The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft
clivethompson.medium.com
clivethompson.medium.com
I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in, and just sitting in the backyard and resting my eyes. And I don't even have children...
they are the freemium and mobile segment. dismissed by both the toxic gaming communities and themselves, but noticed by the companies who will change their whole trillion dollar business name to snag them further.
1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games. (The actual per-person-per-day numbers are very high compared to the average 2hr/week i watch tv but whatever). Most of TV and Video Games are about ignoring reality for entertainment in a fake world already. thats a few hours people can dedicate.
2) The metaverse can be more than traditional video game type entertainment. WFH has turned the office as a destination into a keyboard/monitor as a destination. You can use VR to have a much more immersive/focused work destination than either office or WFH desk. Thats 8+ hours a day you can spend in metaverse.
(I have tried the Oculus workrooms and if the virtual screen resolution was higher then i'd personally work in it.)
Watching TV or playing a game in an immersive, distraction-free VR environment sounds great, and will happen, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.
Working in a virtual home office has the potential to be extremely productive, ergonomic, and space-saving, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.
A metaverse involves some kind of shared space and shared experience across a networked medium. Not only is it more than just doing things in VR, a metaverse doesn't even require VR.
eg. maybe your vr home has digital art, but that art can also exist and be viewed in other mediums. Or you can all sit at home and watch VRTV with friends, but one friend just watches on their phone on the bus.
Or a virtaul office desk, that can have coworkers visiting. The office server can be hosted on your corp servers (or, the social networking, maybe you self host your personal office), but when you leave to go virtually home, you're now in your home, hosted by fb nee meta.
It does not matter because for the public and the media Zuckerberg is redefining the meaning of the word right in front of our eyes. Give it a few years and everybody will believe VR is an inherent feature of metaverse. Just like those of us who had been using the word "crypto" to mean "cryptography" for decades were trying to explain in vain what the word originally mean - but it made no sense as the new meaning was already popularized.
People are already dismissing this "metaverse" furor as just more VR hype with a stupider name and the company "Meta" is risking killing the entire term "metaverse" and any usefulness it might have had altogether.
Ironically, by owning Facebook "Meta" should be in one of the best positions to build/sell a 2D "metaverse plane" as well as just about anyone else possibly could. Tear down some of the garden walls, allow a bit more of the old MySpace and Blog anarchy of clashing styles and user control, be a better web citizen. They aren't likely to do that because they are using "metaverse" as attempt to make more Oculus money and risking the Facebook lock in and walled garden for a vision with actual guts and takes risks doesn't seem to be in their interest.
[1] https://www.highfidelity.com/backlog/requiem-for-the-hmd
Have you seen the leaked Quest Pro design[1]? It's already close to being ski goggle size, and it's only a couple of generations away from something the size of sunglasses.
Displays are getting cheaper, better and higher resolution. UX is being improved, passthrough cameras already exist.
My estimate is that towards the end of this decade we'll see unprecedented adoption of VR/AR outside of the few niche use cases we see today.
Meta is jumping on the bandwagon early, making their brand synonymous with VR, and betting big that this will change how everyone uses computers today, and that it will be the tech to replace smartphones.
As much as I dislike that such a user hostile company is trying to popularize the metaverse/VR, I'm sure they did their research and are confident this will eventually sell like crazy. I think they're right.
Whether or not they did their research, whether or not we are just a few iterative improvements away from mass adoption, there's still just too much feeling of "same hype cycle, different day" from the average consumer (which is the point of that article, and my implication that VR is dead right now but it was Facebook's lucky albatross so they're tying it around their necks in the hopes it is still lucky while dead [1]).
[1] Spoiler alert for a classic poem used as a metaphor here: in the poem things do not go well from here. I am pessimistic about this marketing play for "Meta".
They used to be open. Cambridge Analytica came along and congress made them decide open was a liability. Sure they were starting to close down before congress, but now they're sure as hell not opening up.
I don't care if the data is locked down or not, the social graph isn't the interesting part of a "metaverse" and in some ways it is probably better locked up and that can remain Facebook's lock in to keep them interested in the project. The kind of garden walls I was talking about are more federative: bringing external content in, but in ways that are true to the outside content; not just confined to Facebook looks and styles and components, not confined to a bare amount of customization of boring card styles, not embedded in a "Facebook way" but in a "web way" (whatever that means, and it doesn't really feel like it means much at all after the imagination and wilds of the 1990s).
I referenced the anarchy and chaos of blogs and MySpace, specifically: it's about user control to "do ugly things", to escape the gray walls and graffiti "their spaces". If Facebook is a "space" today, it's a building full of cubicles all alike. Sure, you can hang photos in the cubicles and they've got colorful stock ones, but your still constrained to just those cubicle walls and they mandate a lot about the allowed size and frame styles. That's almost directly the antithesis of a user owned "metaverse" whether 2D or 3D.
I'm sorry, I think if you want to broaden this term like this you're going to have to stipulate some new boundaries. Else, we've got the metaverse: it's just the internet, and metaverse is just the latest in a long line of silly names for it back to the "internet superhighway".
And when Di died or 9/11 happened I had a "shared experience across a networked medium" about them, for concrete examples.
Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember? So I'm not sure where this idea even comes from.
