The metaverse is already here, it's called the internet
canolcer.com
canolcer.com
Anyway, Zuck's easy to make fun of. Easy to underestimate too.
Back in the 90s, it was thought to have been proven that an AOL-like attempt to top-down control the WWW was doomed to failure. An open web was too powerful. Well... that was before Zuck.
In many countries, FB-only internet is free and that means FB-only internet is the internet for like a billion people. Meanwhile, lots of unsophisticated users who's first and only device is a smartphone are mostly just FB users. He defied conventional wisdom, made FB a walled garden. Zuck really did "do AOL."
Meanwhile, the IG & WA acquisitions are strategically flawless in retrospect. With his tactical skills in the early days, Zuck's managed to keep more shares and control over FB than other CEOs. He may not have style and he's not quite hip, but Zuck is effective in his strategies.
I'd like to believe Carmack is right and Zucks' lame, top-down VR metaverse is doomed... pun intended. But I also recall that Zuck bought John out, and he's the boss. That may not be coincidence.
Carmack vs Zuckerberg I think can be summed up as follows: one builds things things people will genuinely like, and the other one force-feeds people until they like it and know no other option.
Behavioral economics of the preceding decades trained people to sit and stare.
His success is due to a shared idea lots of money = positive contributor
Like here's a "Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Phone Edition" phone out a couple of years before the iPhone https://www.zdnet.com/product/anextek-sp230/
It proves Apple’s data labels and growing awareness digital ads drive little business, which proved Facebook is a non-contributor to the economy in a real way
Zuck is just looking to keep his good times rolling as interest fades. This isn’t courage, this is “the writing is on the wall, let’s try something sooner than later.”
I'm not so sure that this shows Facebook pulling off an odds-defying feat. AFAIK Facebook targeted people who would have never touched a mobile phone or have working internet otherwise. Any company with sufficiently deep pockets to subsidise internet for free could roll out a similar locked-down internet for these people.
Until they didn't anymore because broadband infrastructure, now they're a prefix that you say before you say "Time Warner"
How long until we get to say "Meta Disney"
A pretty poor one, as it does great harm to the inhabitants. Intrusive advertising is based on being able to target specific people with messages (tracking). Different messages for different people. Gee, its almost like this mechanism might engender mistrust and divisiveness. Which in turn might fracture communities. And gee, one might even consider that foreign governments might use this as a weapon. Or potential dictators and other bad actors. Gee.
The clickbait metaverse is only one of an infinite number of alternatives. Each metaverse has a set of rules for how the inhabitants operate. Wikipedia and craigslist come to mind as non-members of the clickbait metaverse. Other rules would - for example no tracking - would create other metaverses.
We need a radical alternative to this shithole that Nation States and corporations have designed for us, or our children won't even have clear air or water left because we will have polluted everything, and for what?
Edit: Here's Carmack's keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo
That’s the vibe that I got.
No wonder Buffett was doing new deals all the time, probably his way of coping with it.
""" I can do anything in the world I want to do but what I want to do is run Berkshire Hathaway. Now why do I want to run it that way? There's a couple of things:
A) I get to paint my own painting. I go down there every day and I feel like Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel or something. [...]
And the second thing I like, frankly, is I like applause. I like appreciation. So I like having shareholders who feel good about what I've done.... Everybody in our family has got all of their money in Berkshire, and so those people are counting on me. And that's kind of fun to have something where you can actually deliver for other people and change their lives in positive ways.
"""
Have to say it's entertaining to see Carmack roast Zuck publicly.
I have access to many many acres of forest, and am quite familiar with it. For reasons unrelated to this discussion, I am unlikely to see many interesting places in person around the world... Pictures are nice, but will never do them justice. I wouldn't mind being able to take a 3d VR tour of them one bit.
Edit: That said, living in VR and never going for a walk through a forest would be utterly dystopian and nightmarish for me. The only thing keeping me from daily walks in the woods right now is hunting season.
I don't think any of these things are substitutes for each other. A book about the arctic is not an alternative to a visit. It's a substitute for another book, maybe.
