The metaverse is bullshit
outline.com
outline.com
Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.
We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed many more "forward looking visionary" startups.
Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
The Metaverse will be programmed with text.
The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text.
When journalists ultimately write its obituary, they will write text.
How many people watched game of thrones? How many people read all of the published books in a song of ice and fire? The book might be better but movies and TV are a lot more popular.
But the moment is over and now it’s just another show in a vast universe of streaming options.
Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while the book sold 150 million copies [4], so the books seem to have fared better.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episod...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#cite_no...
[3] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0120737/?ref_=bo_tt_ta...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-arts-tolkien-novel-idUSL1...
I've purchased all of the books you've mentioned, but watched the films/series via other means that won't show up in the statistics, and I'm not alone in doing so or vice-versa.
Books like Lord of the Rings gets passed through generations and loaned around as well, so I'm sure the number of people who've read LotR is a lot higher than the number of people who bought the books.
All Netflix cares about is profits. All libraries care about is sharing. They are two very different entities except for the fact that they deal with media. They are more different than they are similar.
Capitalism has really fucked us up if this is a common sentiment.
The first libraries were private. Sometimes they were opened to fee-paying members. Netflix is a library.
Public libraries are the "new" thing. But not the only thing.
Umm isn't that just on the date it airs? That's like comparing it to the people who read the book in the first month (year?).
There is no way as many people read the books as saw the tv show. I would bet it's at least one order of magnitude difference, if not possibly more.
Isn't this viewers in one country (USA), versus books sold worldwide?
> Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while the book sold 150 million copies [4], so the books seem to have fared better.
Viewerships in Box-Office are limited to a specific timeframe and location. They do not include television, private viewing on streaming-services/DVD/etc., later screenings in cinemas around the world. And the movies only exist for 20 years, while the booksales are from 3x that timeframe.
And finally, those are exceptional successful books and franchises. What about an average book? How many people have seen Forest Gump and how many actually read the book even decades later after the initial hype?
The most amazing special effects in the world can't match my imagination for fidelity and if they did, they'd still not be mine.
I've noticed that the book to TV/movies I like aren't because they are good adaptations so much as they are close to what I imagined.
It's rare that happens but when it does it makes the TV show a deeply enjoyable, Season 1 of Altered Carbon and all the seasons of The Expanse did/do it but not much else in the last 5 years has.
IMO, the best movies are NOT adaptations.
When you watch a movie, your eyes and ears has to collect the information, and some part of your brain has to turn that into a log of events. You have to do a lot of work to do to keep up with whats going on.
When you are reading, you don't need to do all that work, the author has already decided what is important.
I think the two mediums aren't really comparable, they both just happen to be good ways to tell stories.
Try prefixing text with 15 lines of advertising text that you must read, and people will prefer video quickly. In the current world, I don’t click on 30s video quotes because it is prefixed by 30s of ads.
But real-time chatting is not dense, it s in fact very reduntant with lots of information being discarded left and right, and avatats can still text each other. The idea of 3d stuff is just an evolution of that imho, a messenger with extra stuff
We have this stuff already btw, second life users do that every day, but Zuck didnt even mention it.
Also, they probably want to keep the nsfw aspect synonymous with Second Life out of the discussion.
Virtual medicine is the one thing that is really useful because the majority are of doctor visits are a waste of time and I go to the doctor a lot, if not once a week sometimes 3 in a single week. That doesn't even count the 2 times a week I usually have to go for a blood draw. Outside of the lab I honestly can't recall the last time in person part being necessary
Kids massively play and pay for games, games are the core of the appstores. They also listen to music and watch crazy hours of youtube.
Text won't die, but it's not the prime interface. Even texting is more and more sending gifs and stickers around.
Entertainment is often more enjoyable with rich sensory experiences and some amount of novelty. People with great imaginations are probably the folk who experience books that way but, for everyone else, rich media provides more entertainment value than text alone.
The Metaverse is entertainment. It might be great for parties, games and other virtual interactions/experiences but it's definitely more a medium for novelty and sensory excitement than for pure information exchange alone (obviously).
I often like to compare the post web 2.0 era (ubiquitous, high bandwidth, highly lubricated UIs) with mailing lists (limited, slow, bare). People think more before chatting on MLs, their messages can be short but mean a lot, or can be long and tell even more. Video feels a bit like the former.. you get more data, it's more pleasing for a while, but it doesn't give much more. Sometimes visual / geometric media add some value (when balanced and tuned to massage viewers mental model) but often its just redundant fat.
So much this. That effect is why I cringe every time I'm presented with an instructional video instead of text -- videos waste a lot of time to give me the information that could usually have been done in a page or two of text.
Well, there is that whole snapchat thing.
I’m not sold on this. Twitter is more of a mechanism for group totalitarianism than productive conversation.
> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
But I agree with your comment, while also agreeing with part of the spirit of the parent comment. Of course videos can be high quality, and making a high quality video probably takes much more effort than making the same thing into an article.
The reason: the movie is often the worse copy of the book. Very often, movies get made of successful and often well-written books. So, the movie has a high hurdle to overcome to be even better than the book.
(if movies were made of "average" books, this would likely be different, but this typically makes no commercial sense)
On the other hand, literary offsprings (books based on and book spin-offs) are created from movie. These are, by the same reason, also typically worse than the movie.
This is why longer series are so popular, see: the Mandalorian
It’s possible that as digital tools make it easier to make hundreds of hours of high quality content the ‘metaverse’ experience will become on par with the books.
I don't see the appeal of TikTok (though I haven't tried it), I much prefer skimming text than skimming through videos (let alone with sound). But it is incredibly popular, and a ton of people find video content addictive. To my surprise it isn't just popular among youth, but I have older smart senior software engineer friends (who didn't grow up surrounded by optimally addictive apps) who say it's amazing, at least once you let the algorithm converge.
So we shouldn't just assume that text will always prevail. Look at other seemingly amazing technologies/mediums that largely died or were at least hidden from the mainstream due to business reasons. These may be weak examples (I just woke up) but hopefully the gist of it is clear:
* RSS?
* I remember hearing that the alternatives to VHS and maybe blu-ray were technically superior but lost due to business reasons.
* Maybe Windows too, beat out technically superior alternatives because of business reasons
* Google+ apparently had a number of innovative features (like "circles"), but I barely know anyone who used it over facebook back in the day)
Now of course text content couldn't just "die", but perhaps the main companies hosting content could give strong incentives to produce video content instead of text, and control what the vast majority of people see. From what I understand: content producing companies (like CollegeHumor) that were super popular before Facebook were basically screwed when Facebook was the main way that people discovered content. Even though it was still possible to visit their website, the majority (or at least many) people would just watch whatever videos showed up on their facebook feed, so CollegeHumor took a huge hit. (I think that was what I read a while ago, anyway. I forget a lot of details so please correct me or add more information)
That scares the hell out of me: if a few tech companies ultimately control what the majority of people see, the content producers are basically chosen by the tech companies' algorithms. And the algorithms are ultimately going to optimize for profit, and not "quality content" or even "content that isn't harmful". (And more relevant to the comment I'm responding to: favouring ad heavy video over text). Potential up side: maybe it will be easier to filter out crap content if it all goes to video.
If people value quality content, quality content will be rewarded. If people don't care it won't. Some people just want to have a laugh and don't care about the production value of the video.
I have never tried to make money producing content on the internet. But I have found a few good content producers who make podcasts and post them to YouTube. I wish that they would also post transcripts and have an RSS feed, but they don't really have any incentive to do that. And I can't blame them: I don't think I would really pay any extra for it. And unless there are better content producers who show up and do those things, I'll probably still keep watching the same podcasts on YouTube.
So I am concerned that all the best content producers just doing whatever will make them money, and:
* ultimately they will probably produce content and host it with a big company.
* And that big company will probably do whatever it can to maximize profits
* (and presumably content providers will typically favour the company that pays them the best).
* And I worry that video content can make way, way more money than text, at least for certain content types.
Certainly I'm probably overstating the issues, but I think there's some truth to this. Look at what happens when you look up cooking recipes on the internet: you almost always get a big article and a bunch of garbage that no one wants. I think I read somewhere that they do that because a recipe can't be copyrighted without an article. If that's true, why isn't there a nice clean recipe site that doesn't have all the garbage in it? Perhaps even with a nifty database where I can filter based on ingredients and stuff that I have? I think the answer is that (#1) I don't look for new recipes that often, and (#2) I am willing to tolerate skimming through some garbage on the rare occasions that I do.
Sure it shifts parts of the cognitive load to those writing or reading it, but in my eyes if there is any meaningful societal future text would play a central role.
This is why I am no friend of the direction IT is taking nowadays. Although I didn't grew up with it myself, I wished people would have to learn working with a unix shell and programming languages just like you learn how to read and write.
Learning to read and write is certainly not easy, but it really pays off if a society teaches its members how to do it no theless. In my eyes learning text based computing is just the same
Suggesting that a metaverse in VR is plausible has nothing to do with eradicating text. There will be plenty of it in there. People will not be welded into headsets and have their books torched, as the Nostradamuses want us to think.
"A Picture says more than a thousand words."
> Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.
Because text is asynchronous, and persistent. Text is a weak medium, but with specific strengths which can beat others in certain situation if they can played well.
> We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
I guess you haven't discovered yet youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...
> News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
No, they do not? Some do, not all. If anything, the people reading tweets are the one you should trust the least. But that's for reasons of twitter, not text.
> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
Which is proof that text is the weaker medium, because text demands the readers to fill the holes, which is for some a beneficial experience. And on the other side, pictures also demands more work to let them shine. This would be an actual valid argument which will make metaverse problematic. There will be a high chance of 90% of the content just being halfassed trash.
> The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text.
More like diagrams.
Meanwhile, text is so much more easily consumable. (Youtube Premium junkie here, BTW.)
But yes, of course this is another case in which text can shine because of its weakness. Simplicity can be beneficial.
If I give you a thousand word essay, good luck crating an image that conveys the same information. I mean you could photograph the essay, but then we're back to text again.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Or are we back at pictures? Because text is generally just a collection of tiny little pictures.
Let's consider a philosophical essay as something highly abstract, then its video counterpart would be mostly audio (transcript of the essay). In other cases, e.g. a scientific report, video might be easier content to consume but producing a proper video for that take much more time than writing a 6-page text. The video as the visual medium counterpart has lot more complexity and not always worth it.
Consider a presentation: text+visual+audio, it's more capable to convey the essence of the material. So all these boils down to what is the perfect combination for a particular use case. From short to long image/video, from Instagram, TikTok to YouTube, each multimedia choice lead to different use cases.
And text is the mightiest not because that it necessarily convey better, but because it can:
1. produced/maintained/transferred with the least complexity than others, it's much more efficient representation in this regard.
2. It can represent with most rigorous detail (e.g. consider a math paper)
3. It has the easiest retrieval and mining
4. BUT It usually needs more effort to consume
It's always nice to choose the proper combination of text+visual+audio+interaction. AR/VR only add one ingredient (if you consider it a new one) to this whole toolbox we as humankind are building. It makes our communication much more complex, and much more powerful. However, at the end, the most basic one which is text will remain the mightiest. We may need to wait for some bizarre telepathy technology between brains to change the status quo.
It is indeed async & persistent, but those are not it's only strengths.
Text is ALSO highly searchable, and skim-able. I can search and jump right to the point I want, I can rapidly skim through parts I'm not so interested in and then focus and examine deeply and repeatedly the part that is of interest. Or, I can read it sequentially like a video/audio stream. In contrast, searching vid/audio is cumbersome, frustrating, and time-wasting at best.
Text is ALSO has a much higher information density than video, except for situations where moving pictures actually add to the information, as in video of a specifi event, mechanism working, etc. Most of the time, just listening to a talking head is far slower, and harder to remember than reading (where I can read rapidly forward, then back and re-read key bits, often without even thinking about it; w/ video, I'd need to interrupt the train of thought, hit [back], try to go back just the right number of seconds, then re-view, etc. - useful ONLY when the vid id of an event, not of just reading info.)
Moreover, text is more direct. To make a really good video usually requires a well-thought out script written in advance, from which one reads - I'd rather just read the script. And when it is something like an interview with a noted expert, I'd usually rather just read the transcript, for the above reasons.
You actually highlight the problem with video: >>There will be a high chance of 90% of the content just being halfassed trash.
Absolutely correct - most of it will be rushed out without the solid base of a test-based script and screenplay, which would in most cases be preferable...
Text really is —still— one of the key defining inventions of humanity, and I have no expectations that a "metaverse" will beat it soon. (Now if it can start reading text directly out of my brain without typing/dictating, and I can edit it on the fly — THAT will be really something...)
Often, people's considered thoughts will give a better connection than their offhand comments. Many a great romance or friendship has grown and been preserved by handwritten letters sent via the post.
In thinking about my last comment, what I'd really want in a metaverse is the ability for the participants' thoughts to be scanned, textualized, and edited via thought transfer, then displayed above/beside them, so we can both read and speak about things in real-time, at the speed of thought/reading, instead of speech. It could get really interesting...
It is sooo common to feel that we can't communicate nearly as fast as we think, even when the lot of us are very fast talkers...
You state this as fact while it's extremely debatable. What is your measure of a mediums strength?
In that sense, text is a strong medium for certain things (like a dataset) and bad for others (like conveying the beauty of a camera pan within a movie that conveys a miniature story).
I've noticed that fanboyism of old AND new technologies is often only grabbing half of the story. We still use "obsolete" technologies, since none of them ever become completely bereft of potential purpose with the development of new technologies, even when they become hipster-niche-chic. Horses or tape storage, for example.
Reading for pleasure requires an individual with a greater degree of imagination and intelligence vs staring at a screen and often takes a much greater time investment and yet often offers a broader set of experiences because one needn't convince someone to invest 100s of millions animating fantastic scenes if one author sitting at a typewriter or a keyboard can produce as vivid an experience in the mind of the reader.
Movies financial and runtime constraints often rob the source material of much of its richness and the description of the players emotions, thoughts, and state of mind is harder to communicate aptly without seeming clunky and expositional.
I’m saying yes, we hear lots of people say “the book was better” and in most cases that’s true. However, most people will never have read the books movies based on books were based on, so it’s kind of a pointless Pyrrhic argument.
That said, many will claim that The Godfather movie was better than the book -I never read the book, so I cannot offer an opinion.
But, yes, normally, in order to capture the nuance and details of a book you’d need a multi part series.
I think I tried, lo so many moons ago. And IIRC, I can confirm that yes, The Godfather is one of the few exceptions that proves the rule.
> "A Picture says more than a thousand words."
One of those two is bullshit (and always has been)... And it's not the first one.
> > We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
> I guess you haven't discovered yet youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...
And yet, here you are discussing this -- not on youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...
> > Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
> Which is proof that text is the weaker medium, because text demands the readers to fill the holes, which is for some a beneficial experience.
This was, by my count, the third time in your comment you claimed that "text is the weaker medium" -- each time in response to an example illustrating how text is superior. So basically, your definition of "weaker" is... What the rest of the world would call stronger, right?
Facebook has _nothing_ for the future.
* Blue app is already on it's death bed.
* Instagram is already seeing a massive decline in quality and engagement as its getting close to the end of its lifecycle.
* They managed to survive Snapchat, but I think that made them think Instagram is too big to fail. Thus, they didn't go after TikTok. It was a mistake.
* What's App is not monetizable.
* Oculus is not becoming the next PS4/Xbox like they hoped.
Facebook is usually being compared to the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon. It's nothing compared to them. It's not even gonna be able to do a Microsoft/IBM pivot as it has no monetizable developer ecosystem.
I personally think they should've acquired TikTok last year when TikTok was looking to be acquired by Microsoft. They probably would've extended their survival for another 10-ish years (lifecycle of a social media)
It is, they talked about introducing ads to the status tab before. I agree on the rest though
I still have not agreed to the terms of use since I continue to be able to opt out and am amused by FB basically chickening out requiring their users to actually agree. The normal course of action would be to eventually block access to the app. That hasn't happened.
So, they could turn on ads but then they'd have to get me to agree to that first or risk losing me. They really want to do that but at the same time they are afraid of what will happen.
In the same way they chickened out of their blockchain plans by simply not talking about it anymore. The Meta announcements featured a large absence of any of that. Which basically means they are probably giving up on the whole notion.
I'm guessing Meta might turn out to be more of the same. FB is struggling to come up with things that actually work. A lot of their efforts just fizzle out. Facebook bots kind of never happened. Payments are dead in the water. They threw out the baby with the bathwater when they had an actual gaming platform with gamers on facebook and shutdown the platform in favor of a glorified ad platform.
