The Metaverse Was Lame Even Before Facebook | Hacker News Reader

The Metaverse Was Lame Even Before Facebook

theatlantic.com

39 pointscoffeefirst6 comments

It seems "Internet history" now claims Neal Stephenson's coined the term "metaverse" in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash.

But this isn't really true. The term is older than that. I recall at least one usage as the title of BBS in the 80s that allowed members to join/form virtual nation-states and act as varying governing bodies. Other members would create issues and crisis that would have to addressed by these players.

Of course it was primitive compared to modern virtual reality, but it was nonetheless just that in word form -- and very much literally a "metaverse".

There does need to be a better "universal terminal" than the smartphone, tho. Reduce the suck of that interface just a bit and they may have themselves a winner, and pick up "We authenticate and monitor the world" as a bonus extra.

Weren't BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) lame before Facebook, too?

BBS > List of features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

Metaverse > History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse

TIL there's a VR version of Flight Simulator 2020 and it has the best Earth model of any game. Is that a metaverse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator_(20...

> Flight Simulator simulates the topography of the entire Earth using data from Bing Maps. Microsoft Azure's artificial intelligence (AI) generates the three-dimensional representations of Earth's features, using its cloud computing to render and enhance visuals, and real-world data to generate real-time weather and effects. Flight Simulator has a physics engine to provide realistic flight control surfaces, with over 1,000 simulated surfaces, as well as realistic wind modelled over hills and mountains

AFAIU, e.g. Microsoft Planetary Computer data is not yet integrated into any Virtual Game World Metaverses? An in-game focus on real world sustainability would help us understand that online worlds are very much connected to the real world. https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/applications

https://github.com/TomAugspurger/scalable-sustainability-pyd... describes how that can be done with Python code.

You are being downvoted but I agree with your point. Just because past attempts at something were “lame” does not mean the next attempt will be lame. You could just as well say that smartphones were lame before the iPhone. After all, Nokia had Symbian smartphones for some time. HTC had Windows Mobile smartphones with a touchscreen before the iPhone. But when the iPhone happened, everything fell into place and it changed the world. I am a massive skeptic of the meta verse concept, and definitely wary of any big technology company having a lot of influence/control over it (particularly Facebook). But I also don’t think a backwards-looking retrospective on something that hasn’t been done before in the same way is useful or a convincing dismissal.

Before the Web, the Internet was lame like 50 years ago, therefore. Who would ever need a 10MB storage device?

Hopefully there will be more VR standardization someday.

Maybe this Metaverse of decades past could integrate some live weather?

The author "invented the metaverse" because they ported a text based game to one with terrible visuals that was never really sold or used? It's a strange kind of inventor that never implements his invention or describes it so well that it might be implemented.

If I have an idea for a humanoid servant created from forcefields and holograms and create a mockup with a mannequin and a bucket - I shouldn't be able to call myself the inventor of the holographic-assistant. Further, if that technology ever became slightly plausible I don't think I'd have any special insight because I spent a bit of time doing something that obviously didn't work decades ago.

The hard part about the metaverse isn't thinking up the concepts. That's been done already, multiple ways by many people. The hard part is turning a fictional idea into a reality.

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