The main way VFR competes with other stuff is competition for time, in the sense that TV, social media and such are.
These will be the same software developers that will end up building Progressive Web Apps for smart glasses made by a big tech company.
Probably it will have both AR and VR capabilities built in and the use case will be to use AR for outdoors (and indoors) and VR for indoors only.
Like it or not, it is going to happen and they will be building it anyway.
IMO Facebook wants you to experience life entirely though their platform, because once you take a step back you realize that Facebook is this weird alternate world where everyone is angry all the time, truth has no meaning and there are no social norms.
Meanwhile, when you DO step back into real life, you realize many of the people who probably want to murder you online are perfectly nice in person. Or that most of the people you talk to on Facebook are people you used to be friends with but would never make time to see in real life because you’re not that close anymore. And that Facebook might not be reflective of reality, which threatens their engagement metrics. So they want to shape your reality to be less threatening to them. I couldn’t think of a more dystopian concept — fortunately the value proposition is not appealing to most.
Anyway, I use it once or twice a month to play a zombie shooting game with my brother, who lives overseas. We shoot zombies for an hour and chat. It feels kind of similar to golfing, bowling or somesuch. We can't do those in person, so we do it in VR.
So for me, VR is kind of a comms tool. A place to catch up. Alternative to video calls. Calling is great, but doing something together it just a normal way of bonding.
As always, the tech is a canvas. You can paint any pictures on it. That said, yeah... This kind of tech & gaming has shown a real proclivity for isolating us from reality and each other.
OOH, I think social VR has a lot of immediate potential, with current and next generation tech. It'll take a while before the user base, hardware, etc. will support blockbuster gaming, films and such. Social stuff can be more lightweight and simple. In that sense, fb is a sensible home for VR.
OTOH, fb's approach to software if goddam awful. Their whole paradigm is making software that makes people do things, not software that people do stuff with. That's likely to tip the balance in the antipattern favour.
We definitely don't need fb. VR though, is another mode. We don't necessarily need it, but having it does give us something new.
For hanging out with a younger sibling, zoom doesn't work too well. Video (or audio only) calling enables only a certain kind of interaction. In the physical world,we play tennis, have dinner, cook together, etc. We don't just sit in front of each other and talk intensely all the time.
VR opens this up a little.
In comparison, any computerized activity will require tons of resources (and related industrial pollution) and slave labor to produce the hardware you're using, and more energy/resources to power the device. I'm not against video games, but do we need more hardware? Our hardware is extremely powerful already (though games are rarely optimized in any way) and as much as i can see human progress via Internet connectivity, i don't see any "usefulness" for VR technology: it seems to me that apart from requiring more hardware and potentially fueling gaming addictions and social isolation, there is little to no value proposition compared to Second Life and other software we've had for decades.
>“There’s this piece of art that goes around the internet of this dystopian kid in a corner, drooling, with goggles on with rainbow pictures and it’s a terrible looking place,” Carmack told Rogan. “And people say, ‘This is the world you’re trying to build, people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them.’”
>“Is his life really better if he takes them off and he’s in this horrible place?” he asked. “I live in Dallas. It’s 100 degrees there. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air-conditioning. People don’t generally go, ‘Oh, you’re not experiencing the world around you because of air-conditioning’ … That is what human beings do, we bend the world to our will.”
I guess it's a matter of perspective but I will say this: I had to isolate myself for months during covid, because of chronic issues that increase the risk of getting ICU'd. And while I missed social contact and leisurely walking under the sun, I can't say that I ever felt imprisoned. If anything, in times like these I would love to have even the emulation of the experience that is walking through a forest without having to worry about my allergies, my joints, snakes or getting lost.
What this all means is that, you're not "better" or "worse" than me for wanting to go in the countryside. You're only different. The whole notion of "you have no life if you work in front of a computer most of the time" was absurd to begin with. How is doing something that I enjoy doing "no life"? The solution to that is simple: Instead of applying societal pressure by pointing out that someone refuses to have a life by focusing too much into games, programming, anime or whatnot to inspect the reasons why they're not attracted to what you claim to be as "having a life".