Actually a good plan for them would be to rewind fifteen years of bad decision making. Of course that would require getting rid of the chief decision maker.
Me too. Every couple of weeks they show me a popup asking me to accept the new terms and I just click the x and continue about my day. At first they were threatening me that I'd lose access to the app by some date but that date passed months ago and I still have access. I'm amused because I feel like I called their bluff and it turns out they're not as confident as they make themselves out to be. One day they'll probably block me but until then...shrug.
Something like that that has no benefit to users is an absolute death warrant for them. The other apps only need to reach a tipping point and they will be absolute dead in the water, they're already creeping up.
Eh, IMO I don't think that would have worked - I suspect it would have raised too much anti-trust attention and not have been allowed.
The bigger picture is that in the UK at least, 'Meta' owns most communication channels that I use to communicate with my friends. TikTok isn't really a replacement to insta/whatsapp/Facebook, it's a replacement to Youtube.
I think Facebook is using the 'metaverse' as a metaphor to mean 'Facebook owning all forms of communication, as much as possible, both traditional messanger/audio but also extending into the real world as much as possible, and new media'. In that case, I think the metaverse is a much broader play (that nobody else can easily make, and that probably raises even more concerns!).
Forgive my ignorance but I thought Instagram was just a place to upload random photos.
Bring them back to email, because there are still many small email providers in the UK. See https://delta.chat/en/ for email as IM.
Or a sign that Zuckerberg's read all the popular fiction on the subject but failed to comprehend how much of it was either satirical or meant as a warning.
Ha ha, so, in fact, bullshit.
I'm so happy someone called it out. Being a developer, tech-savvy person, I should be all into BitCoin, VR, meta ... but I have recoiled from more or less the last decade of crap (including, I might add, "social" and maybe even phones — although they are great for navigating).
Maybe I am just getting old (that is true) or maybe this is in fact a load of bullshit: just Big-Internet trying to make "meta" a thing.
Pass.
Google in 1998 was just another search engine. Netflix mailed DVDs. Amazon grew from $150 to 600m revenue and had just started selling music and movies.
Facebook non-ad revenue is $3b annually and growing. Oculus store and devices account for easily half or more of that number. Beat Saber on the Quest 2 alone has cracked $100m. Beat Saber!
The biggest drag on Oculus right now is the need for a Facebook account. The switch to Meta fixes this, makes Facebook just one of many properties, with an eye on the prize. It’s like Microsoft pivoting to Azure and away from Windows years before Nadella did.
Valve could step up, or Apple, or Google. But otherwise Facebook is running away with VR, and that will have a massive impact on all of us.
Maybe within the tech circles and HN crowd. But outside these circles nobody even feels like something is off.
Reminds me of when no one cared about native mobile (vs the Web), or before that, no one cared about GUIs (command line is where it’s at)
GUIs started to catch on in 1992 with Windows 3.1, and only became ubiquitous when Windows 95 came out. At which point the Mac plummeted to 2% market share, before the iMac started to turn it around in 1998-1999.
The backlash to Steve's announcement of "web apps only" was largely from game developers and early adoption tinkerers. Native mobile was rejected by a majority of developers (who still complain even though we're down to 2 platforms) as an abomination that eschews the open standards of the web and required 3-5x the work to support Android, iOS, Windows Mobile , Nokia Symiban, Blackberry, etc.
Most "native" apps were thin wrappers around HTML5 sites until around 2012-2014. Instagram is arguably what changed this, and why Facebook bought them for $1b in 2012. Users liked the features and responsiveness of native apps. Shortly after, Facebook shipped their native mobile app (written by a 3rd party contractor that knew native mobile - it was an HTML5 wrapper prior to this).
Dozens of essays have been published on HN over the past decade lamenting the death of the Web, PCs, hobbyist PC tinkering, and all that is good, because of the terrible trend driven by native mobile.
So, yes, GUIs and native mobile were exciting from a certain point of view, but they've also had huge (and ultimately ineffective) backlashes that slowed things down a bit.
Saying "nobody cares about VR" feels to me exactly like this. Those that see how important AR/VR will become feel like those that saw the potential of GUIs or native mobile early. Those only seem obvious in retrospect.
In both cases the new UX environment took 5-10 years to catch on. We're now arguably in year 5 of VR/AR (if you assume 2016 era devices were the first viable mass market ones, which also coincides with the release of Pokemon Go as the first mass market AR experience) which is easily as big a shift as it was from keyboard to mouse.
What are you talking about - they went after TikTok exactly the same way as they did after Snapchat: By cloning the feature and making it prominent in the app, then double-listing them in the main Big Blue App, too.
Instagram added Stories to copy Snapchat and they are still prominently at the top of the app.
Then they added Reels to copy Tik Tok and it's the primary central bottom button of the app, and also one of the first things you see in the Facebook app.
The hilarity though is that Tiktok watermarks exported videos. Vast majority of "Reels" on Instagram have Tik Tok watermarks.
They're failing to destroy Tik Tok the way they succeeded in destroying Snapchat (effectively) for a couple of reasons though:
1) Snapchat was primarily for person-to-person communication (their attempts at highlighting "creators" was always awkward. Instagram already had all the celebrities, and what grows success in "social networks" these days isn't the social graph between peers but parasocial graphs with big time creators
2) Snapchat was always technologically inferior. The quality of the photos and videos was awful. The AR filters were slow. Instagram offered higher quality and better performance. TikTok doesn't have that problem. It's blazing fast and for the kind of meme content it is best for, video quality isn't important.
3) TikTok's For You Page (FYP) recommendation algorithm is truly groundbreaking, and will be remembered in 10 years the way we remember panning around on Google Maps and not having the page reload. It is truly incredible how effectively it learns content you might be interested in after some engagement, and crafts an FYP that feels like it's speaking directly to your anxieties, sense of humor, neurosis, aspirations, goals, etc.
You can call it creepy and you can worry about how all this information about your personality is going to the Chinese government, but that's a separate issue...
They were wrong. They should've gone after TikTok by acquiring it. Just like they did with Instagram.
That seems shortsighted. I’m not even talking about destroying the app by adding ads or selling user data.
They could add payments between individuals, it would instantly become the default method in many countries. Expand it to pay businesses then, via QR codes like they have in China. Make sure you’re cheaper than cards and Apple/Google Pay, especially for small sums.
They could sell business accounts, and allow customers to message any business by searching them by name (without having them as a contact). Give them a url and QR code that opens a conversation directly. Develop tools for pros to efficiently handle customers. Let customers book a business directly from the app for example. Given the reach of Whatsapp in many places you’d have a lot of interested businesses.
They have a place in the phone dock of entire first-world countries, billions of people literally have the app open all day, and they can’t monetize?
When Facebook thinks of monetizing Whats App as one of their major/only assets, it needs to find a business plan that'd allow billions of dollars.
By the way, a hefty portion of that cash was pocketed by Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook's deathbed is gold laden. Ads targeted to 45+ users are 2-3 times more expensive than ads for 16-25. By the way, ads targeted to 30+ women (hello, Instagram!) are even more expensive.
If the only limitation of metaverse is Code and Content, and if that would be much easier to create, then in a blink of an eye it will turn into something absolutely inconceivable to mercedes benz drivers. What really is bullshit, is lack of imagination in people and a shitload of thought inertia. Personally, it feels like the article author has never ever been in the internet, confining themselves at a small circle of “social” networks bs. Those will live in an exact copy of their current environment, paying to bigcorps with their work hours to achieve “expensive” toys, to impress similar narrow-minded guys. I’ve seen second life at its peak, and this is exactly what they were doing there.
And will then exit, captured and recycled!
Welcome to the future!
And they may have a point: after all, "the old folks" 30 years ago were saying the same thing about the Internet, well into 2000s.
I personally feel that hardware need to be next-gen as I am nauseus but would be happy to have discord alternative to play in VR. Imagine drawing board, fake cinema, sharing games, arranging common space minecraft-like. I think this will work. You login after work and do creative shit with buddies.
This is how it works for me now but we have discord and own game that we work on. Happy to upgrade XP when new hardware comes.
My high school and college friends and I are spread across the continent. The pandemic and a mix of Discord and Tabletop simulator brought us back together to do regular board gaming. This is effectively a VR environment without the headset.
My 12 year old hangs out on VRchat or Minecraft , simultaneously watching YouTube or Twitch streams at the same time with his friends when he is home. Today this is a mix of FaceTime , Discord etc, but all-in-one will be used if it’s better.
My younger daughter likes to explore VR worlds, and interact with them.
We are seeing what’s coming years in advance, but many aren’t looking. Facebook is going to eat this space up completely at their current rate of success, if Apple , Microsoft or Valve don’t step up.
This is the central problem for VR. The internet offers many experiences that are essentially "VR without the headset", from the Tabletop simulator you mentioned to World of Warcraft. What does the headset really add? You're still looking at a screen, except now you've got a damn thing on your head and are blind to the actual world around you. That virtual world better be really incredible to make up for it.
ultimately, people choose VR for the immersion. It’s why problem build home theatres or still go to the theatre, or visit amusement parks, etc., when they’d rather stay home. The headsets are getting far more convenient and comfortable. Still early.
That's anecdotal evidence. Just because there were user that age, doesn't change that their population, in general, was skeptical.
Zuckerberg is 37 years old, so he’d probably be lumped into “the old folks” category. Why would he get it and not us?
I’m, a decade younger than Mark, so idk if I’m young enough by your standards to get it, but my sister and her friends are in college and think this is all a joke. None of them are interested in putting on VR goggles, let alone joining the “metaverse.” None of them had heard of it until Facebook’s name change.
The Metaverse is a top-down Wall Street sponsored hype cycle. It’s not a matter of “old folks” not getting it. It’s Zuckerberg’s attempt to distract Wall Street investors and consumers from Facebook’s growing problems.
Those problems, at their recent peak, are that – recent. Yet I know, for a fact, they have been working on the new concept for very long now. I spoke to a FB insider about a year ago already and he, in very diluted way, described what we know as metaverse now.
I'm out of the loop, what problems are they having ?
People underestimate Zuckerberg’s ability to see socio-technical far in the future at their peril. He was ridiculed for making a MySpace competitor, for getting rid of Facebook Apps, for the look & feel changes, the ridiculous prices paid for Instagram and WhatsApp… and he was right each time (for growing his business and his customer base).
Where he has been wrong is in putting Facebook at the centre of his empire, when it’s increasingly a legacy platform for family members, old people and maladjusted conservatives. Metaverse corrects this by making Facebook just one of several properties.
Disregarding Meta entirely, I would say it's completely normal for people on HN to be sceptical of new things. Most new things don't work out. Most new things are either vaporware or snake oil. It's hard to tell the good from the bad sometimes.
No, the reason is because many new technologies are dismissed here not due to technical infeasibility, but because posters cannot understand the point or value proposition. When this is happening in response to technologies that many people are using and investing in as early adopters, which provides proof of some kind of value at a minimum, is generally speaking a sign of being out of touch to write it off entirely as doomed to fail, vaporware, etc, because you simply do not understand what people are investing their time and capital in.
For example this comes up continually with VR and AR and crypto, extremely rapidly growing technologies with tons of capital flooding into them. It's one thing to say we can't do something, it's another thing to see entire industries forming around you and tons of capital being allocated and saying it will all fail simply because you don't see the point.
The value prop of VR and AR is remote social presence on par with f2f and full sensory override. This is why Facebook is pivoting the entire company around it. This is not something to ignore and dismiss, unless you think Zuck is a complete idiot. The value prop of crypto is economic freedom. This is why VCs are pivoting their entire portfolios around it and why more than a trillion USD have rushed into it. This is not something to ignore and dismiss, unless you think the entire alternative Internet-based financial system being developed around crypto is a bunch of hot air. At a minimum, for those technologies, they deserve steelmanning given how far they've run without dying. The hubris it takes to dismiss things as big as these, which as much potential to radically alter society, isn't just unfounded, but foolish, given that being on the wrong side of this trade in the direction of dismissiveness is hugely risky if you are a technologist.
Well...
> The value prop of VR and AR is remote social presence on par with f2f and full sensory override
Full sensory override how? VR (and VR-facilitated AR) can't even create an immersive visual experience at this point. It hasn't yet cracked the "3 dimensions" chestnut. You talk of "full sensory override" as if plugging into the brain stem was right around the corner (and was going to bring about that override).
If you did have full-sensory override, you might be onto something, but the way things are today, with the tech so inadequate, it seems like a non-starter. Full-sensory override, if it will come, will likely come from a completely different direction. Think lucid dreaming.
> The value prop of crypto is economic freedom
The kind of economic freedom where even your ability to get involved in crypto at all is fully dependent on centralized exchanges, and their approval of you as a client? That, or rummage around in your attic trying to find a spare power plant that has to be there somewhere, so that you can enter the game via mining.
I am sorry. I really would like to believe. But these hot technologies seem to come with insurmountable design flaws that have been there from day one, were still present at day one thousand, and will be there at day ten thousand. I think that is the reason for the broad skepticism.
Also there are already decentralized exchanges within crypto assets (eg uniswap), but you do need to find a counter party to get out of fiat. It’s being worked on and centralized exchanges aren’t your only option. It would be worth catching up on DeFi.
Edit: btw I meant visual and auditory sensory override - I agree it is a ways off before you have full proprioception etc, if ever. Not necessary to beat face to face social presence tho.
Just out of curiosity, what about other senses? Smell, touch, temperature, taste?
How close are we to fully experiencing a dinner / concert / mountain hike in VR?
The key point is effectively, imo. If not completely real, there may be a line of deepdive that once you cross it, real trips will still feel “better quality”, but not as in vs “staring at the monitor in your room”. VR doesn’t have to be REAL or even resemble reality, it just has to be convincing.
In my view, there is no point in “walking around” with your real legs in VR, or having the human shape at all. Think of it as a PAL/NTSC converter from human to VR-entity which may or may not be human in different situations. There is no human dinner, concert or even mountain of importance in there. You may be e.g. a spaceship flying in the heat of a quasar, or a building bot with 360 view of its surrondings that moves along the eye focus and feels nearby constructions with its ”skin”. That’s what I was talking about in the root comment (that’s still naive and narrow-minded compared to what is to come). Sorry for this analogy, but most of comments against vr are like “we don’t need modern cities because these are not built for horses”. Yes, no horses, no haystacks, no blacksmiths. It doesn’t mean people will not rush into the city once it’s built with all the infra.
But its just a new way of looking at pixels on a screen. You can't actually "do" anything that you can't already do now.
You can pretend to fly the moon. You can simulate going on an adventure. Its all just entertainment.
That's how you dismiss the value and can't understand
Don't read HN if you want to be excited about something new, read HN if you want it to be torn apart with constant negativity.
I'm excited about Deno.
I really like the idea of serverless, cloud functions, and these new durable cloud objects that Cloudflare is talking about.
I'm super excited about the Steam Deck. A powerful, handheld PC running Linux, with real buttons I can click, not all just touch screens.
I can understand how Smart Watches will be cool eventually. When they are unteathered and running an open OS.
I will grudgingly admit that the stupid siri voice assist ball thing my wife bought is useful. We use it a lot for setting timers and alarms, playing music, and we are slowing finding more ways it can be useful. I can see that as Siri gets smarter, she will be more useful, so I can understand why everybody is going ape shit over AI.
I think e-bikes scooters are cool. I think EV cars will change the world significantly. I do a 15 minute commute on a scooter every day.
There is a lot of great new tech out there. VR is not one of them.
Even this begs the question.
Why do people take it as a given that there will be a "metaverse"?
I mean, personally, I think that a genuinely interoperable, decentralized VR/AR infrastructure would be pretty neat—I have no idea if it would solve any specific real-world problems, but "decentralized and interoperable" is a world better than the systems we've got in the current internet.
But...that's just the thing. Where's the incentive to make it genuinely interoperable and decentralized, especially for a company like Facebook? They want things to be under their control, so they can mine them for data and sell ads on them.
Any form of argument where the conclusion is assumed in one of the premises. Many people use the phrase "begging the question" incorrectly when they use it to mean, "prompts one to ask the question". That is NOT the correct usage. Begging the question is a form of circular reasoning.
Logical Form:
Claim X assumes X is true.
Therefore, claim X is true.
There are no great incentives for Meta or whoever to make their vision of the metaverse align with the openness of the web or Internet, other than perhaps a desire by their leader to do something good for the world to cement his legacy. So this is why it is important smart people work on providing alternative visions, as oppose to writing off the entire thing while the future arrives and we're left subject to corporations because the nay-sayers didn't understand what was about to happen. (See also: the iPhone)
Wow, have you ever seen Mark Zuckerberg talking, or noticed any of his actions? To imagine he would drive Facebook to do something out of "a desire to do something good for the world to cement his legacy" is comically outside any realistic possibility.
