Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is not the center of Open Simulator activity. This is just someone's directory of it. With ads. Just as Yahoo was "the directory of the Internet". With ads. I've used Open Simulator and never heard of this site before.

A more useful site is Hypergrid Business.[1] This discusses the various players in the Open Simulator world and what they're doing. There already is a distributed, federated metaverse with no single ownership. It's just not all that big. There are currently 362 grid operators, each with their own servers and users. Some are commercial, some are personal. There's a list.

[1] https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/

View on HN

Reading the "What is OpenSim" page on your link and... it sounds like the "Metaverse" already exists. The term is being sold like it's a new thing that doesn't exist yet, but it seems like Facebook is behind the times.

OpenSim seems pretty cool honestly. Similar draw as Second Life, in my mind. Though I downloaded Second Life and only played it a couple times.

> OpenSim seems pretty cool honestly. Similar draw as Second Life, in my mind.

It's the exact same technology as Second Life, just a third-party implementation.

These are ideas that have existed in pop culture for decades, and had a bunch of attempts at making it happen. It was surreal watching Zuckerberg talk about Horizon Home because it felt like he was projecting a Big Tech veneer over a hobbyists domain. People have been messing with this stuff in VR and earlier with virtual 3d desktops since the 90s, and possibly earlier that I am just not aware of.

It felt a bit like Elon Musk doing a keynote on a cool model RC plane he had built.

re: earlier than the 90s, I grabbed this link [0] from another metaverse thread, showing some 80s VR research (Judging by hardware, Sun-3, a macintosh, mentioned 20Mhz 386, otherwise no dates), I wish there was more info of who the people are, I would love to read their papers. At a Q&A near the middle, a researcher suggests allowing anyone to create content is a threat to the old publishers, pretty prescient but also typical 80s silicon valley I guess, but what do I know, I wasn’t born yet.

Also I rewatched Johnny Mnemonic today (set in 2021!) and apparently some form of that was written in 1981.

I realized what irk’d me so much about the Facebook’s presentation was that it had none of the flavor/aesthetic of being inside the computer, just a simulated mansion on the beach, super unimaginative, no attempt to explore the medium.

[0] https://youtu.be/5FC4UQDm_mQ

There was of course Habitat, and later World's Away. I came across this 1996 wired article about the "metaworlds" of the time:

https://www.wired.com/1996/06/avatar-2/

There's also the classic:

"The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat"

Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer Electric Communities

> This paper was presented at The First Annual International Conference on Cyberspace in 1990. It was published in Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt (ed.), 1990, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Wo...

Ed: see also this comment for habitat revived: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29055742

This is the largest list I know of (~176): https://ryanschultz.com/list-of-social-vr-virtual-worlds/

But it's missing many. Others have already mentioned Habitat (1986). Probably one of the most important.

It really feels to me like Facebook is basically squating the metaverse name, that existed for quite some time as a concept. And I don't like that at all - now everyone working on this stuff essentially has to start calling it with a different name or else they will look like they are somehow connected to Facebooks corrupted attempt at building a metaverse.

I think the opposite: everyone should keep using their existing metaverse name, to prevent Facebook from getting a viable trademark on it.

Good point, that could work as well! Especially as there is IMHO a good chance of Facebooks attempt to fail spectacularly (especially given a lot of people already involved in this area will not touch Facebooks stuff with ten foot pole), possibly soiling the name for quite a while if they manage to keep it.

That's right. It's like those open-source alternatives to Facebook, such as Mastodon and Diaspora. They work fine, and they have tiny user communities.

"Metaverse" is going to become a whole lot more nonsensical as it becomes a buzzword.

Between September and today this company added "We are building the Metaverse of the supply chain." to their front page.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210902024704/https://topo.cc/

https://topo.cc/

That one is Maria Korolov's blog where she blogs more about facebook and oculus these days (with obvious paid guest posts that are ads). Her grid list s manually crafted and very outdated. Curious why you didn't know of opensimworld , it exists for more than 5 years and its teleporters are everywhere. She has even embedded the opensimworld twitter feed in her front page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com