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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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