I disagree with the author that I can see a lot of value in improved social interactions and virtual workspaces in VR once the technology gets there. You can already see glimpses of it with today's hardware and software. And, it makes sense the VR/AR will be the medium to contain all other mediums. But, that doesn't mean that we need to live in "metaverse" as defined by Neal Stephenson or how Zuck imagines it.
Yes, you'll be able to create your Facebook (or Meta) avatar, and use it to log into work meetings and social events - but that's not much different than using Facebook Login today. There are already a bunch of siloed social experiences in VR, like Facebook Horizon, VRChat, Altspace and Rec Room.
I don't see FB or any other of these apps moving to open protocols that would allow decentralization and federation, just as todays "2D" social media companies, including all the ones owned by FB, aren't doing it.
If Zuckerberg is serious about a federated metaverse and open protocols, he should start by opening up Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
In the end, the metaverse will be the internet, but mostly experienced through the medium of VR/AR.
Edit: Typos
In the same way that e-books will make normal books completely obsolete? I doubt it.
I now buy books as a fancy way to donate to authors I like.
Whether Meta will be able to dominate the scene if the way they do photo sharing I dunno. Their demo video doesn't enthuse me (https://youtu.be/SAL2JZxpoGY).
I guess they may be able to work the network thing - I put my photos in insta/fb because thats where my friends/family are. But will I go on Meta to chat to mum? Probably not. I think text messaging/phone are fine for that.
We need a few desktop screens up for information, a big whiteboard, and the ability to see each others screens. With Immersed and Horizon Workrooms we get all of that already. Before workrooms was really stable we were using Immersed and keeping Mural (white boarding) up on one of our desktops together.
I also do daily workouts and meditation every morning before I start work, all in VR.
I haven't had any motion sickness yet.
The only difficulty I have run into is my bad eyesight. I have found the prescription lenses inserts from Reloptix to be the best, for me at least.
The biggest problem with wearing it for hours is comfort. The strap that comes with the Quest 2 is not good enough. You will feel the weight of it on your cheeks the most, it will get sore pretty quickly. You have to upgrade. I use a halo strap from VR Panda, it solves that problem for me.
There didn’t seem to be anything new in there and it feels detached from any reality - even a reality in which we might find ourselves in 10-20 years.
I’m generally bullish on VR/AR in the long term. But this is not it.
What also frustrates me with these types of presentations is how misleading they are about the current and near-future state of technology. Much of the general public will be totally misled by what was “demonstrated” here. Particularly once it’s been processed through the bullshit-adding filters of various news outlets who will further degrade the signal to the point where it’s almost entirely noise.
Normal people can’t easily distinguish between utterly fabricated pre-rendered nonsense which has a very low chance of coming into reality in their lifetime, and what’s actually realistically possible in the near-term future (5-10 years).
Microsoft did this with their Hololens presentation years ago. You look at the visuals being presented and you may as well be watching an episode of Star Trek. (But even that was anchored more to reality than this).
Having said that, the scripted dialogue, forced hand gestures and weird facial expressions throughout did get me wondering whether they are actually further forward than we thought, and the entire thing was presented not by humans but by a rough draft of some AI-driven avatars, which look almost real but where they haven’t sufficiently nailed the “acts like a convincing human” feature just yet.
Edit: Found an article about it. Actually in 1993-4 https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1993-06-19-93061...
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
Perhaps a less verbose and more honest version would be:
“Sorry. GDPR. So…. Nope.”
:)
the good news is that the metaverse and the tech industry's very
expensive obsession with trying to make it a reality will be a
schadenfreude generator the likes of which we've never seen before
I'm not sure I'd write them off as a bunch of idiots quite yet.
A bunch of idiots with a lot of money maybe...
But look: Something is happening.
You can close your eyes and pretend it's not. Apps are going to go away and the web continue to be The Way people access information online, and sucky little progressive web applications that hardly anyone is using or making money off are going to become awesome and NFTs will die. I mean, heck, it's only a matter of time until all those people who invested in bitcoin lose it alllllllllll right?
You can sit there and laugh as how stupid they all are.
...maybe? If you want to.
That's probably not a wise thing to do though.
I think there are enough things going on, with enough competent folk doing them, and enough money behind them, that you're looking at the start of a change.
Who knows how it'll go, but I think it might surprise people who are sitting around laughing.
One thing that you can always bet on: Things change.
Corporations rule us today and will only continue to grow larger and more powerful. There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms. See the futile fight for privacy some of us still care about as an example.
We, the technologists, are complicit or directly benefit financially from this change. Governments are slowly catching up, pretending to control the monster they've let loose on their citizens, but are really in symbiosis with corporations, so nothing will change there.
This Metaverse thing is not something to laugh about or dismiss. It will happen one way or the other. And all of it makes me want to pick up gardening and go live in a mountain shed away from it all.
We've all read the sci-fi books or seen the movies to know how this plays out, yet are actively working towards that future. I have no words to describe it but mass insanity.
I'm trying really hard to think about the positive aspects of this, but I'm coming up short. Will the future be more convenient? Sure. Will this help some people live out a better life in the real world? Probably. But the vast majority will be mindlessly plugged into this thing, isolated from meatspace, at the direct benefit of the corporations that produced the experience.
There won't be a big war between man and machine. The Matrix will be built by humans, machines will help us do it, and we'll all want a taste of that juicy steak we saw in that ad.
What are we doing...?
I don't think history supports this prediction. We've been through several cycles of of this over the past few hundred years already -- the rise of powerful corporatocracy, followed by the people ultimately getting sick of that and knocking corporate power back.
I see no reason to expect that pattern won't continue to repeat as we move into the future.
Why would an asset designed for one game make sense or look good or feel at home in a completely different one?
Why would companies make one of them and sell it for a million bucks instead of trying to convince more players to buy it in a shop for two bucks?
Is the mechanic of a weapon gonna adjust to the new game when you import it or stay the same? If it stays the same, it's gonna be exploit galore. If it changes, well then, what's the point? Gonna be the same AK-47 as everyone else's, but this tiny sticker on it that nobody's gonna pay attention to is unique!
Even if we pretend this is somehow a promising field, why even use NFTs and make each one a couple of pixels different instead of making a common one, selling it for like $50, buyers get a file in whichever format is agreed upon, and import them in the settings.
Okay, but none do, and none will, and any other video game that did code in a substantially similar functionality would simply sell the same content in their own game, there's no benefit to the company to spend the time and money to make the content and not get compensated for it especially given radically different content architectures, visual styles, levels of detail, physics, object-player interactivity, etc. You can tell this is true, because they could already make it interoperable now and they don't -- like it's entirely possible that Marvel could sell "buy the Spider-Man game and get Spider-Man costumes in every other game he's a crossover character, across all platforms" and they... absolutely don't do this!
But also this vision is predicated on there being a small number of canonical NFT brands, when in reality you can open up Grand Theft Auto Online and there are literally tens of thousands of items made for the game. So if there's 10,000 items made for GTA Online and 50,000 items made for the Sims Series, then interoperability means that Square Enix needs to add 60,000 items to Final Fantasy to support subsidizing the NFT marketplace for the other two games? Or else you sit around trying to import your Mercedes Hood Ornament NFT from Forza into Mortal Kombat 13 and it tells you "hey, we don't support that one! Or that one! Or that one! Or that one!"
And you can tell this is true because Nintendo already has a system for this called Amiibo where you buy little figurines with fungible codes that putatively can work in any game that supports them. And 99% of games on Switch don't support any, the ones that support any only support 1 or 2, and only one game supports more than 10 or so, and it's a crossover fighting game called Smash Bros.
You might say, okay, but Amiibo are finnicky, they take up space, NFTs improve on Amiibo by not having you actually need a physical object. Okay, but the vast majority of the value is in the physical object. You can tell this is true because Nintendo has the capability of reprinting the relatively expensive physical figurines as marginally nearly zero cost trading cards and... they don't, because there's no real demand.
But then you say, no, the key thing to NFTs is their non-fungibility. Okay, but that's a horrid fit for games. Now instead of modelling Mario once, I need to model Mario a hundred thousand times. If the differences are small between each model, then I get the benefits of procedural generation so it's less work, but the market collapses because the token is as-if fungible and that means the supply is as-if unbounded. And as Nintendo, wouldn't I rather sell each Mario costume for $1 to every player that wants it rather than selling one Mario costume for $100 to someone and then establish an elaborate crypto-driven derivative market where I get a chunk of each secondary sale?
It seems like the most obvious way you can make NFTs actually be something different is when you overtly lean into the bizarre gambling, ultra-rare one offs, and big money market speculation stuff, and at that point you no longer have a game at all, which is probably pretty bad if you're a game manufacturer. But game manufacturers have tried this too, with limited edition sales (Nintendo sold a game last year that they discontinued after 6 months to preserve scarcity, both digital and physical; Nintendo has also done ultra-rare and non-fungible collectible Pokemon leveraging real world events), numbered editions (Atlus with Devil Summoner 2 on the PS2 in 2006 or so). Even one-off multi-thousand dollar stuff has been done in the gaming industry, with special issue collectible hardware (Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have all done this).
Like the issues raised in the currently top upvoted thread, almost everything about NFT in video games is pretty easily analogized to something people have already tried and failed at in video games or something people currently do in video games more efficiently without NFT. And it seems the people entering the space, rather than study what works or doesn't, start from the premise that they read a novel that described something they thought was cool and then trying to blue sky that in video games.
In the end that really doesn't matter, each version for same weapon is listed under few categories. And for players it mostly doesn't matter which one they pick. So even in the case we have good example what non-fungibility is, it really does not matter much.
As the article points out this is a dumb idea that doesn't make any sense. You could port an ownership token from one game to the next, but the receiving game has to implement some semantics for that item that are completely divorced from the originating game anyway.
They’ll find it’s easier to just use a centralised database they collectively run or contract out or whatever. The whole idea of putting the “ownership records” on a public blockchain doesn’t help the system work at all and adds a ton of complexity (not to mention environmental concerns).
But like, eh, yay blockchain!
Another possibility is mapping everything to a limited set of items. So like, I can bring over any of my golf clubs from PGA Tour 2K12 to Grand Theft Auto, but they all just map to a generic "golf club" I can beat people up with. But this isn't very compelling after the first couple times someone tries it.
Tim Sweeney has been talking up a technically reasonable vision of the Metaverse for several years now. But Epic hasn't shipped much. You can load new game maps into Fortnite. That's about it. Unreal Engine 5 doesn't have much in the way of support for a world where users can change almost everything. It's still based on a model where you do massive optimization during build time.
This seems extremely dubious to me and also shows a severe lack of humility. There are many very smart people at these companies and Mark Zuckerberg has consistently shown himself to be a canny and innovative founder (even if you dislike him for whatever reason).
It may end up being BS but dismissing it out of hand seems extremely foolish.
There is good reason to be skeptical given the long list of failures and Zuck hasn't shown why his take would be different yet - to my knowledge.
In the words of Morpheus from the Matrix, "Show me."
Mark has shown that he successfully didn’t destroy a MySpace clone that prints money. Other than that what has he done besides buy already large companies?
Did you buy an HTC First, the infamous "Facebook Phone" that was so universally panned, they couldn't even ship out their first production run of phones, despite it being one of the cheapest on the market?
When's the last time you used a Portal?
Facebook has just as many stinkers, despite many smart people working the company.
The metaverse is poorly communicated. Revolutions start at level 1, but communication sometimes start at level 25.
level 1 for smart phones: Read email/chat while waiting for the bus
level 25 for smart phones: A large economy with global behemoth corporations built on the premise that everyone has computers in their pockets
Level 1 for metaverse: You can now work from your couch/porch/beachhouse/bustop as you don't need your screens
Level 25 for metaverse: Everything running in 2d on computers now gets translated to 3d in the metaverse, a new set of global behemoth corporations. Massive implications for code, data and anything big or complicated (think structural blueprints)
Whether revolutions succeed or not is decided by teens and twenty-somethings, not the 30+ crowd (parents dont get it, not now, not ever)
The real challenge here is creating hardware that is cheap and good enough that teens can and will buy it, just like with the smart phone revolution, if you get 90% penetration with the teens then the rest of the world will follow.
Quest2 costs about the same as one decent screen.
I am not a business analyst, but from where I am sitting it seems like they've at least got traction.
They were successful with one thing. Now they are talking about something else.
Why shouldn't "MetaVerse" be compared to the insane optimism of AI in the 1980'ies? Something that seemed just around the corner, but never arrived.
It's like Thorium reactors: half the people think it's the next great thing, the other half thinks it will never come into production.
I know a company that has a very popular game (Minecraft) and they develop the premier game API DirectX. They also have a pretty popular game console, AR glasses, a well known operating system, etc. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in a good position to make a play in this space.
But they are fatiguing, unflattering, and uncomfortable, even for 20 or 30 minutes worth of usage.
Maybe in 10 years when the software stacks are ready the headsets will be good enough for passive use.
Change is not inevitable. Every change has to justify its own existence.
Look at your computer. You're likely using a keyboard and a mouse. How long have they existed with no fundamental change to how they operate?
Sure, there are other devices for interacting with computers, and smartphones are totally different beasts altogether, but nothing has supplanted the basic keyboard and mouse setup for desktop computers because they work perfectly well and there isn't really much you can improve about them. Everything else that has been designed is only for niche use.
The promise here is that the Metaverse will be the next evolution of the internet, rather than just an expensive toy for a few rich people. It's supposed to be better than the internet, and so much so that we'll all want to be part of it. It's completely irrational to shrug and turn off your brain and say it's pointless to reason about claims like this because it's "inevitable" because things "change" all the time.
Big wigs with lots of money can't be wrong!
If you look at the really disruptive innovations in technology, the vast majority of them were not made by incumbents. The iPhone is the shining example against me here, but the examples for me are Netflix, Facebook, bitcoin, heck, the internet itself. Incumbents expend efforts entrenching their positions, protecting their products they're already invested in, preventing disruption. It's baked onto the game fundamentally. And to be a little cynical, I'd argue that an incumbent claiming to be a disruptor is not being honest with you more than likely.
It is a wise thing to bet against incumbents promising to disrupt their own industry because more often than not you'd be right.
1. Augmented reality, that is, overlays on the real world. A cross between Pokemon Go and Google Glass. The Facebook version of this would probably look like that "Hyperreality" video I mention too often. This is all too likely to happen, if only to free up the hands of people who walk through the world staring at their phones. John Carmack expects it as soon as the headgear gets down to eyeglass size.
2. Virtual reality, that is, some simulated place you can visit. This may or may not involve headgear. This is really Second Life with better frame rates, or VRchat with a bigger world. It's striking that the newer metaverse wannabees have far lower visual quality than either of those. Roblox is the technical leader in this area, with a strong R&D team and a good technical roadmap. Unfortunately, their market is centered at age 13, so they censor very heavily. Holding hands is prohibited.
3. Virtual scarcity, that is, NFTs and land in virtual worlds. This is way overhyped. I expect the SEC to come down hard on a lot of that stuff soon, like they did with the ICO crowd in 2018. Selling NFTs for sports team collectables is probably OK. Selling virtual land before you build your virtual world is clearly a security, per the Howey test. The collectable NFT stuff peaked months ago. That works like Beanie Babies on eBay - $5000 asked, no bids, actual sales around $50. It turns out that OpenSea was front-running and Beeple's big sale was not arms-length. Same old scams, shiny new packaging.
I'm into the technical end of #2. This is a rather lonely place right now, even in the game development community. There are interesting problems to be solved in building large-scale virtual worlds with high-detail user content. That's not impossible, although many people think it is. (Plug: See [1] for a demo.) The number of people actually doing anything of technical interest, as opposed to blithering about the "metaverse", is surprisingly small. I haven't even found a serious forum where such issues are discussed. I've read about a hundred of My First Metaverse Article at this point, though.
But turning every game to a social 3d world you can use on a laptop and (minimally use) in a phone is something that might work. I mean simple social gaming like farmville is already bridging those form factors.
VR I just don't see getting there. It blocks your vision causing multiple problems, and technology is nowhere near where you would want to wear one for extended period of time.
AR and VR are great tech, when it gets good enough that it's a simple comfortable accessory to wear, and it incurs no strain on your eyes, it'll definitely find many uses.
And for sure we'll pursue the tech for better full body tracking, walking in-place, simulated touch, and all that, and if all that one day works similarly well, you can bet lots of people will start using it all too.
So now imagine you have this tech all figured out, what would the software look like? Obviously you're talking 3D UX, logically you'll start building virtual worlds to inhabit, eventually you'd want some things to if possible transfer from one app to another, and where all apps are virtual 3D spaces that might mean some of that stuff needs to transfer over.