What I'm saying is, getting out once or twice a week to get my sun exposure for some vitamin D works just fine for me, and I hope people will stop pointing out that "I don't have a life because I prefer X over Y". It's wrong, it's borderline "no true Scotchman" and pivots over the real issue that is respecting people's preferences without feeling that you have "more life" than others.
And we see that it clearly has a very negative impact overall so idk what kind of argument is that.
"everything sucked so we destroyed our environment and enslaved ourselves to machines to make it bearable"
You're talking about AC? Surely the climate dialogue hasn't devolved to the point of "uses energy == bad". We can reflect on its role in shaping society/living spaces and its costs and benefits without being so reductionist.
Humans are just really good at externalizing costs on the environment and on each other.
And enough humans are driven by motivated reasoning so that entire organizations are devoted to disrupting any attempts at fixing things.
Those are human problems. Facebooks social problems are not caused by the evils of digital scrapbooking with reliable write/read coherence over shards. They are the evils of humans redirecting information based on perverse incentives, taking profits from others pain.
AC has had an extremely positive impact. Simple uses energy == bad reasoning hasn't.
Nation States and corporations have rendered the western world so meaningless and painful that most of us will do anything to get out of it for a while... whether it's via drugs or VR or whatever means at our disposal.
My friend has had a vive for years, he has an entire room dedicated to it so you can actually walk around. Its being driven by a several thousand dollar computer and makes the room unusable for anything else as you have to keep the floor vacant so you can actually walk around. If I had a room to spare, and 5-6k dollars to drop, I'd have it but when you're taking home about $500 a week and don't have an empty room...
The cheaper options, where you're just sitting on your couch, aren't nearly as engaging or interesting (at least to me). Another thing to consider is how many people wear glasses, and how poorly these things work while wearing glasses because they mask them into your face and/or fog. If I want to get custom lens inserts, I'm looking at another $300-500 cost every 12-18 months (that's assuming any can actually accommodate my astigmatism and the prism requirements I need).
But: As evidenced by the Gaming industry and the Entertainment industry ($150b+ combined rev), folks do want to escape from their usual environment.
If you're Facebook, and your mission's to connect the world, then metaverse sounds like one plausible solution to make that happen.
- you are working
- you have a family
- you have access to a forest
---
Whether or not more and more people will be unemployed or not due to advances in technology and shifts in society is probably up to debate. I personally think that we'll see more unemployment with uneducated folks. And even if they work it will be paid badly, unstable due to being easily replaceable and rather stressful and dull.
Same for having a family. Finding a spouse will be difficult for the disposable and getting children risky. So, also not an option for many.
And access to a forest - as in a place with nature where you can walk for half an hour without meeting anyone. Good luck with that living in the middle of some ghetto without public or individual transportation options.
---
Those products will be the new Opium for the People. The new couch with chips in front of the TV. A sedation and escapism.
A good chunk of them live online, having parasocial relationships with Twitch streamers and Youtubers, or buying skins to put on their characters in Fortnite. I have almost no idea what Roblox and Minecraft are besides world building, but kids get addicted to that too.
Lots of money to be made.
I regret the amount of my teens that I spent playing video games in general, but I don’t regret Minecraft. It’s such a genuinely positive and constructive experience in its openness. It’s like life - there’s no endgame or goal. No single way to play. You can decide you want to build a megabase connected by rail, you can decide you want to terraform a mountain, you can build crazy automatic machines to grow food or kill enemies for you. But it’s your choice, the game doesn’t push you in any direction outside of the very early game.
It also served as my introduction to computing - the in game wiring system is Turing complete. I learned about logic gates from Minecraft.
You know, the things that might come in handy in 20 years in toppling oppressive regime.
Meanwhile taking Chinese kids out of global shared culture that is increasingly more interconnected, virtual and gaming related so they only trust and feel at home when they are fed familiar government messaging.
But I'm sure goal of Chinese government is strictly improvement of peoples conditions.
I am not here to pretend I know anything about whatever the metaverse is, but I do know one thing if it's controlled by any of these companies it's gonna be bad for the people using it.
