of misunderstanding and conflict already. A further layer of indirection and reduction in "humanness", in the form of "cartoonifying" everyone, is going to further erode society's foundations.
Folks who played Secondlife, Farmville, Animal Crossing, etc. But I think that part of the problem seems to be that some of us have negative emotion towards Facebook, and we feel uncomfortable even just knowing Facebook is working on this.
Although for me "metaverse" is the stuff Marvel does to ensure every super hero becomes dull and boring
While I'm pretty sure Linden Labs still exists, it never did much more than get an initial buzz from people that could only see the possibilities disconnected from the what it actually means to be an organic, living entity in a very real world. It also gained attention from those that feared missing out on the promises made by that early buzz. But even Second Life couldn't avoid the reality of the physical world that preceded it. Second Life is still with us, but it's an unimportant niche player with little lasting impact on society, such that many articles touting the new metaverse don't even acknowledge its existence. Journalists don't recognize that they're simply jumping on that hype train which leads nowhere again.
Yes technology has come a long way since then, but probably not as far as we imagine either. And the companies best positioned to deliver a "metaverse" can barely get their own products working to a level where they can even be described a "useful" (try using a pixel phone, a chromecast, and youtube together and see how much just doesn't work reliably)... a sustained alternative existence will necessarily have a lower tolerance for poor quality delivery: I don't think any meaningful player out there has a culture of quality sufficient to get a compelling product out the door that can establish itself as such an alternative existence. Finally, as a physical being in a physical world: you won't sustain yourself with virtual food, doctors will not be able effectively to cure your physical ailments without examining your physical body, and other realities will almost certainly mean you're spending more time experiencing the real universe than the metaverse. The plumber, electrician, construction worker, farmer, fireman, policeman, garbageman, etc. won't do their work in the metaverse. Maybe a metaverse can consist of some office workers and those people with enough free time and money to spend their leisure time in a constructed fantasy world, but that doesn't strike me as game changing.
I think the best technologies that have potential to have an impact on our view of reality will be augmented reality technologies. Those products seeking to replace reality with something different will just be a fad to be gushed over by journalists and influencers.
I mean, the previous big things haven't even had the chance to become big...
When can we go back to hyping the wavelet transform?
I'm pretty up to date on what trends and fads are happening in tech: this is the first I've heard of the term "metaverse".
> It's attracting attention - and money - from some of of tech's biggest names, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Epic Games' Tim Sweeney.
Sounds like by "some" the mean "two". Or are Zuck & Sweeney just backing VR and as clueless about this new metaterminology as I am?
This reminds me of the attempt 2 years ago to rebrand AR&VR collectively as the even more confusing "XR".
It's just VR. Call it VR. And it's not a new trend, VR undergoing a resurgence for some time now.
0. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Metavers...
A solution looking for a problem. Snow Crash was an excellent book, but irl virtual reality doesn't add any conveniences over simple documents. Sure it's more "immersive", but does a virtual, immersive version of the world wide Web actually accomplish anything besides shininess?
The main thing VR provides is the ability to examine 3d objects. Considering that most of the content online (other than gaming) is 2D text, forms, images, and video, VR doesn't add much.
Look how 3D movies failed to catch on.
Virtual reality MMORPGs, maybe. But it sounds like some non-gamer marketting people discovered MMOs and decided the name wasn't cool enough.
What’s really sad about this time, though, is that the Metaverse name comes from a dystopian sci-fi novel in which people retreat to a VR world because the real world is such a miserable place where corporations and organized crime runs the world.
Instead of embracing that, maybe we should be striving to avoid that state of affairs.
You should probably also avoid Ycombinator which is basically seeding reality with pointless corpo brands, many with their own brand bucks for you to spend
All in cahoots with government
Like an organized crime syndicate
And we all go online to distract from and support it
There’s no getting around a police state; the goal of a state will always be to insure people accept what’s politically correct.
If it’s politically correct there are billionaires that always win, political policy will enable it.
FTFY