It can even be simple things, if I can now whiteboard virtually, and use my own hand writing on the board, and now I'm in another app, and I'd like to pull up that whiteboard I did? This is equivalent to say Slack letting you send photos or files over.
I don't think any of this is far-fetched, it is just a matter of getting the tech to a point where it is easy, comfortable, convenient and all around pleasant to use.
Now calling it all a Metaverse, that's in the same league as calling a bunch of remote servers the Cloud.
And yes, the article is right, we all have this stuff already, but we have it in 2D, using 2D interfaces like flat monitors, stereo sound, physical keyboards and mouse. Now you're talking what if we had a surround 3D monitor? Surround 3D sound? Full body tracking with milimeter precision? You'd just take all we currently have and upgrade it to be full surround 3D as well. That's all it is.
I've played a few VR games at friends places, and unless they had the luxury of a spare room for it it's a pain in the ass to create space.
I dont see this taking off beyond the affluent first world for this reason, and even then, most first world countries have much smaller housing than the US - The average UK household is less than half the sqft of the US.
The average consumer doesn't want to immerse themselves and inhabit another world, they want to append to their existing one in an unintrusive way. This is an America-centric fantasy. Internet connections aren't good enough in many places, and a VR/AR headset is going to be inaccessibly priced.
or because most consumers dont have surround sound setup in their homes?
So I only found it important in VR and AR, and sometimes in 3D games it's nice too, but not as much as in VR games.
> they want to append to their existing one in an unintrusive way
That's what AR and mixed reality is about.
You really need to think, what if there was hardware that could provide high fidelity mixed reality and be super comfortable to integrate. Maybe it's as thin and light as normal sunglasses. Maybe it projects things directly in your eyes, or in the air around you.
Like obviously all of this is premised on hardware that reaches this level of comfort and quality to be mass produced. But I think companies think that's just a matter of time, just like for radio, television, computers, smartphones, etc. before it.
If I'm wearing some glasses that make it look like my friends are sitting on the various chairs in my living room, then it matters a lot that the sound feels like it's coming from where they are.
If I make a chair in SolidWorks, I can't even drag-and-drop it into a 3D printer, let alone open the document to use it in the Sims or in an email client. When I drag and drop an email into Excel I get a dialog box asking about what the delimiters are, and woe is me if I want to drag and drop an image to share it with another networked device. To get anything to work, one needs to be constantly aware of filetypes, which applications support which files, and the quirks they have when importing/exporting files (text encodings ftw /s).
If we can't figure out metaverse-style interactions on text files, the only way it's going to happen with car files is in one company's interoperatability walled garden.
It will probably be a combination of "works but with problems" and explicit deals between some companies for certain things where they explicitly put the work in to allow some things to carry over.
But my point is the whole Metaverse is marketing hype. The premise is really just that if the real world is one 3 dimensional surround universe you can experience, the Metaverse will deliver other such 3 dimensional surround experiences for you to go from one to the other.
The amount of things you can also move between all these "real"/"virtual" worlds is probably gonna suffer from all the issues we have today as well when moving from the real world and all the various 2D worlds.
But again, take out all the expensive hyperbolic terms. What we're talking about are just very obvious logical next step.
Assume a very good VR setup, now assume a scanner that can take a 3D surround image of say your favorite teddy bear. What do you do? You make a feature that lets you bring that 3D scan into VR.
This is the same as bringing a 2D photo of your teddy bear into your current 2D computer environment.
In my opinion, nothing here is far fetched, even though people will probably have patents for these ideas, they just logically come out as obvious next step for this new technology.
And it'll go the other way around too. You will be able to carve some 3D cup in VR, and then 3D print it into the real world. And that's the same as drawing something in Photoshop and printing it.
The only change here is that when you add that third dimension and make it surround, everything starts to feel more "real". Which is where people are starting to hype it up with mental hyperboles like a Metaverse, or calling things New Worlds, Other Universes, etc. But the only change from today is adding the 3rd dimension.
Think about a Zoom videoconference call with 5 of your friends where you make the background a photo of Mars. The only reason we call that videoconference and not: "Jump into a parallel universe in the deep landscape of Planet Mars with your friends and experience a new reality" is because it doesn't have the 3rd surround dimension.
Except that it is not at all equivalent. To pull your whiteboard the other app has to pull the code that draws and manipulates it. This has two problems a) security b) how the host app supposed to interact with yours?
OLE and a few similar technologies tried to answer this. Never seen big use due to complexity. Since that time no new ideas emerged in the field and I don’t see how Metaverse would solve this. Without addressing interoperability and security Metawerse apps will be siloed in the same way as modern apps. That would impose non-physical constraints in the world that tries to by as close to physical reality as possible. I see this as a major concern.
The thing with this space is, enough smart people are sufficiently excited by this new media and working on realising its potential, that it will inevitably end up producing value that can’t be ignored.
Large swathes of smart people who see unrealised possibilities will always win out against individuals who only see impossibilities.
Whenever I see a failure to appreciate the potential of new media, I’m reminded of this conversation between Jeremy Paxman (British journalist) and David Bowie when they were talking about the internet back in the 90s. https://youtu.be/LaHcOs7mhfU?t=297
“The internet… it’s just a tool though isn’t it” ?
But from my POV, we've started using VR for work meetings/social gatherings (we're a remote company, myself in Spain, the majority in SF), and we've been able to achieve a level of rapport with each-other that's just not possible via a webcam.
We will definitely continue to use it.
I believe it's a game changer, it definitely holds my attention I even use it for exercise.
Rapport is built through authenticity and vulnerability, not fucking avatars.
Fact is, that for now it feels valuable enough for us to keep using it (more so for social 'hangouts' than for things like stand-ups, which we still do via Zoom and where we can be as authentic and vulnerable as we like)
Watch out guys, VR destroys companies!
It will still need some resolution improvements to replace a 4k display, but the latest headsets are already getting pretty close to replacing a 1080p display. And of course that isn't limited to one 1080p screen, it's all virtual, so you can have a tripple screen setup, a big cinema screen or whatever else you want.
But I still rarely use it. Even completely wireless it's still a hassle to get out, and not especially comfortable or easy to wear. And even shifting it slightly results in things going out of focus so you need it lines up just right.
Plus very few people have big empty dedicated VR rooms so you have to move furniture.
There's definitely potential but there's zero chance people are going to use this routinely for work even in a few tech generations. It would need to get to the weight and convenience of wearing sunglasses, with an angular resolution close to that of a real monitor.
We're probably 40 years away from that tech.
For gaming I think it will get more and more popular. For socialising and work? No chance.
But you know that saying "come for the tool, stay for the network"?
Right now, we are super early in the adoption phase. You can tell by looking at what fraction of your Facebook network are on Oculus (in my case it's about 2%). That's why most of us are playing solo games which feel a bit like mere novelties.
But now that all of my work colleagues have one, I'm using it heaps. The value of VR grows the more your buddies have access to it.
It’s just a matter of finding the right balance of capability and convenience.
Remember, videoconferencing was also dead and nobody used it… until they suddenly did.
People use videoconferencing now in spite of its flaws because they have to. Once the pandemic is truly over it will gradually return to near its old levels.
The fundamental issue is that a lot of people have shitty internet. VR doesn't change that. Replacing shitty videoconferencing with shitty VRconferencing is not a compelling option unless you really benefit from the VR (maybe architects?).
Given the extreme push to retain remote work, I’d say this is unlikely.
> The fundamental issue is that a lot of people have shitty internet. VR doesn't change that.
I’ve been in middle of nowhere rural areas and still could get 10mbps, which is plenty for video conferencing. Though admittedly this requires demand and local action.
My broader point was about the younger generation. They are quite fond of videoconferencing in my experience where teens and early 20s are on it half the time while they do other things. Most have good enough mobile phones for FaceTime or WhatsApp video. Average internet speeds (and thus Wifi) are in the 40-50 mbit range, which is plenty for a typical 750kbps video conference (1.5-3 mbps or so if you want HD). Even LTE rates are getting better.
Uneven bandwidth hasn’t stopped Netflix or YouTube from taking over our culture. More interactive video and VR makes sense as a coming wave. The demand will grow over the coming decade, and if the wireline infrastructure isn’t upgraded, people will switch to satellite or wireless. Zuckerberg is looking 20-30 years out.
I think it's more about latency and packet loss than raw bandwidth. I have 100 Mb/s fibre and it's way way better than my old 200 Mb/s cable was.
> Uneven bandwidth hasn’t stopped Netflix or YouTube from taking over our culture
Well yeah but Netflix and Youtube don't care about latency or packet loss.
> Zuckerberg is looking 20-30 years out.
Definitely agree there. This screams "we're scared this will be the next big thing in 30 years and we don't want to let anyone else own it".
Then again, I don’t game for the same reason.
And have emails look like a stack of papers that you could actually process - pick up, hold, throw in a trashcan or put in an archive folder. It'd be amazing if I could just crumple up garbage emails and throw them on the floor behind me, or light them on fire.
May still need a physical keyboard, but voice recognition could work. Or voice memos sent to people. I think we don't do that today because most people don't have a private office or headsets on. But it would be a lot more efficient in some circumstances if you could just leave a voice memo.
And "apps" become screens - so you can pull up PPT, see it, work on it, and then push it to the side. It would be virtually unlimited and scalable screen real estate purchased with just one headset. You could have different flexible workstations (e.g. one for music production with 6 screens in front of you, one for each project). Sort of like desktop environments, but actually changing the desktop so that the files you leave around and windows you have up are saved in their state until you return to it.
Writing a new book? Pull up a writing environment template that minimizes distraction. Ready to be social? News feeds? Gaming?
There is a lot of potential there...
And watching sports on the weekend? Throw up all the games on multiple big screens.
The way we interact with tech today is a semi-distracted state. There is always some sort of "real world" going on, and we're not immersed. It would take more energy to be fully immersed, but we would be more productive from it. It could make using "old" tech very boring and not worth the time when you could do a much better job, or have a better experience through VR.
And people say "well people watch TV or movies together". Sure, maybe. You're in the same room, but you could both throw on headsets, enter the same virtual room, and "watch" together, whether you are in the same room or not. And it might highlight that there are higher quality forms of recreation than sitting and watching TV together.
Also, while sitting at a desk with a computer describes a disproportionate amount of our work and personal lives, I'm not sure how well that translates for mass adoption.
For some reason this is a hilarious image in many ways. Perfect example of imagining the future being a better horse. But it also does sound cool
But I don’t see “email” going anywhere for a long time. At its core, it is text information and serves as a record of a transaction, usually related to the real world. If we think VR will take us past email, it means setting up a new standard for communication that is somehow better and will have enough network effects to take over from email (e.g. - everyone will need to migrate to VR before abandoning email).
So processing email more effectively is an open problem of VR. VR isn’t going to hook into our brains more than video or audio or text, so I view it as about how someone interacts with that in a VR environment.
So I think the way we process things will matter and could be massively improved. For example, you could have a “workbench” for insurance related items. Where you go and all of the things you were working on and relevant communications are neatly organized and sandboxed. You effectively wouldn’t have to put anything “away”. It would just be sitting there on a desk until you returned to it.
Training for work environments would be amazing - you could copy the environment for your employees and it would be intuitive. Right now companies often give people just a vanilla machine with basic office apps and expect them to find their optimal setup.
Now if we were talking 3d modeling or art, something that would use the spatial input of AR instead of a keyboard, that would be exciting. In fact you could almost do this today if the Hololens had some better productivity apps.
> Large swathes of smart people who see unrealised possibilities
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
You may be right, but here's an anecdote: David Brevik did a post-mortem on Diablo[0] on GDC. He first mentioned they accepted the contract for developing Diablo for Blizzard for $300000 which was extremely underpriced for a team of 15, so they have to look for other revenue such as accepting other contracts developing lame football games for $1 million.
As they were busy shipping Diablo, Sabeer Bhatia came to them with an idea of "making the email over the Internet", he replied, "dude this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard! What're you talking about - I've already had my email over the Internet!". Sabeer insists this is a big idea, and offer them 10% of the company, only for an empty office in the back which they're not using in return. But David was stressing out because they were about to ship Diablo, so he turned him down because he want no distraction, ..plus "it's the stupidest idea ever".
And the company of Sabeer was called Hotmail. 14 months later the 10% would become $40 million...
> Being 'inside' a virtual world was never really the important part"
Well, the facebook keynote presents a compelling argument how social interaction with VR can be more meaningful than through a 2D screen in many situations.
However, what IS bullshit, is the display of obviously fake demonstrations with highly experimental and expensive technology.
The reality is, most of the tech, won't be accessible or even productised for a long time, as they didn't even announce any planned dates...
5-10 years after VR starts to really take off, you’ll be able to get a decent standalone VR headset for $200 or less. They’ll probably be cheaper to make than laptops or TVs in the long run because of the smaller displays.
Avatars would feel like creepy cartoons because your brain knows the voice of the person but your eyes see a cartoon image.
Have you ever tried that? Smart phones as VR are extremely disorientating and the latency of the gyro makes it unusable.
I've got an Oculus Quest and it's amazing how well it works using the 4 camera vision-system instead of a gyro.
What they were demonstrating in the meta-verse was facial-tracking attached to VR headsets, which is super expensive experimental technology which is not going to be commercially available for quite some time.
[1] https://www.vive.com/us/accessory/facial-tracker/ & https://www.hp.com/us-en/vr/reverb-g2-vr-headset-omnicept-ed...
That's not low end VR, it's pain and frustration from knowing you just wasted 105 bucks.
It sounds to me like you never tried a setup like this. Because in reality you mainly spend time adjusting the lenses because focus is so bad you can't even tell which setting is better. The pixel grid is so huge that reading any form of text (like menus) is near impossible. The latency is bad and your view constantly drifts over time because the phone sensors don't cut it, so you better sit on a rotating chair. Oh, and if you've all that covered somehow you'll realize mediocre VR video players and bad rollercoaster demos are pretty much the best phone VR can offer.
Someone was going on and on about how Facebook is showing off a (likely) $50,000 prototype and I was just explaining that 2021's $50,000 prototype is 2031's $100 at Wal-Mart
A distraction from all the criticism they are currently receiving.
People that buy Louis Vuitton are going to shell out for NFT metaverse skins and wear dorky headsets.
That totally tracks.
It's now common for some to use stylized/beautified cartoon 'avatars' in a professional context. People communicate using contrived and performative message board speak with coworkers. Even the 'influencers' spend a large chunk of their life editing and constructing an unrecognisable version of themselves.
If you meet some of these people in real life it's obvious why they do so - reality is too dull, too expensive in time and effort to find a way of standing out from the crowd. Online you can pretend to be whatever you want to be. I see this trend continuing.
> ...just like you have the W3C that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web, I think there will need to be some of that here, too, for defining how developers and creators can build experiences that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their friends, and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences.
I'm sure Facebook is looking to have a big and profitable presence in the metaverse, but the point is that it's not one big walled garden like Facebook, but more like the Web as a whole.
The way I see it, Facebook kicking off the push towards a metaverse is kind of like Bell Labs creating Unix. Sure it took a big corp with a lot of money, but that gives the rest of the community something to emulate and build off of, or decide what parts they do and don't like, and so eventually we'll have the metaverse equivalent of Linux. (edited for clarity of the first paragraph)
What's to say that's how it's going to go here?
> I also wouldn't expect a big corp to be the one to create open standards for the rest of the community.
Exactly. So root for a W3C metaverse, not Facebook's walled garden.
Comparing themselves to W3C is a nice trick but they are not at all alike. W3C is a non-profit funded by its members. Facebook is a shareholder-controlled corporation.
Light only moves so fast through cables. Average ping time between New York and LA is in the high 60's, and that's assuming a wired connection.
I think often about the old talk [1] Web Design - The First 100 Years, that talks about why planes never went supersonic. The alternatives were good enough, and the costs rose exponentially for linear (or sib-linear) gains. Transmitting information across the wire is an obvious win on value. Transmitting experience seems like a whole different order of magnitude that might just not be worth it.
[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
What surprised me the most is how fake and forced the conversations and interactions looked. It reminded me of those first blue screen effects you see in these old movies from the sixties. I would assume that Facebook/metaverse spent an enormous budget on it, but nevertheless the outcome still looks creepy. In my opinion we have mostly figured out how to avoid the uncanny valley for rendering, so I'd guess improving conversations and interactions are up next. Until the techniques are on par with what we need, I'd heavily avoid trying to model a real world representation in a virtual world. (Think about the early Pixar movies: instead of trying to create the most realistic world possible, they embraced their current constraints and turned them into a feature that made their movies instantly recognizable.)