A few weeks or months ago you probably noticed your sentiment towards facebook turn pretty negative. Just thinking about the company as dorky instead helps their bottom line.
We all know this project isn't going anywhere, including maybe everyone but zuck.
The more noise about this lame ass project instead of how fb is ruining society, the better for them.
Depends on who gives the smart glasses it's 'killer app' and the ecosystem it needs to take off and who ever executes that properly, will win. The games are going to come first.
Probably will come from either Meta, Apple, Google or Microsoft. Most likely from Meta with the support of the Web and PWA's first.
> In the meantime, all we can do is make sure that Facebook’s cut of VR social networks stays as small as possible.
I don't see anything out there right now to counter what Meta is about to do, unless Mastodon or something else is planning to persuade the masses to not make money on the metaverse and stay on the fediverse.
Either way, this decade is going to introduce the smart glasses and it will come from Big Tech again as it did with smartwatches. Sorry.
Watches weren't new, calculator watches were introduced almost half a century ago, the concept had a ton of time to mature. A HUD/AR capable smartglasses will be an entirely new concept that has so far failed spectacularly every time it has been tried. Not saying it won't happen, just that it'll need a lot more time to mature as a consumer product than smartwatches did -- there's a lot more to it than waiting until the technology is capable.
My whole point is about execution, rather than something being 'new'.
It's not about being first or introducing something 'entirely' new, it's about the overall execution of the concept which then leads to mass adoption and who ever does that properly with a 'killer app' and ecosystem behind it, wins.
Can you tell me who currently leads in the smartwatches market?
In my personal bubble, Garmin smart/fitness watches are the most popular, followed by Xiaomi Mi Bands. I use a Suunto smartwatch I got as a gift.
Adult content also had a role in the rise of VHS cassettes and the early internet.
Exactly this. Mastodon on its own is clearly not enough. And cryptoeconomic systems still have to navigate financial regulations successfully before they ever become legitimate contenders.
Not sure I see another macrotrend out there to help counter this. Except crypto. And despite all my faith, I remain skeptical.
Let's about devastating mental health problems that this will cause. To me it's obvious that they will majorly fuck up human perception of reality like they did with social interactions.
Oh, and what do you think which age groups will be mostly drawn to it?
The metaverse is the internet we just need a bit of linking it all together, one company building it top down isn't going to beat out the obvious open internet approach.
For example with the web the interoperability is really between the browser and websites rather than between websites. Although a few do interoperate. This is more similar to how Roblox or Steam works where one program lets you join lots of different games and maintains some common state than common ideas of interoperability in the metaverse.
I think the Zuck use case was buying a t-shirt for a virtual avatar and I want to use that t-shirt in other applications. There is a matter of interoperability required at the level of the data that sits behind both applications as it pertains to the user that sits on the other side of those applications. (meaning just sharing data isn't enough, there is user level context as well).
And if you reduce interoperability to a single entity owned platform (like Steam), well other platforms will exist and the interoperability problem will be recreated.
To me the issues that require addressing are things like standardization, general uniqueness proofs, Cross-app total order broadcast, identity and service discovery, to just name a few.
My feeling is that the internet does not solve these problems, especially at the application layer, and therefore interoperability is a technical solution that is required for a metaverse like vision.
I believe the path to those soltuons does lie on the road of ubiquitous and dynamic technical interoperabity for web applications.
Anyway, back to what you said, I agree that seamless transition is the very big factor. IMO, "metaverse" requires seamless transition between assets not worlds. Current VR experience, even assuming a perfect browser, means that you switch between world when switching between websites. I believe that most usages would be that pages are mostly assets, not whole worlds. Kinda frames I guess. I don't think there is any specification at the moment for such a thing.