This being said, I see one big use case for AR/VR adaptation during the next decade: digital twins with simplified, tailored representations for development, marketing, education and operational purposes, as well as amusement. My best guess and personal bet is on this space.
And even though we've had VR and more recently AR getting more accessible to the consumers, it's still at least 5 years too soon for mass adaptation; most people still consider it a novelty.
In my experience interactive 3d will emerge next in the mass-market. Up until now I had the best conversion ratios by having a conventional 2d GUI/wizard and some very conceptually simple 3d drag and drop to create simplified 3d representations of products one could buy (think sheds, carports, verandas etc). First consumers will have to get familiar with 3d annotations, before we can make them interactive as well...
So yes, I see a future for (some version of) the metaverse, but the implementation they showed right now was a bit meh, because they tried to model it just like the real world, and the techniques to do so properly still aren't there yet...
From the guidelines. Here is the original source: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/the-metaverse-is-bullshit/
I use (and love) Outline myself wherever it works, but linking to the original source is much better IMO.
A metaverse run by Facebook where their algorithm recommends content to me based on controversial things that make me angry really doesn't appeal though. If Facebook's Metaverse is anything like Facebook I don't want to join. Metaverse cannot be free (as in money). For it to work users must be able to pay for it, and for that payment to give them the tools to control how they experience it for themselves. If it's free like Facebook it will die.
We're already living in a walled garden whenever we use the web, I'd hate that reality became like that as well. It already is with restaurant chains and Amazon killing local venues' diversity. Meta would make it even worse.
The presentation is cringeworthy, but VR is very attractive for teenagers and preteens. I know this from personal experience with my kids.
Same with the concept of NFTs. Using real money to pay for an in game asset like a fortnite skin is completely natural to them.
It's meaningless, though, since the same (massive) caveats apply as when cryptocoins tried to claim they were a viable and better alternative to traditional financial services: buying and owning digital assets is entirely possible to handle with existing, more efficient technology.
Nobody that sells digital assets has any reason to buy into whatever purported benefits a distributed system provides other than hype: you don't need a distributed system if you already control all the servers and everyone is fine with that. The subset of customers that will be _REALLY MAD_ that they can't use their Fortnite skins should Epic disappear is vanishingly small.
NFTs don't even have the edge case that they're useful for transactions for illegal goods. It's grifters boosting bullshit trying to make a profit through and through.
If you think about it, land ownership is also just a very well established social convention.
If you think NFTs add to that the ability to resell as a hedge against initial purchase price, then Valve added a player driven market to TF2 in 2012, the same year Blizzard added the real money auction house.
If you think NFTs add the ability to use content across games, Metal Gear Solid had features involving reading other game save files in 1998, Nintendo Amiibo launched in 2014, and Steam also allows for this via player inventories.
If you think NFTs add the ability to cash out for real money, that's been possible via external third party sites in TF2 since 2013, and analogously for real money gold sales in World of Warcraft since about 2004.
There are ways in which all of the examples above are not totally perfect and/or are more technically clunky than the vision of what this looks like in 5-10 years, but qualitatively more or less every feature of NFTs already exists in various forms over the last 20 years, in some cases all in the same product.
If the Segway was invented and the inventor cited Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov as influences, but had never heard of or wasn't willing to talk about scooters, vespas, skateboards, or cars, that'd be a huge red flag, even if you think that Segways add a bit of value.
So I think the parent's question is still pretty well taken -- what's the connection between the thing everyone's been willing to do for 20 years and the thing that's alleged to be new and different?
Even in the late 90’s folks were buying and selling virtual items in Ultima Online.
Headsets are horribly bad. The day I can get my VR onto my glasses, that's the day that VR will be for everybody. My headset, and many people I known headsets, is in a box. I love VR, I love the games, but I find it too cumbersome for day to day use compared with my screen.
> NFT
Yes. This is already extremely popular, but you do not need NFTs. Your old and proved in-game assets make millions a day. NFT allows for a distributed proof that most people does not care for. It's going to require a lot of marketing and government regulations and trial sentences to make it enforceable and safe.
I tried all the things, from VR experiences to porn. Kind of neat, but I still very much prefer the real world. I guess I will play through resident evil 4 and half life alyx, and then the thing will collect dust in a corner again.
One thing that felt quite dystopian was the giant house you can get as your home environment. I can see people living in a tiny apartment with no access to beautiful nature using this to escape from the real world, as soon as the quality gets a bit better.
Regarding NFTs: I don't get it, but I also don't dismiss it completely as a scam. There is of course a large FOMO / get rich quick component, but also an underlying desire for digital ownership and agency.
I don't know what the focus thing is about, though, unless the headset is shifting around on your head, and the fix for that is a new strap. The stock strap is pretty meh.
On the Wii, the killer experience for most people wasn't Mario Bros, but was Wii Sports. On the Quest, there's a lot of games that let you use your body well, such as Walkabout Minigolf or Beat Saber. Alyx is good, but not as compelling as the sports games, IMO. It also plays on the computer and requires a wire or a good router and has occasional problems because of that link. Games that play directly on the headset are generally less frustrating.
The NFT craze (and cryptocurrencies in general) is largely fuelled by an inflationary global currency ($) and dare i say it, a lot of money laundering too. But that does not make the sector illegitimate.
in fact some of the platforms that have risen out of web3 already (ssb/patchwork) for example are indeed just better versions of dystopian counterculture that have gone before.
i’d say the author here is just keen to shout at the TV as the big corporate news breaks.
Billionaires will be the ones who may end up benefiting least from a true move to a dystopian, decentralised internet as Web3 is hinting at.
Any tips how to get the kids to appreciate the real world more? It's not like I am not trying, but I also don't want to deprive them of computer games.
I basically grew up gaming and hacking on computers (starting with an Atari 800), and I liked it.
It could also mean art or music.
And finally... It could still be on the computer, making digital art, video games, writing novels, etc, instead of just playing games and chatting. Learning to create the experiences is hard, but the reward for having created them is pretty compelling and the skill carries across different softwares pretty easily, setting them up with those skills for life.
But maybe that is normal. After all it took myself decades to figure out life so much that now I enjoy real life. Was just hoping there might be a shortcut.
Of course they're addicted to screens, like all kids these days.
It's just that they want a quick and easy fix, and certainly not to wear one around their heads.
Addictive screen technology has no "wow" factor for people that had them from birth. Screens are about as exciting and cool as daytime television was in the pre-Internet era. (And similarly, we somehow can't stop wasting hours a day on them still.)
> ll just be a natural extension of the gig economy, some poor soul being paid .00000000001 bitcoin an hour to virtually dress up like a carnival barker and shout about the latest horrible news out of Syria on some virtual street corner.
It's not going to be real people but scripted animations, Meta is a way to automate marketing so that even influencers are redundant (after ads and companies with their ads budget).
Enjoy the second pre crash bubble and brace yourself for another 2008.
To me, the metaverse is a web browser for VR. But rather than a flat screen with text and images, it’s a 3D environment where open objects can coexist.
Kids today play Minecraft or Roblox etc for hours while simultaneously watching a twitch or youtube stream with their friends and video or text chatting about it. Sometimes they just have an open vid connection just for the “pseudo connectedness” of having someone feel next to you while doing something independently. All of this bodes well for more integrated experiences.
We need - as with the early web- for engineers to push this stuff to be open. Because it won’t really take off until it’s open, we are currently in the “AOL” vs “compuserve” phase.
We've had video calls for decades now, but people still use text messages because not everything needs to be a video call.
Likewise, we'll keep using text chats because not everything needs to be VR.
I was walking around the park a couple days ago, nursing a bit of neck pain, and I realized what I personally want. I want a Google Glass type side screen where I can develop software and analyze data with my brain while walking around the park. If the brain thing isn't in the cards, I'll put on motion-sensing gloves and use a virtual keyboard/trackpad.
That seems a lot easier than a fully immersive metaverse. So metaverse guys, let me know when you've got that one.
Games are cool because they each are separate universes. They are closures. Metaverse billionaires who want to break the boundaries between games by connecting all game economies are simply trying to rake all games. They’re trying trans-dimensional conquerors like the Combine.
Simple features like Steam achievements are clear and simple counter examples.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/facebook-meta-what-is...
How can Meta (and other Metaverse advertising companies) not be seen as an evil organization in context of the dystopian Cyberpunk futures it is so heavily influenced by?
You can tell this absolutely makes no sense, because if we're in the metaverse, why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Or if I can't, I'm going to open up a shop next door that sells metaverse helicopter rides. If I make a vehicle in the metaverse, I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around.
Not to mention, you don't need cupholders in VR, because your avatar doesn't have a stomach. You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse? Heck, I don't need the whole front of the car, because the engine doesn't actually exist.
The whole metaverse idea is based on clunky, outdated metaphors to the real world like this. Someone who saw Ready Player One in theaters thinks that driving a car in VR is cool, without thinking for five more minutes about why it's actually not.
Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Lively (2008), PlayStation Home (2008)
It was such a tired cliché by then that even Homestarrunner was making fun of it in 2007 [0].
Go look back at some of the early VRML hype from the mid 90s, it's like watching history replay itself. Most of it is before the era of the Wayback Machine, but there's a few good articles out there still [1] [2]. I can't even find any news writeups of SGI WebSpace, just screenshots, despite it being the VRML plugin for Netscape back then.
[0] https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147 [1] https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html [2] https://community-place.neocities.org/
You know what? the internet was better when it topped out at 56k for mortals.
And remember webrings and Internet Link Exchange?
I'd also say that MySpace and Tumblr carried that vision forward.
It's ironic that Facebook won, with its bland conformity, and now they think they're going to bring us the metaverse.
What's worrying is...what if FB manages to create a metaverse that thrives on the same toxicity that FB itself does. And through the Oculus makes the tech cheap and portable enough to get a critical mass of people involved in it.
The general consensus seems to be (and at this point I wholeheartedly agree) FB attempting to build a meta world is hysterical considering their seeming complete inability (with some unwillingness sprinkled in) to address trolls/astroturfing /misinformation on their flagship site was a significant driver of many people ceasing to use the site.
If they screw up something like a vanilla social network, they have no shot at running an entire second life derivative. At least one where anyone other than NFT sneakerhead type marketing victims will willingly spend their valuable free time.
Nowadays Minecraft and Roblox seem to fill similar niches.
That many attempts failed doesn't mean all attempts will fail. You may not know this, but there were other social networks before Facebook. There was Orkut and MySpace, for example, both disappeared. Yet Facebook now is a billion dollar company.
VRML appeared at a time when people were still using dial-up modems. Things change - eventually technology may be good enough for people to adopt VR on a larger scale.
Yet the social network as a concept that moved from one monopoly to another is a fad that is dieing. It certainly seems likely companies that have gotten their start from VR will succeed in collecting a lot of money and possibly diversifying successfully, but will VR end up being more useful than a FB style social site?
The basic problem with VR for me is that second life showed some potential that isn't going to happen because it is socially positive and a lot of negatives that make me want to kill VR as a medium before I have to deal with FB owning real estate in it.
FB has basically created the bifurcation that will limit the future of all new mediums. Half your friends will never use anything they participate in making the concept of social X a disaster for any X.
Nobody would be happier than me if a decentralized alternative to social networks like Facebook could be established.
I am not really seeing it as a given, though - the big companies usually offer more convenience and the masses fall for it. And for content creators it makes more sense to go to where the masses are. I have looked into the Fediverse but it seems there is hardly anything there.
I don't know if VR will replace classic web sites like Facebook. An issue in SL, for me at least, was that it was too difficult to create a good looking avatar. In Facebook you don't have to bother with web design. Not sure how to translate that to VR - everybody having a standard living hexagon for representation probably won't work.
By this logic nobody should play Gran Turismo because a Superman game exists.
> You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse?
By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you don't need a car to surf the web and you can't test the car by visiting the website.
The web is pretty analogous to the metaverse and the most plausible path to an actual metaverse may be an evolution of the web browser. It's the only platform with a sandbox strong enough to run completely untrusted code on your local device with no centralized gatekeeper manually enforcing rules, which I think is a hard requirement for a real metaverse. Any metaverse contender that doesn't start with that is doomed to eventual irrelevance.
But I don't think, as the author of the article seems to, that today's web is already the metaverse and nothing will change. What really drives platform change is input methods. The iPhone was a new platform because it used capacitive touch instead of mouse and keyboard, and the web evolved with it. The metaverse will be a new platform because it will use still different input methods (yet to be determined, probably not the VR controllers we use today) and the web will have to change again, perhaps more radically this time.
So, perhaps I misread Tim Sweeney's point of view, but it seems like it starts and ends with "put cool car in metaverse, drive it down Main St., everyone stops and stares, like that one scene from Snow Crash. Or Ready Player One."
If it's more specific than that, "put cool car in video game, in metaverse" product placement, well we already have that today. Mercedes Benz already did a whole Mario Kart thing [0], and countless other racing games like the Forza series have sponsorships from real car companies. So that's not really anything novel for the metaverse, it's just the same product placement marketing strategy that's already existed. Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years.
> By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you can't test the car by visiting the website.
Pretty much all of these websites have a call-to-action for "Schedule a test drive at your local dealership". Hell, I remember an entire campaign from a major car corporation that was to the tune of "anybody can watch a TV commercial, but driving it is believing"
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/29/5760538/drive-a-mercedes-...
Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?
So, like, yes Stephenson's metaverse is similar to a lot of video games we have now, but it's critically different because his characters are "heroes" in that universe specifically because they coded their own avatars and their own environments.
Which is another way of saying that it rewards thought, code, and creativity -- exactly the things that video games steal people away from.
> You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities
I ask again: why can't I code my avatar to be the most OP avatar that ever exists? I will create a weapon that kills people if they look at me. What's the incentive to purchase new things if everyone can just code the most OP version and undercut the person next door? I will have the best cars, the funniest T-shirts, and the strongest potions, and you cannot stop me. Because I write Lua scripts.
There's some element of cooperation that is usually assumed when people talk about the metaverse but I don't see any incentive to maintain it that way. Garry's Mod and Roblox are platforms that do what you're talking about, today. The way they maintain this cooperation is that they prevent users from having strong autonomy in games that others make. In Roblox, your avatar is limited to a few cosmetic choices for customization, and in Garry's Mod, you don't really have any customization at all in most game modes.
So Second Life ...
If they want to meet with friends and hang around, real life contact just can't be beat. That's the reason why virtual persistent worlds are ultimately bullshit (as opposed to game worlds where you have an actual game to play, be that chess or matching colored gems or killing other players).
Because there's no guarantee that the experience is in any way comparable to the actual driving. It's in the manufacturer's interest to do the opposite. If the controls weren't standardized the simulation might have still been useful to learn the controls, but they are.
Besides, when AI cars come along the criterias will change completely. From driving experience to cost and comfort. That could be virtualized... but there wouldn't be much point in it.
Suffice it to say that plenty of people genuinely love driving, both in video games and in the real world.
Flying won't make driving obsolete any more than mountain biking has made hiking and trail running obsolete in places that are accessible to mountain bikes.
That being said, switched my old BMW 3 series (E46) with manual to newer 5 series with automatic steptronic transmission, and especially for longer drives, the cognitive and 'manual' load is measurably less. But you don't realize it until you migrate.
It moves to almost boring territory, luckily I am not a type of person who tends to fall asleep behind the wheel (unlike my wife).
This is not to cast any aspersions on the game - popularity is not everything - but things like MFS are perfect examples that even the best simulators are just niche products, not the future of the web.
Virtual reality can have all sorts of landscapes, and moving along a surface, whether it be hilly or flat like Tron, will be popular. Driving is one way to move along a surface, but there's also running, swimming, base jumping, skiing, snowboarding, skating, and others. I'm sure all will be common in the metaverse.
For an example of something where driving is exciting and totally unnecessary, see Rocket League.
Yeah, that's just "the layout of the game's tracks" from the G^~5P, only now in more detail.
I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game.
The reason that giving you the real experience of being in a specific car is bullshit for marketing purposes is that you can see hardly anyone markets cars based on what it will actually be like to use them and of course because except for a few outliers using any specific car is the same as using pretty much every other car built in a similar time frame.
on edit: meaning every other car serving the same market segment of course.
Why wouldn't everyone make it the most engaging virtual car driving experience they can find, what incentive is there to make it "real" in this useful way?
I mean, I get that it's necessary for this to happen for the whole pitch to make sense, but it's just nonsense. Why these weird religious beliefs about 3D stuff, including product placement, which seem to magically behave differently than the 2D versions we've been living with for decades now.
I am just incredibly confused by this. Is it like NFTs where we aren't supposed to believe the cover story and the wink-wink acknowledgement of the grift is a in-joke/cultural thing?
The experience of driving a real car is heavily influenced by the real world. Take those little flap things cars sometimes have to shield your eyes from the sun - the metaverse will first have to simulate an annoyance (possibly with harmful eye-melting ultraviolet light?) then let you mitigate it with the flap. It isn't obvious why people will want that or pay money for it. If they don't simulate glare, then what is the flap for?
Cars aren't independent of reality, they exist as well designed tools that allow us to do and experience things that we otherwise couldn't. When that gets translated to some sort of virtual space all the design decisions start to fall apart. The only thing that really carries over is to get the branding in front of a person to make them think of the name - which rather undermines the original "isn't going to run ads" thesis.
Why do you think the metaverse will do a better job than the developers at assetto corsa for whom it is their primary mission?
It's all just marketing wank to get advertisers excited to put product placement in facebook's new second life metagame.
A huge monitor is way cheaper.
I appreciate this isn’t going to be a super common use case but it’s definitely something that might appeal to some who have well paid jobs in expensive to live locations (like London and SV).
It can take a long time to unlearn things in video games. It took years after video game arcades ceased to be the dominant factor for games to get rid of "Lives" that existed only† to ensure players pump coins into the no-longer relevant coin slot.
I think Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes shows off what VR can do well that you couldn't do otherwise. The isolation between the player defusing the bomb and everybody else is part of the game. The fact that the player defusing can't look at the bomb manual is enforced by them being in a VR environment with no manual.
In too many VR games, the VR is largely an impediment, and the takeaway is "This could be a good game, shame it's VR".
† OK things like Hundred Mario challenge and the modern Endless Super Expert show that you can do other things with this form, but it's pretty arbitrary, there's no way this would exist without the history of video game arcades.
I wonder when society will realize all this technology has no value without the support of the single most valuable resource on this planet: humans and their educations. The number one asset of any/every company and every nation is their people - yet we treat people as completely disposable. Our civilization is literally insane today, and will remain so until this clear value is recognized.
The point about VR games are that they’re an unrealistic escape. If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
What? Why?
A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution.
Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (which is actually just your perspective if you prefer beer, the orange-juice-loving person in the group is seeing the whole group drinking orange juice) and discussing the latest celebrity scandal. All of the cosmopolitanism and variety of social media, none of its artficiality and bullshit.
(Off course there is going to be new bullshit in this world, people will go through various hoops to pull idiotic pranks on other people and scammers will have a terrifying field day with the new convincing techniques the new medium will bring, but at this point this is just more or less real life. Real Life In Your Pocket that is. (hopefully eventually, it will have a PC phase first). Who is not excited by that?)
Imagine a professional like an airline pilot or a heart surgeon transmitting a read-only record of a flight or an operation, complete with haptic feedback and a temperature-and-wind reconstruction of the transmission environment. Imagine those records dumped to storage and serving as humanity's Library Of Crafts, a correction to our ancient shortcoming of only being able to capture in symbols what could be said (and with photography and microphones, what could be seen or heard), but not what could be felt or experienced.
Won't this absolutely revolutionise learning and communication? There is a very clear path from here to eventual Greg-Egan-style post-singular communication where you are roaming freely in abstract structures residing everywhere from your head to a server in orbit.
Every thought or system or structure ever dreamt up by the human mind began with a 1:1 snapshot of reality that was then further filtered and compressed (Hume's golden mountain). The ability to arbitrarily construct, store, transmit and reconstruct 1:1 ever-more-convincing sensory representations of the world at will is nothing short of a revolution comparable to the invention of language.
Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket, too. It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.
Why so? the first 3 paragraphs are 2 examples of why a 1:1 reconstruction of our world on demand can be an amazing thing, the remaining is the statment 'All creation or innovation that the human brain does, or is ever capable off, is simply mixing and remixing its readings of the outside world. So mutable and cheap on-demand reconstructions of the outside world will be an immense boost to creativity and innovation'
>Why are we all drinking OJ/beer?
Why are we exchanging asynchronous plaintext blocks right now instead of speaking on the phone or sharing 30-seconds videos on tiktok? This is the medium we chose, this is the medium the hypothetical group in my example chose. (from a sea of possibilities that make our communication options right now look like ancient letters)
>Can we taste it?
If the hypothetical social media app we're talking about is any good, it will have the option to sync your avatar to real-life-you on various 'motion paths', so that whenever you move along those motion paths, your avatar move in the same way. One of those 'motion paths' is all the movements your hand make when holding an actual drink, which would translate to your avatar mirroring the movement in the meta verse.
What happens if you release the drink ? you have the option of making the renderer either disappearing it or (for fidelity) putting it in a corresponding location in the dream. What happens if you can't or don't want to drink? you have the option to either make the renderer hallucinate a drink (along with believable drinking animations at believable intervals) or just make you appear in the dream as you are in meat space.
What happens if/when the marriage of neuroscience and computers get fruitful enough that this whole thing is being served directly to your neurons, bypassing the many middle men in your eyes, ears and skin? You can have the additional option of eschewing physical mirroring of the meta verse and just have the gear directly stimulate the feeling of drinking whenever you drink in the metaverse.
>If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers [...] without risking giving up the lie?
Lie? Am I lying to you right now because my username is not the full name registered to my national number in my country's official records ? is the jvm lying to the code running inside of it by presenting virtual method calls as a hardware primitive? This is make-believe, the whole entirety of human civilization is built on it. Even my real name is no more real than the username I chose for this account, except merely by the virtue that more of my existence (more records, more of my opinions, more memories in more heads,...) is attached to it.
You have the option to say you're presenting as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of pretending to present as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of not doing that and saying to your group you're just making the renderer playing tricks on them, and on and on it goes. Whole ecosystems and apps will develop conventions and preferences toward particular options.
>that all understand English and American
This is entirely orthogonal to the technology under discussion, the internet have made millions want to understand English so they can communicate with a greater pool of people, and when cyber communication becomes as deep and convincing as the vision of the metaverse, untold millions more will be motivated to understand popular languages, and will be able to more efficiently than now because language learning (as all learning) will become much more effective and joyful, imagine the high-fidelity virtual/recorded tourism trips available by the petabytes to every person who wants them.
Again, when/If AI or neuro+cyber ever reach the moon they are aiming for, this will integrate nicely with the vision of the meta verse by, respectively, a real-time translation engine running in parallel or direct brain-to-brain telepathy, but even without this the metaverse faces a problem of languages that is no easier and no harder than the internet, which I see it handles perfectly fine.
>(that all understand English and American culture enough for me to gossip about US celebrities apparently?)
I didn't specify English or American exactly, I myself am a Middle Easterner with worse-than-average [knowledge of | interest in] all but the most popular celebrities even in my own country. International or regional celebrities have worldwide following even now and even by purely traditional media, and the internet have made the word 'celebrity' expand in very weird directions.
>Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket
"Electronic computers, why!, I already have pen, paper and my trusty slide rule right here my good sir. I see no purpose those 'electronic brains' of yours can serve"
>It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.
Nobody ever said it would, it's a very specific vision* with a very specific claims : We will construct our own sensory reality. Whatever can be fixed or made (much much) better by constructing and manipulating indistinguishable-from-the-real-thing sensory models of reality, this vision is implicitly claiming it would fix or make it better. This is a gargantuan subset of. humanity's problems. Whatever can't be fixed by this alone, won't, and nobody ever claimed otherwise.
* :When I say 'vision', I mean the actual vision advanced by visionaries like Greg Egan, Gibson, and others in their works, not the garbage copied-and-pasted from the marketing brochures of corporations jumping on the trend, or for that matter those marketing brochures themselves, which are a watered-down inferior version of the visionaries' vision. I'm just as opposed and unbelieving of the promises those companies make as anyone who ever read a headline or two about them, I just still believe in the underlying dreams they are appropriating/butchering.
People don't want to be completely disconnected from physical reality. The world you described is vulgar to any real human person, honestly it sounds like a cross between Brave New World and The Matrix.
There would be no authenticity of experience in the world you imagine. It'd be people living out instagram fantasies continuously.
Society would eventually devolve into a decadent, fetalistic world marked by the boredom of playing a video game with god mode on, where humans would no longer be able to deal with hardship or conflict. Bored of travelling to places that don't exist, they'd try desperately to satiate their desire for authentic human interaction by sitting in virtual pubs chatting about the imagined escapades of pretend celebrities.
It’s the same reason we watch super hero movies, read comic books and novels. Escapism. If the virtual world is a 1:1 with actual reality then there is literally no reason to enter the virtual world.
And why are text mediums so popular? Because they’re convenient. VR lacks that same convenience.
But they obviously weren't "a 1:1 reconstruction of our world": You can't all simultaneously be drinking beer and be drinking OJ in the real world, so all the scenarios were false.
Who wants to context switch from reality into a virtual world just so they can see what the new Ford pickup looks like? Nobody, thats who.
This whole concept reads to make like a Facebook exec went into a coma just as Second Life was taking off and woke up recently demanding that Facebook cease on what they believe will clearly be the future of online interaction.
"Does Zuck have Second Life second-system syndrome?"
Nobody thinks he's cool in this world, so he'll just spam "new worlds" until somebody thinks he's cool in one of them.
You can now extrapolate this to almost any interaction in VR; walking, flying, typing or shooting.
Until there's an input method that is able to emulate these experiences effectively, then it is pure science fiction.
Driving a real car down a windy road is 1000x better than the best Vr setup.
This is how heavily-monetized games work today and it's not surprising that some in the industry are salivating at the thought of extending this economic model beyond just entertainment.
We're talking about facebook here. I expect the metaverse to be designed 100% according to the wishes of ad buyers. And Cambridge Analytica.
I'll take your underhanded way of trying to ridicule the idea as a tacit admission that you actually agree it's true, but have some undisclosed motive to discredit it. (Own a lot of Facebook shares, or what?)
if it still exists. Once the metafart comes to be it will naturally compete with the Web of old, so it will probably look for leverage to extinguish that.
Why would anyone want to do that rather than fly? Why would I rather play Gran Turismo when I can be Iron Man in LEGO Marvel Superheroes?
Draw it on a piece of paper if you need to convince yourself. This is an incredibly common trick to stabilise rigidbody physics simulated vehicles in games.
Edit: I took some time to setup OBS on my non-work machine and make a little video explaining what's going on (apologies for kids in the background and that for some reason my voice only comes out of the left channel): https://youtu.be/qvMbdzbaAMQ
Your force sideways is actually from the ground, on the tyres. This acts on the CoG (or better to call it Center of Mass), so if this CoM is above the tyres you get a torque, because the mass doesn't instantly accelerate, but resists the force. This torque then needs to be countered by having more force on the tires on one side than on the other, which when you take into account things like suspension, causes body roll, or in the extreme case the car lifting wheels on one side completely off the ground.
If you put the center of mass below the car then think what happens not during turning, but during braking. The center of mass will swing forward underneath like a pendulum (think of what happens to something hanging from the rearview mirror during braking) and if you took it really far down you could even get the car to do a wheelie while braking, which is of course ridiculous.
If you want the car to be completely flat during turns, acceleration and braking then you need to put the center of mass at the ground level. This way when you turn and the ground puts a horizontal force on the car at the contact points with the road (ie. the tyres), it goes through the center of mass and there is no torque generated. No torque = no body roll.
If you don't believe me you can download Unity, UE, Godot or the rigidbody simulator of your choice and just setup the experiment. Of the engines mentioned UE is perhaps the easiest to set this up with a straightforward car example.
We're very much not talking past one another. I recommend just doing the experiment to convince yourself because as I and Animats note this is a very common thing to do in games. As I said in my last reply just grab a game engine (they're all free to download) and test it yourself!
There are only two forces involved - inertial forces which act on the CG, and friction forces which act at ground level. Swap the order, and you swap the direction of the torque.
The tyres exert their force at road level, the centrifugal force at the height of the CoM. The CoM usually being above road level, the centrifugal force will tend to tilt the car outwards.
Lower the CoM to exactly road level and there is zero tilting moment; your car might slide outwards if it loses grip, but it will remain upright with no tilt, because the centrifugal force has no vertical leverage relative to the opposing gripping-force of the tyres -- they're opposing each other in the same horizontal plane.
Lower the CoM below the road (magically travelling through the soil without interacting with it), and there is again leverage, only this time with the centrifugal force pushing outwards below where the car is trying to stay attached to your desired trajectory and thus tilting the top of the car inwards, towards the inside of the curve or the center of the track.
:: Moving the CoM down has a stabilizing effect down to road level, but if you go lower than that it starts destabilizing again, only applying its rolling force in the opposite direction.
Its a trap to focus on it. Many have resources, energy and no sense, taste or imagination. You cant blame them. Its like complaining to a cactus for not producing strawberries. Or yelling at swampland for not turning fertile.
What you can do is shift focus, and focus on what you and people like you are working on, and keep the focus there no matter what.
Flying? I hope I can teleport as easily as I can jump to a web page by clicking a bookmark or typing its URL.
Second Life had teleport. I walked, drove a car, went flying only for the fun of it or for very short distance movements.
Cars are a symbol of status and people will want to have that status wherever they are - look at how much people will pay for a skin in Fortnite.
I think it’s more likely car manufacturers (the expensive ones) will only let you drive their car in the metaverse if you buy it for real in the real world.
If this metaverse really does come to pass, it will be just as (if not more) valuable as a place to be than the real world.
I know that sounds mad to most of us, but by the time it happens we’ll all be 10 years older and not the main market for it anymore. Everyone else will have grown up paying for Fortnite skins and NFTs and it will all seem a lot more… normal.
Sport team season ticket holders getting exclusive digital jerseys to wear? College students getting a code to unlock digital shirt of their alma mater?
Brand affiliation as an identity marker in a virtual space makes sense.
But in the end it will be whoever’s walled garden the metaverse is planted in that makes the real money. 15% of everything.
That’s why fb want this so bad.
I've already paid a lot of money for a number of high quality car models I can drive quite accurately on high quality race track scans with lots of other people in iRacing.
These are works of love, and I greatly appreciate that the interest in iRacing has boomed as much as it has since I joined the Papyrus guys' latest offering in 2008.
Heck, soon I'll even be able to connect a real BMW M4 racing wheel to my sim setup, adding more $$$$s yet also more realism to a setup already deep my the investment path; I just don't see the use case for "having cars" in <meta name="rainbowpuke" content="Facebook" /> or whatever if it's only going to be window dressing; I mean, what's the point, unless we enter the fidelity of e.g. iRacing. So I can't see "meta" competing with them at all unless they either buy it (and they wouldn't; it's far too hardcore) or a competitor.
I can see the value of motorsport companies investing in esports, however, as the newest generation of F1 drivers have their roots in that and e.g. karts - which enables a connection to the fanbase hitherto impossible. Would they find value in giving lots of money to MetaFace instead? Time will tell; it'll be interesting to see what eventuates from all of this. First impressions are pretty much Candy Crush in VR - with all the spam you could possibly tolerate, and then some. (No thanks.)
With all that, I truly think yes... people absolutely will drive a car in VR.
This is one of the articles main points this decentralised universe of cool shit you can do already exists. The question is whether interoperability actually brings anything useful.
Even if I can drive a square block by designating it a car, it’s not really a car I want to drive in.
i3 is explicitly for power users, but someone will eventually take the idea of tiling window managers and make something with a low learning curve. And that will be the end of desktop icons and movable windows.
How much extra do I pay to get wired up to feeding and waste tubes for 24/7 access?
I’ve seen the Matrix, so I assume I need a big pod full of pink gloop in my bathroom too?
You could sign into different worlds, or turn different layers of reality on/off.
Perhaps you choose to use a reality where the rules are more akin to the real world, and so the best way to get around is a car... a car that looks and behaves like a car.
And then 15 minutes later you get bored and jump into a world where you can have rocket boots instead.
There will be markets for all different types of realities.
I mean now if they simulate a car for Grand Turismo, they also use some kind of API (Unity Engine, OpenGL, whatever) to encode the behavior. Likewise a metaverse will have some API which you can use to encode behavior.
It remains to be seen what options it provides. In SL I think you wouldn't have been able to create a very good car simulator because the engine was too limited. But the situation might be improved for newer metaverse attempts.
I think most people in this thread are missing the point. It is not that people could only experience VR without the metaverse. People can still surf the internet, yet most people chose to spend their time on Facebook, because it is more convenient and makes some things easier. To the point that some non-Facebook internet sites make you sign in with your Facebook account.
If everybody is on meta, it makes no sense for Mercedes to create an independent VR experience to advertise their cars. It makes more sense to do it in meta, where Facebook can direct users to the Mercedes VR world.