(Now I'm daydreaming of a VR RSS reader, where I move in my various news. Nope that doesn't sound like a good UX)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrml
> VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language, pronounced vermal or by its initials, originally—before 1995—known as the Virtual Reality Markup Language) is a standard file format for representing 3-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graphics, designed particularly with the World Wide Web in mind. It has been superseded by X3D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D
X3D is a royalty-free ISO/IEC standard for declaratively representing 3D computer graphics. File format support includes XML, ClassicVRML, Compressed Binary Encoding (CBE) and a draft JSON encoding. X3D became the successor to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) in 2001.[1] X3D features extensions to VRML (e.g. CAD, geospatial, humanoid animation, NURBS, etc.), the ability to encode the scene using an XML syntax as well as the Open Inventor-like syntax of VRML97, or binary formatting, and enhanced APIs.
There's also OpenXR: https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenXR/specs/1.0/html/xrspe...
This article here seems to believe that the metaverse is nothing but "internet VR". The talk by Carmack for the most part equates the metaverse with MMVR - massively multiuser virtual reality.
But according to the explanation that Raph Koster (the mind behing metaplace - the only prior attempt at ever building a metaverse) recently posted at the Playable Worlds homepage, what Facebook is trying to do, is building a mirror world - which is just one world out of many in a multiverse, which in itself is just one small part of the metaverse...
All that enthusiastic talk about "it's the future!" isn't helping either - if anything that muddies the waters even more.
Right now, we are on the best track of turning "metaverse" into a completely meaningless marketing buzzword. Everyone uses the term, behaving as if it was totally clear and obvious what it meant - but nobody seems to be able to actually produce a clear and to the point explanation or definition.
What actually is the metaverse?
Facebook already is a digital ecosystem company - they aren't changing anything at all.
Today Facebook steals your time by locking your attention to their web page or mobile app. Tomorrow they do it by locking your attention to their VR headset or AR glasses.
And each time, the whole Facebook ecosystem comes with you.
This is exactly what they do and Meta is a natural extension that is betting in a cultural change as much as it is a continuation of everything Facebook is.
Instead of clearly defining what these things mean, I think it's better for clarity if we just focus on implications. That's what we care about anyway. We care that "The internet will be the metaverse" inasmuch as this statement has implications.
"VR Internet" implies, IMO, decentralisation standard protocols. Zuckerverse implies centralisation.
The WWW didn't grow because with one or two companies controlling it. It grew out of a mass of individual webmasters.
To me, it seems kinda hard to discuss the implications of something, when you don't understand what it is - or when the people discussing it, have incompatible ideas of what it is.
For example, by the arguments of this article right here, AR/VR is not a requirement for a metaverse (otherwise the current internet could not be a metaverse, right?).
According to the keynotes/talks of Facebook and John Carmack, VR seems to be the most central ingredient though.
Raph Koster seems to rather agree with the notion that VR/AR is not required. It only has to be multiple virtual worlds that (at least some of which) can interact with the real world somehow.
As another example, Raph Koster thinks, that there must be many virtual worlds in a metaverse, and that this virtual worlds must be able to be significantly different from each other - visually and mechanically.
Facebook seems to think that having just one single virtual worlds (Facebook's own VR-world) is kinda enough to create a metaverse.
This article right here implies that no virtual world is required at all - as the internet doesn't qualify.
As a third example, both Facebook and Koster seem to agree, that it is important that a user in the metaverse be represented through some sort of Avatar. They seemingly disagree on what constitutes an Avatar though - Facebook's ideas imply a full 3D VR Avatar - while Koster counts MUDs as virtual worlds, where you get nothing but a handle (username) and maybe a small "description" text-box.
This article seems to deny even that notion, since in the internet you are just a more or less random IP-address. You can have all sorts of Avatars on various places on the internet - from usernames to profile images to fully customizable 2D or 3D-models. But all of those are separate and siloed.
And that's just the first few examples that came to mind - there's a lot more contradictions like these.
"Cloud" was a very ill-defined term once - many companies threw it around, often in completely nonsensical fashion. The cloud turned out to not be that magical future some where predicting back then. It's basically a new-ish way of hosting virtual servers in data-centers, that allows more flexible forms of deployment and new accounting methods - like pay per actually used compute power. Also more dynamic scaling. It didn't quite completely change the internet, and people's lifes like many claimed it would.