People have managed to create good apps for the Oculus Quest, too.
I was CTO in an Augmented Reality company that did a lot of user testing (using AR to showcase products) so have atleast a rudimentary understanding of the technology and peoples relationship to it: AR and VR are 'wow' experiences that really excite people before they've tried it and for the first few experience, but apart from a small subset of people the excitement and wonder wears off pretty quickly. When selling things, aspirational photos (the product in a desirable setting) is usually more useful to a buyer than seeing it in AR in their current home.
I first used a $50K VR headset 30 years ago in a CS research department (Dire Straits - Money for Nothing video quality graphics) and it was thrilling but obviously didn't catch on because of the cost and lack of technical performance at the time. The technology available still isn't ready - poor battery / CPU performance really kills mobile AR, the low resolution/field of view/lifelike rendering makes VR painful for the average person.
(Well, he would if he existed.)
The corporate metaverse will be advertiser driven. You won't be able to put rocket launchers on a car except in specific zones where violence is allowed. You'll have to pay the metaverse operator to get your helicopter approved, and they'll want 30% of anything you make from helicopter rides.
All of this is an advertiser friendly second life with no reason to participate. I've had plenty of fun in VR but I want nothing to do with advertiser driven VR, and a metaverse even less.
incredible work zuck.
The closest thing we have to what's being described here is a video game. 3D game development is one of the most difficult and unforgiving branches of software development.
To achieve what is being talked about here, BMW is going to have to hire a team of 3D artists, animators and programmers to realize this asset. And someone is going to have to make sure this asset performs well, and interacts appropriately with the world, and with all the other assets which have been created by independent and unrelated teams. Part of that is, driving around in this car can't use too much CPU and GPU budget so that it brings the framerate to a halt when it appears on screen with any combination of the infinite number of combinations of things which could exist in this world.
This stuff takes years and is hard to get right for mature AAA studios with decades of experience. The idea that every company with an ad department is going to get into this vastly expensive and unproven business is a dream for facebook but a nightmare for everyone else.
You'd be surprised how popular truck and flight simulators are.
I'm also reminded of the US military's funding of FPS games like America's Army (and at least involvement in Call of Duty) as recruiting tools.
Advertisers will no longer just manipulate what we read or see but now what we interact with. Makes me yearn for the ceefax thing on the frontpage.
New abilities to interact is meant to fundamentally transform data in the same way the web added links, not merely put lipstick on existing pigs.
Instead, marketing execs (whose real goal is merely to sell more ads) want to recreate the boring experience of being stuck in an auditorium because this is what the aesthetic of "learning" looks like to them and they can't imagine learning differently.
A key difference is choice: you opt-in to look at something, you choose to pause and explore a topic further, you're not passively being marketed at like people who leave the tv on all day in the background.
It's so frustrating that there are so many exciting wonderful advances being done in all kinds of domains and they get overshadowed by the marketing gimmicks.
But they were buried by the web. They wouldn't have scaled out anyways, but we were working on that. But they were mostly lost in time.
Ego-capitalists like Zuckerberg want to pilfer from that history and make something they control. The interesting parts of the Internet have been buried by things like Facebook which has offered a dumbed-down walled-in Internet where your uncle can act out his own virtual reality fantasy of ranting about Obama at the thanksgiving table all year long to an imaginary bottomless audience. Sigh.
I personally won't let VR goggles into my house. I'd like my teenagers to grow up without them.
> We've been playing games and chatting for decades! What do we truly have to gain by trying to merge all entertainment into one giant Ivan Ooze of content?
There are some uses for which gaming will be important commercially going forward, as things turn remote. gaming mechanics are going to be useful with:
- remote work, where the 3d representation gives occasionally a sense of immersion with the team, permanence/continuity, and a graphical sense of "where is everyone"
- remote education, where kids will be lured by avatars and follow interactive demonstrations of things, making it a lot more engaging.
VR is not needed for any of this, but a bit of gaming environment and mechanics are the natural evolution of texting.
People in this thread seem to be focusing on VR and AR and immersive interaction and they're missing the point. The article is not a rebuke on these things, lots of people would love to jack into quake and run around like real life, or engage in some virtual activity while their nether regions tingle. What's being rebuked is this idea that people will walk down a street from one website to another and sit around a fake room drinking a beer with their buddies with dildos strapped to their foreheads and hundred gallon cowboy hats on. This idea that all online interaction is better when immersive is absurd if you think about it. VR games are cool, but the metaverse isn't VR games, it's VR YouTube ads and VR SMS and it's not going to catch on because it's lame.
The year is 2030. A 5 year old Timmy is bored and demands attention from his mother, currently hooked in VR doing her remote job. She excuses herself for a moment, straps Timmy into a special harness and puts his VR goggles on. Timmy is now in a virtual playground with other kids his age. All his movements, especially facial expressions, are reproduced in virtual reality. There's an option to use an automatically generated avatar that sort-of reproduces how Timmy looks, but he can also look like a cartoon character. His mother is happy - she doesn't have to drive him to a kindergarten and he stops impacting her work. There are early brain implants that greatly expand immersion, but they are so expensive they are limited to multimillionaire nerds.
2040. Overwhelming majority of kids in developed nations attend virtual schools in VR. Brain implants got better and cheaper, allowing full virtual body control. They are now within financial reach of the upper 20%, not just a tiny financial elite. They start to be required in professional settings as they greatly increase efficiency, with companies sometimes funding them for their employers on a payment plan.
2050. An entire generation now greatly prefers communication in VR to real world interactions and self-identifies more with whatever they chose as their avatars rather than with their real body. Their friend networks are global - quite possibly they don't have any friends within 100km. They spend overwhelming majority of their waking time in metaverse. Brain implants are ubiquitous in people below 40, with most expensive versions allowing a full dive experience.
Most of physical work happens in metaverse, with workers controlling humanoid robots remotely. It's not perfect yet - but it's getting there.
---
Compared to the growth of 2d internet, metaverse is now in early 90s. There's no need to buy a vr kit right now - but once facial expressions tracking arrives it's time do it, otherwise you risk permanently losing touch with the zeitgeist.
NeosVR already supports facial tracking with HTC's face tracker.
I believe much of it comes down to left brain hemisphere dominance, as would suggest Mc Gilchrist’s "The Divided Brain".
These people are ungrounded, and most concerning is they are less capable of empathy (a scientific fact outlined in the book I mentioned).
It really does not bode well for society that these people have so much power and money, as it’s not just them, but millions of people around the world slowly getting out of touch themselves through using apps and services created from this "left hemisphere dominant" attention to the world.
The CLOUD is bullshit because it already exists, and it's called the internet
But as soon as I tried to find out how this "magic" was supposed to work, it evaporated.
I suppose similar to SSID, the Metaverse is a marketing plot to bring what's already happening (for decades!) in some circles to a wider audience. And marketing being a complex problem, I believe it's largely up to chance whether it succeeds in the long run or not.
First, I can’t believe the author can call the metaverse bs because it would be nonexistent or would soon die: it is already nascent and seems to be growing by the mere fact people (some of them influential) are pushing for it, as he points out himself.
Consequently, we are left with an ethical viewpoint: internet of text has more virtues than vr or blockchain, games are more creative (thus, beautiful?) if closed worlds, etc. Allow me to call is the “down to earth” viewpoint. I should also mention the calling out on private interests driving the metaverse developments, but allow me to stay concise.
I can definitely relate to it, but, in some sense, this criticism sounds like a lack of respect for future humans who might feel like this metaverse thing is actually improving their lives. It’s a bit like criticizing a religion in front of a believer: that’s rude and often not conclusive.
At that point or the discourse (as a better conclusion to the article), I’d be more interested by reading some ideas to concretely promote a different vision for the future of the internet and games. What else can we suggest, as programmers, designers, … that could be convincing to people to follow the “down to earth” path?
Specifically, beyond all the delusion of the metaverse as discussed in the article... are these people seriously pitching that average (or even top 1%) people will create content, and people will pay not to view the content, but just to be listed in the blockchain database that says that they own that content?
That sounded crazy to me before I wrote it, but I just realized: apparently Twitch (the video game streaming site) makes quite a bit of money from people paying just to send a message to all the other people watching the same stream. I don't understand this and haven't been able to get into Twitch, but maybe that's what they mean.
Still though, it seems dishonest to call that buying an "NFT". At that point you're bidding on being seen by all the other people watching the stream, not just to be listed as the "owner" of some digital content.
Then again, devil's advocate, people used to say that the internet had no applications for regular people. All it would take for NFTs to become important is for everyone to agree that they are important, and for some reason choose to read the stuff written by whoever buys the NFTs.
That seems crazy to me now, but I suppose it's not too far off from paying to send messages in a twitch stream. Maybe if all the companies agree to integrate viewing the NFT purchases with viewing the stream, then it would work? People also voluntarily read comments, so maybe NFTs would simply be the way of having an HN/reddit style comment tree on twitch streams, substituting karma for cryptocurrencies.
This gives me very unsettling vibes, but maybe the world would be a better place if you needed to pay 10 cents to make a comment, and if the content producer received that money for creating popular and engaging content. (Ugh, new dystopian idea: someone being able to make a living by posting articles that start flame wars)
While the eastern wisdom suggests that we sit down, clear our heads, and connect with our bodies, here we are at the opposite extreme where your senses are completely immersed in an environment managed by a company that did everything to maximize profit and increase addiction.
Human body exists in the physical world, not in a second life. They need to thrive in that world not into some "metaverse". People already glued to their phones, next, they are completely helpless, connected to a headset in a fantasy world, dysfunctional in the real one. Beside what exactly is this adding to people's life? internet is already connecting people thoughts and ideas, perhaps the effort they put to see each other in real life is worth it.
No thank you. And that is not a vision I would like to pass for the coming generation either.
One, it is inevitable that our concept of identity will continue to change. How people opt in and out of a persistent identity/persona/brand, and how that interacts with community standards, seems a key concern for the future. This can happen just as much in textual media as anywhere else.
Two, 3D worlds. Most tools we have today are more efficient ways of interacting than being embodied in a space. 3D games on 2D screens are fun but I see no need to somehow standardise and share these, and I certainly don’t want to move any of my day to day interactions into them.
Three, VR and augmented reality. The headsets are just bad. I don’t want to wear one at home, let alone at work or on a bus. AR apps are all janky demos on tiny screens. But it won’t always be like this, eventually let’s assume you have near perfect fidelity in a HUD on some nice sunglasses. That’ll be fun when it happens but it’s more than a decade off so I don’t know why people are making any bets on this stuff now.
Four, AI. When I finally have my cool sunglasses, I will immediately realise that the UI is dreadful. At that point, we better hope that AI and personal assistants have moved on or it’s all going to be for nothing. We will need subvocalisation tech to make these palatable for use at work or in public. If AI is good enough to service these interfaces, however, I strongly suspect the nature of work and life will be radically different anyway. Having a cadre of intelligent agents out there in cyberspace representing my interests? That’s cool, but also makes me think the actual metaverse is going to be optimised for machines not humans. We’re not going to be able to keep up.
Of these, the flashy 3D avatar stuff seems to be what people focus on and yes, does seem a trivially stupid idea. But despite my cynicism, I can’t discount the rest, beyond the fact that it all seems very far off.
Having these capabilities of course does not mean that VR games are automatically superior. In fact, the vast majority of VR games are kinda clunky compared to traditional PC and console games. But they enable fundamentally new interactions which are really interesting to experiment with, and shouldn't be discarded as just gimmicks.
Not only predicting but apparently hoping for and trying to bring about.
Trying to bring about a dystopia: Yup, they're the baddies all right.
I don't think, XR will be an integral part of it for some time.
Tokens (FT and NFT) that help us to distrubute and handle value in a transparent and decentralized matter are the USP here.
The rest is just extras on top.
This man is a moron.
This blog "missed the part" too. I hate how this site has no <noscript> warning for a JS-required blog entry and then also wants you to connect to Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Syndication, and Taboola. Facebook deserves all the criticism and then some, but if behind the scenes you're selling out your readers, you're not much better IMO. Outline wants to "empower readers" and their ToS page doesn't even work (https://www.outline.com/terms.html).
Quoting someone in this thread: "Metaverse is bullshit" is going to be the Dropbox comment [1] in 10 years!
And why did the Dropbox comment existed? It's because people on HN think if something doesn't fit their needs, it's then useless everywhere.
The difference is who controls it.
It is all about power transfer.
They are the baddies. Let's not forget WEF's aims that we "will own nothing and be happy" by 2030.
My impression is that this is the way they aim to achieve this. They'll have us hooked up to something or other, and harvest our 'free cycles' in our wetware to decrypt encrypted thoughtcrimes. Lol :)
Rather they are attempting to provide us with a consolation prize that we accept as if we wanted it. Because they plan to make real reality so unbearable we will want an escape!
Even hacker news.
I'd imagine it will be similar with Facebooks strategy
It makes sense to me. I don't think we have any idea how it's going to turn out though. Certainly the 30+ people here do not understand why teens buy Fortnite hats or have fun in Roblox. The lines between the "real" world and the digital world are blurring and will continue to merge as technology increasingly allows for more and more compelling digital experiences.
It goes all together with other humanity dreams like fly, eternal youth, read other’s minds, immortality, travel beyond the sky, trespass all frontiers/circumvent the world, telepathy, life without work or pain, etc.
They -have- to try, specially because they successfully achieved other large goals in their previous enterprises and now they feel they have to defeat new boundaries.
And I'll do what I could to create better and more convincing alternative...
There might be interesting reasons to simulate distance in the metaverse that correspond to real world phenomena like latency. Probably not IMO but who knows.
But “traveling” in the metaverse has always been a dumb idea; what’s the point? Anyplace you want to go is at most seconds away; the idea of “moving” to get there doesn’t add any value.
As ever, the grand vision totally ignores the realities of human nature.
Now look at the iPhone today, literally one of the most popular devices in history.
A lot of similar vibes today as there was around the release of the first iPhone.
If I had to bet, I would be betting on Mark even if I don't like Facebook or their other products.
Contrast that with the metaverse concept - Until some killer solution comes along that drops the friction for joe public to access it, it'll languish as a niche activity for people willing to dedicate a room and endure a bulky headset. Just as Internet surfing did through the 90s when it really required owning a desktop PC and having some corner of your house dedicated to the beast. Right now that looks like bulky VR headsets, poor resolution, and being locked off from the world around you while you're in the other place. There are a lot of parallels there to 90s internet access I think, and how that opened up with mobile devices that you could whip out of (and return to) your pocket moment to moment.
Early attempts to break down this barrier were Google glass, and Microsoft's foray a few years back into augmented reality. To an extent Starline as well. If/when someone cracks it and comes up with a solution that greatly reduces the friction to slip from real world into metaverse, they'll clean house. Until then, I suspect folks comparing it to the failure of 3dtv adoption are closer to the mark.
Funniest thing I’ve read all week.
I feel though, that the needlessly aggressive tone does do those arguments a disservice, by burying them under a ton of very loaded rhetoric.
This writer is obviously more concerned with creating a stir, and riling up people - rather than actually making a point.
…sorry.
I started a new job March 2020. I've yet to step foot into an office, or even get a badge for crying out loud...almost two years later.
That's my life.
The part that made me slightly dizzy was lack of proprioception during turns.
I suspect some brain implant is needed to transmit what all the human senses other than auditory and visual need for the brain to put the full picture together
This is just the latest installment of MZ's (literal) self-enrichment. OP have mentioned that people like him don't get it - they're the villain in these narratives - I can only but agree.
For all the hate HN has for the latter, it still exists, and defies its constantly predicted death. At this point if HN says something is bullshit its actually time to start looking at it critically because apparently bullshit survives much longer than what HN actually likes, lol RSS for example.
I would also hazard a guess that the future of screens is not more immersive screens but fewer screens at all. Voice control is a more important innovation than VR goggles.
In what sense has there been increased privatization since the 1980s? Note that I'm not contradicting you, I'm just asking how you are measuring this.
Note that Government spending has gone up. Since the 1980s, we've massively subsidized and increased regulation over healthcare (ACA, medicare expansion), housing (Federal Agencies have come to dominate lending market), education (massive infusions of loan guarantees and aids, micro-management of universities with Title 9), and employment (significant increase in licensing requirements as well as employment regulation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
I think my favourite source of information on the political side of privatisation (rather than the economic side) is this lecture series from Professor Shapiro at Yale:
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=150&step=2&isur...
But in 1997, government output (both state and local) as a share of GDP was was 12.8%, and in 2019 (skipping the covid stuff) it was 12.4%. A decline of 0.4% -- it doesn't seem really relevant as an explanatory variable, does it?
Or are you measuring government production in some other way?
The "data" that demonstrates privatisation most clearly is the sale of government assets. I did a quick search for some reports, here's one but it's about 10 years old:
https://www.oecd.org/daf/ca/corporategovernanceofstate-owned...
Things like prisons, electrical infrastructure, toll roads, rail, educational institutions, are all examples where the government used to own and operate but there has been a shift towards either private ownership or private management or both. I don't think these things show up clearly in "spending" alone, because the amount that is spent may increase as a result of privatisation (a great example of this is that the US govt spends more per person on healthcare than Australia, where I'm from, despite having nowhere near the level of publicly avialable healthcare).
Another example is that NASA pays Spacex to deliver payloads to the ISS. That would still show up as spending by the government, but it has a huge component of profit going to a private corporation, and there's no "competition" to produce improvements for the consumers in that case (us, the public) because of the aforementioned principal-agent problem.
The use of military contractors is another example where govt spending != govt production, and the government can absolve themselves of some of the accountability that would otherwise result from direct management of those forces:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/06/30/...
Conceptually, say you have a government service -- DMV. You have to pay for the building, you pay salaries, you buy equipment, etc. Now the government doesn't make its own pens or computers and it doesn't have its own electricians to service the DMV, it pays for goods and services from the private sector. So you would want to subtract out what it buys from the private sector, which is exactly what the value-add definition for the government sector does. This is to avoid double counting, since these add up to GDP and you want the sales of the computer maker to not be counted twice when you add up the value add of all indutstries to get GDP. Think of this also as the definition of a VAT - value added tax - it's computed as sales net of purchases. Except for government, it would be the budget net of purchases from the private sector, the residual being inferred as "government production". I am not sure how else to objectively measure government production, seeing as how that includes things like social workers, building inspectors, etc.
Therefore I think the data I cited is consistent with your definition, except that it is goods and services (most of what the government produces is services such as education and police, not goods, like roads).
But if you want to look at fixed assets (e.g. the DMV building itself, or the school building), then there is a different BEA table to look at, namely this one here:
https://www.bea.gov/data/government/fixed-assets#:~:text=Wha....
With fixed assets, you have to decide how to value them -- at current cost, historical cost, or real cost -- discussed here: https://www.bea.gov/system/files/methodologies/Fixed-Assets-.... This boils down to valuing that old computer at the DMV based on what it cost to buy deflated by some percentage based on estimated service life or how much you could sell it for today on the open market.
Check out the asset tables: https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=10&step=2
Using current cost accounting, in 1980 government fixed assets were 2.4 Trillion in 1980 and 16.1 Trillion in 2021, or a growth rate of 671% (a CAGR of 4.9%).
Whereas looking at private sector fixed assets also at current cost, we see it went from 7.1 Trillion in 1980 to 51.7 Trillion in 2020, or an increase of 728% (CAGR of 5.0%)
So it is true that private sector fixed assets increased 0.1% faster than government sector fixed assets over that 40 year period, but that certainly doesn't seem like evidence of mass privatization. This is true even if some things were privatized. E.g. maybe we started contracting with more private prisons but also added 20 new public universities in that period, so the net "privatization" was small.
But then, Google built a platform based on open source software that was beyond what anybody had to offer back then (except for the iPhone, which was better but restricted to Apple), and now we know how the story goes (Alphabet has significantly higher revenue than Microsoft, and controls the web, the majority of phone devices and is gaining substantial market share in Microsoft's territory, the PC).
However, there's a platform nobody has conquered yet, because it's inmature: AR. This is an opportunity for Facebook (Meta). They know about social (Google doesn't that much, and for sure the rage nowadays is social interaction with the people, there you see Twitch's success), and they know about AR and VR. I can't say they've any significant advantage over Google, but I believe they can be competitive.
Recent news is they're working on a Microkernel-based OS (I think it's been managed by a top Windows NT co-developer, so serious people that know their stuff), with a small footprint to conquer AR, as the current software simply doesn't cut it. We don't know its status vs. Google's Fuchsia, which is the other contender, but if they can pull it off, it's a substantial improvement and a solid foundation for the future. The idea is to repeat Android's road to success: open but controlled ecosystem that many OEMs can take advantage of. I'm all in for that, and I hope it's either them or Fuchsia the ones that get us to the future (because I honestly don't believe Linux will be). Of course, I'd say Fuchsia seems much more ready, and they're not ready at all.
Plus, they're working on a smartwatch. Let's see how it is, because Google has tried for long, but they simply are not competitive vs. Apple. Facebook could do something different.
Again, it's not my intention to bash Linux, or to say I like Facebook. I absolutely hate FB's social practices, but they know how to engage people, how to do social, and their work on Open Source, crypto, the internet as a whole and VR/AR is absolutely splendid, and for that, they deserve credit.
Y’all don’t have a clue. Blind men trying to describe why color doesn’t matter. Less memory than a nomad. No insight. Lame.
Everything since has been damage control, copying, and buying.
Zuck is a determined person at the right place at the right time. Nothing wrong with that. But a 'doer' or even idea guy? We'll see.
Zero information content article.
Ideas can’t be stolen, man. They can only be copied.
Like it or not, It’s simply the next new/big thing and we better embrace it before it’s too late.
Funny thing, I’ve recently refused a job from one of the big players on the filed because they wouldn’t allow me to work from remote…
This seems incredibly short-sighted.
The US defense establishment is to huge companies with huge budgets what those companies are to garage projects with 5 people.
I mean, that's an exaggeration, but the direction of the relationship is correct.
I had a dev kit in 2013, forgot about it and now have a Quest 2.
Will it take over the world? I'm not sure yet but it is a breathtaking improvement in the past decade IMO.
If I had a sufficiently advanced, light headset, that could mimic all the functions of my smartphone in VR/AR, I can tell you I would ditch my smartphone and probably never look back.
So it's a rant but I'm not sure what about: has the author spent much time in VR lately? Is it Zuckerbergs idea of VR in terms of the sci-fi fictional "metaverse" that bugs them?
I mean the author could be right about this being a flop.. but I'm not sure who it will be a flop for - us or Meta.
On the other hand, every day is day zero. AR/VR is not going away. Don't you want be able to identify a leaf by looking at it? Night vision?
I don't doubt it's coming. It's close. In my lifetime? Maybe.
The first mainstream passthrough AR device that can stitch out and replace humans will be an eye opener for many people. This will happen next year. Most likely at least Meta and Apple’s will do this. And probably a few others. It will be rough but it won’t be hard to connect the dots.
https://gfodor.medium.com/the-rise-of-avatarism-b7ecfa7c42bc
A quote:
What is Avatarism?
Avatarism is a movement to recognize and protect the fundamental human right of freedom of form
The idea that an entire civilisation is going to agree to all use VR goggles full time to preserve some non-existent "right" for a very small number of weirdoes to only ever be seen as their cartoon fantasy version is, frankly, laughable.
You do have freedom of form, you are just limited in the forms you can change to. You exercise it every time you get a haircut.
The question is about what changes if there are a variety of contexts where it is fair to assume most or all participants have photonic override. You are missing the point: this isn’t about goggles. Take a longer view, once the goggles become invisible.
The title image refers to an allegory I wrote, which I’m sure you didn’t read, that might help you understand what is probably going to happen as a consequence of technological curves.
So what are you going to do about it? Keep talking about them or do something to challenge it?
They know it is bullshit and it is dystopian but they are going to build it regardless. If it is not challenged, we are going to keep talking about how they won for another decade.
Every day when Meta is talked about and their services are used, Zuckerberg keeps winning. There is no amount of fines, scandals, privacy violations or confessions that can try to stop them.
They have metaverse in their name. Their avatar system is beyond phenomenal and they keep adding new things [2].
I don't think they're even trying to consolidate power. They appear to be in the very unenviable position of hosting half the internet's public verbal diarrhea, with no freakin clue how to deal with it. No sympathy here for the devil, but this is basically inevitable whenever anyone tries to grab the brass ring and take over a totally chaotic system.
Facebook is essentially a failed state.
Been doing that every hour since march 2020.
"But Tim Sweeney and Mark Zuckerberg don't see themselves as pizza mob bosses."
Also reminded of Laurie Anderson:
"Heaven is exactly like where you are right now. But much, much better."
In the same way Capitalism is based on the Protestant Work Ethic (see: Max Weber) the Metaverse is based on a kind of evangelical eschatology, where the imperfections of the real world will be transcended by techno-utopianism.
Something is always being transcended in these fantasies. But unfortunately this turns into denial of reality and refusal to engage with it in an adult way.
"Let's all live in a shared delusion where the physical world doesn't matter."
t's almost literally la la land.
We love media. A medium is a type of projection of a perceived reality and/or an imagination. The important word here is "projection": This includes distortion, bias, texture, it's never lossless, it introduces artefacts, it's also a kind of hashing as we transgress dimensions, projection comes with boundaries and constraints, and by this creates a specific horizon. We love that sort of thing. (For the programmers out there: This is also true for programming languages: these provide a specific projection as a medium for functional thought. It's ok to like or dislike a language.) Creating and loving media is one of the most human things I can think of. But it only works, because there's a variety to it: if there was just one artist, projecting her specific mediality onto innumerable works of art, art and arts in general were quite boring.
And here comes the problem: By mashing up all media in a more general one, by generalising them in the frame of a super-projection, the Metaverse also puts an end to media, as an immeasurable plurality and variety of specific projections. The Metaverse is just boring, because it is the same Metaverse, always. It may be a capitalist's dream, but it's also the consumer's thermal death of interest.
I thought that was just the World Wide Web.
> And it's not happening anytime soon.
It’s...what?
wear a MetaMask, and equip MetaFilter.
But they really do seem to want to push replacing the web with VR and a VR environment they have complete control, and the only open aspect being you can play by their whimsical rules.
With that, am I allowed to call the FB metaverse - Trump Towers 2.0?
The wave of hype around the tech has honestly been surprising to me. Me and my friends have been trying to build and encourage VR, crypto, and foss communities to build out an open metaverse _precisely because_ the threat is that the metaverse turns into a bullshit narrative co-oped by whoever controls distribution. Which would be a very sad thing not only because it's a slippery slope to even more loss of agency for people, but because the metaverse we envision is the best shit ever and it would be a tragedy if it didn't exist.
And now here we are talking about Meta, the worst possible interpretation of the metaverse we have been warning would come.
There's an entirely different narrative I wish people would write about: how NFTs have let my artist friends quit their jobs and follow their passions, how people are finally understanding how money actually works with crypto, how the NFT/metaverse surge spawns the most genuinely entertaining creator-owned content on the internet, if you're inducted. Others (like me) are having the time of their lives making dank ass open source user-owned games and experiences we've always wanted to exist using dream stacks on the web, with the support of an audience that respects us for what we do, and no middle men like Meta. It's a dream to see it coming together.
And it's surreal that after 10 years of work we got well funded, because we'd be doing it for 10 more years for free regardless. Yet despite a decades long track record of refusing to take user's money until we deliver a dank ass metaverse experience, we still often get called "crypto scammers". And now because of articles like this, our work is "bullshit". It is honestly a little offensive.
I'm still angry so I'll address the points in the article as they annoy me.
> The metaverse is bullshit because it already exists, and it's called the internet
I agree, it's basically the web. That's why I called my company Webaverse. It's a sick stack.
> The metaverse is bullshit because tech moguls missed the part where cyberpunk is dystopian
I suspect many people with opinions on Snow Crash haven't read Snow Crash, because the metaverse/street in that book is pretty sweet. It's run by the ACM, hacking and liberty are respected. I wish facebook was building the metaverse but they are not.
> The metaverse is bullshit because its promised cross-compatibility doesn't actually work
Today I heard there is an awesome avatar release being announced on Monday. We are already testing the avatars in our client software to make sure they animate great, so we can meet the deadline in 2 days. If you don't think it works you're probably looking in the wrong corner of the internet.
> The metaverse is bullshit because no one can actually explain why it's better
It's a sick ass game, that in addition to being extremely fun, is open source and can teach people to liberate themselves from companies like Meta that want to own them. The metaverse is better than the alternative: Meta.
If any of this surprises you to hear, please do your own research before you paint the metaverse with Zuckerberg's brush. It's what he wants.
But I guess some rich assholes pushing it makes it more legitimate.
It's pretty much unfathomable that you could build a standard that would allow for the kind of seamless interoperability that's being promised. You'd either end up with an outrageously complicated standard that's completely impractical to make use of, or you force people into a very stringent set of artificial limitations. That's assuming you are capable of tackling the unknown technical challenge that lies ahead, which is entirely in uncharted territory since no one has ever been stupid enough to try this.
Someone was telling me earlier about how in the Metaverse you could, for example, get a character skin for Fortnite and then use that in Roblox too. When I hear that the alarm bells start ringing. Even if we assume that this just works, and all issues related to implementation magically don't exist, Roblox looks absolutely nothing like Fortnite and any skin carried over from there will look totally out of place.
Actually, what if you have an avatar from a more adult oriented game and use it in a kids' game like Roblox? Is there gonna be a standard for what's acceptable that we should assume every vendor will follow to the letter?
But no worry, I'm told, this Metaverse annoucement just means they're going to start researching these problems and working on them from an architecture and standards viewpoint, and so the answers will eventually present itself. So, basically, this amounts to a promise to commit resources to an R&D project of unknown scope and duration to ROI, with largely uncrystallized use cases and exclusively commercial entities as arbiter of how the standards will look and lots of investor cash, all just so we can do things we can basically already do better with conventional technology at a significantly lower CO2 expenditure.
It's really nothing more than a giant investor cash sink that's going to keep a lot of people busy for decades and then fizzle out. Years later people might ask why the hell we ever fell for this nonsense, but we didn't: this is just how capitalism works now.
For example for most work at least in office, keyboard is pretty damm useful thing. And I don't think there is any good solution to replace it.
"The metaverse is bullshit because no one can actually explain why it's better."
Second Life was phantastic, I still miss it to this day. It just had a very clunky interface, which modern devices like VR gear might improve upon. (I know SL is still around, probably many lessons to be learned).
Also, "We also have Snow Crash to blame for the absolute hell we find ourselves in today," - wut? Yeah, the "absolute hell" of billionaires investing lots of money to create fun and immersive entertainment options for the rest of us. Truly the worst dystopia imaginable?
Yes, the "circuses" part of "bread and circuses".
Superficial appeasement doesn't really outweigh the all the many other unethical actions made by billionaires - in this case, vying for be the proprietary controllers of the literal reality of the future.
You are not forced to attend the "circus", either, if you don't like it.
As for centralized control, that is actually the one thing that disappoints me about the future. Somehow all the SF books glossed over the immense cost required to develop the cutting edge technology. How much money did Facebook spend to create the Oculus Quest? I just don't see hobbyists and hackers create the same level of technology - or think about the Apple M1 SoC. Would hackers have been able to create such a thing in their mom's basement eventually? I rather doubt it. So centralisation is an issue, simply because development costs are so high. It's not simply a conspiracy by evil billionaires.
Facebook bought a company made of hackers to get in on VR on the ground floor. Yes, they're throwing money at the problem to artificially keep the price down, but using that example really hurts your point.
As a side bonus piss off Big Tech by not participating in their extractive, and increasingly authoritarian surveillance capitalism and brainwashing.
> Read paper books that you actually own.
What's wrong with reading borrowed books? Public libraries are a marvellous invention!
Observe the huge jump in fidelity of VRchat or rec room vs second life or Roblox.
Listen to how a kid describes the rec room versions of "squid games" without ever seeing the show on Netflix.
Metaverse is coming. Agree it driven by many distinct holistic experiences; but roblox v2 in a world like Rec Room puts the ball pretty far down the court in the groundwork for a platform of many experiences in one.
There will be aggregators that improve transactions, social networks, communication, ease of app building, distribution and discovery vs operating in discreet silos.
I see this meta name change as Facebook conditioning investors to rationalization of the huge amount of money it will spend buy companies that show early momentum in this direction.
No, VR is coming. The metaverse, as reiterated by the author and self-evidently obvious to anyone who has thought about it, has been here since the 90s, and is the internet. What Facebook is trying to do here is to impose a propietary interoperability gatekeeper layer on top of certain aspects of a VR-enabled internet. But the things they're offering are things that nobody is asking for. They will eventually quietly walk their ambitions back and content themselves with selling good VR headsets with some minimally-attractive Facebook integration.
- Promote LGBTQIA+ to reduce overpopulation.
- Give the remaining useless (from the POV of the techno fascists) humans virtual reality toys and a tiny basic income. They'll become fat, lethargic and won't reproduce as well.
- For the tasks that cannot be automated, import poor immigrants who will work in agriculture.