Blockchain is another such concept, that saw a lot of completely over-blown and outright nonsensical claims at first - and many companies claimed to use "blockchain" even when they didn't, just because it helped attract investment money.
That's what happens when terms get thrown around, that aren't properly understood.
Back to your suggestion of going straight for the implications. So, for example, let's ask the question what implications the metaverse might have on the future of VR and VR adoption. If the metaverse is defined as "it's just the internet and already exists" - like this article claims, then I see no special implications for VR here at all. If the metaverse is defined as massively-multiuser-VR, then the success of a metaverse is going to have huge implications for VR.
So, how do I go straight for those implications, without knowing whether the metaverse has something to do with VR or not?
For Zuck, "metaverse" is just VR with their app store.
All your time ... or rather until the skin on your face gets irritated due to weiring the headset with a microatmosphere within. Man, this must be a bummer returning to your dystopic shitty apartment. We already consider social media interaction as kin to regular drug consumption (stimulants I suppose) then that experience will be sort of a come down hang over.
> The metaverse is already here, and it’s called the internet.
I beg to differ - experiencing a virtual reality through a comfortable 3D head set is more immersive and exciting.
> Mark Zuckerberg is touting open protocols and interoperability.
"Open" probably just means that they will openly document their APIs.
if(user_agent.includes("facebookexternalhit"))
{
alert("Stay in your own metaverse!");
redirect_to("www.facebook.com");
}I was (and reluctantly remain) so excited for cryptocurrency and blockchain networks because of this aspect. Broad open networks interoperable at a data level seemed like exactly what is needed to create more dynamic interconnected digital systems. To some extent this is what is happening in the background.
But the obsession with individual experiences, in crypto it is thr scam coins or ridiculous yield products, dominates the conversation. I think this has greatly derailed the other conversations.
Now I worry that we're left with the only other reasonable answer. Facebook builds this infrastructure as their platform and the market ignores all the problems and flocks to it.
Doesn't seem like there are many entities in between these two places that are working on a more robust, and healthy, "metaverse".
I am determined to try and set up a coding environment in one. I get the feeling it will transform the "laptop experience".
But hours drooling in the corner. No. My son spends waaay too much time online gaming, it does so alsost exclusively with a roster of friends - chatting laughing organising new lands or strategies.
It's not my grandfathers way to socialise. But it is socialising. And we parents occasionally use the internet to co-ordinate chucking them into the outdoors to basically talk about the game they would be playing if their parents weren't so awful :-)
I am beginning to think of parenting in the web age as managing in the remote working era. You cannot rely on just being in same room / house as kids as some metric - we need to decide what are the activities we want to see, what are the outcomes (hours spent laughing, maths problems solved, time spent bullshitting with friends)
It’s easy to dismiss concerns like this with “well another word will just appear in its place” but linguistic history will disagree with you. Sometimes we just lose things, and it’s sad.
> Meta’s usage of it is relevant to its meaning.
Is it though ? - I thought Meta the name is just a shorthand for Metaverse, so the confusion is bounded to discussions on that topic.
Maybe I’m unable to see the issue. Can you give an example where this overloaded word will cause confusion ?
We definitely need to have a conversation about the pro’s and con’s of various things associated with Meta and the metaverse. This name collision thing just feels like a non issue to me.
Yes, the company name Meta is relevant to the actual meaning of the prefix “meta-“, as in metaverse, a word coined in 90s sci-fi as a contraction of “meta-universe”, meaning a universe that is not the universe but is “beyond” or “about” it, which is a very reasonable use of the prefix when applied to a virtual world, in line with other uses like metadata (extra data that isn’t “the” data but is “about” it).
Elon wants to go to Mars while earth needs fixing more than ever. Electricity poles that power pretty much all devices across US are rotten. Roads have potholes deeper than cavities. Average IQ is declining back to chimpanzee levels.
I think we are already in cluelessverse of nothing productive but just hope and dreams or lot of zeros and ones. 010101101110001 = just bytes.
The 'cloud' was already there, it used to be called the 'internet'.
"Serverless" is already here, it's called "servers".
the true innovation in serverless is billing.