Yes, this is absolutely correct.
A "metaverse" exists in contrast to meatspace. In meatspace I walk down the street, I look through a shop window, I see you browsing inside, I spray some graffiti on the wall, you see the graffiti when you come out of the shop. We have a shared space with the qualities of presence (I passively saw you while you were browsing) and persistence (the graffiti will be there for anyone to see).
In the metaverse, I open some application on a computer, I look at some window or readout, I see that you're online (maybe I just see a light next to a username, or maybe I see your WoW character dancing shirtless outside of Goldshire), I leave something persistent (maybe a comment on a blog post, maybe a spray on the wall in an MMOFPS), which is available for you to see at some point. There are hundreds of metaverses (that's nearly the whole point; a metaverse is a virtual space that isn't bound by the rules and limits of physical space, so why not inhabit a few dozen?) of varying complexity (many websites, IRC, BBSes) and immersiveness (Minecraft, Second Life, PlayStation Home). VR isn't intrinsic to the idea of a metaverse, it's just one potential realization of the idea.
> Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember?
Stephenson depicted his metaverse as a virtual space for the sake of the reader's imagination, so that they could envision something real and familiar instead of just a bunch of people clacking away on keyboards. The "virtual street" metaphor used in Snow Crash was always just a convenient literary device, and not at all the point of the metaverse, which to reiterate is the idea of a virtual shared universe in which to exist that is unbound from the restrictions of the physical universe.
Its been around for longer than Second Life in pancake kvm forms but the latest iteration is based on Immersion or Embodied experience facilitated by the new hardware price/performance advances.
VR hardware is just about over the chasm and proper wide fov AR is on the horizon although semi AR/MR is possible today (e.g. Pokemon Go as a shared overlay of digital world space on to a shared real world space).
The Immersive Embodied Metaverse is available over the internet using open W3C WebXR standards today and this will get better as the space and infrastructure matures.
Virtual shopping malls where you would "walk" around by clicking around websites.
It’s clear from Facebook’s presentations for instance that they consider text messaging via WhatsApp to class as part of the metaverse.
It’s not anything new, but I think the metaverse strategy is basically Facebook saying “we want to own all communications, and push the boundaries of what owning communications even means”. That’s my take anyway, but I have found most people are focused on the VR aspect and have missed the more scary all-encompassing and broader definition.
So think that every user is an inhabitant, a citizen, a potential buyer in the virtual and the real world, but also a potential business owner in the virtual world. Business owners will be tax payers that must pay fees to operate on this city-state that will have internal laws that except for few cases (at most) will not be subject to government laws and constitutional protection, and if you are difficult or problematic the authority will be able to expatriate you without prior notice, regardless of time or money invested in the platform. Maybe, at most, they could offer arbitration with a company that knows that if they don't favor Meta the contract will not be renewed. So yeah. It is a good idea, if they can pull it.
There was a two dimensional interface called Flatland that worked like a CLI. Hiro used it to manipulate the virus without viewing it.
VR - Is a user interface. Metaverse is a network built for that user interface.
Historically, we had screen and keyboard based user interfaces, and with it text based gaming like Zork. Then we had screen and controller based user interfaces, and with it games like Pong. At a certain point we got the screen and mouse user interface, and with it FPS, RTS, like Warcraft and Doom. Touch screens were again a new user interface and with it came games like Fruit Ninja. VR now exists as a user interface (although still needs to be improved) and many people love playing Skyrim with it, or Beat Saber.
All of these were mostly local experiences with different (better?) user interfaces.
Meanwhile, each user interface had its own networks that were built on them. e.g. Email is a "first class network" built on the text based user interface. e.g. WWW is a "first class network" built on the mouse based user interface.
The metaverse isn't a new user interface. The metaverse is a "first class network" built on top of the VR based user interface.
The only thing linking metaverse and VR is basic buzzword bingo, they don’t gain anything from being linked.
Second Life is a tiny niche. Connecting Minecraft servers with portals has been possible for ages, and smooth connections seems like it wouldn't be terribly difficult, yet no one uses it because no one wants it.
And despite the huge increases in VR quality that has happened already, none of this has changed.
You suggest it's because the VR isn't good enough yet, but I think the evidence so far suggests VR is not the missing ingredient for people to want to live in a common virtual world.
While I agree with you on this; online dating was seen as something only desperate people would do, until it was for everyone.
I mean, yes I agree. There are some workarounds, i.e. you could jump, in VR it’s very fast to swivel your head, look around the people in front of you or look behind you.
That said, I very much agree, I wouldn’t want to play WOW in VR. The DBM style warning zones on the ground alone would kill the UX. Meanwhile, as a HPally, I played WOW primarily in 2D :)(specifically raid frames). I’m very certain I would continue to play VR WOW in 2D as well. Some sort of console attached to my arm or floating in front of me to 1. See who has my beacon/buffs/debuffs 2. Quickly chose targets to spot heal or cure.
However, I’m very excited to try the second big VR-first MMO (basically the WOW not the EverQuest) built exclusively for VR!!!
Maybe, it’s a lot more skill shots, maybe it’s more aoe heals. I can’t even imagine how spot heals or cures would be targeted. Maybe it would feel like being a QB and Id need to literally throw Madden style spirals to land my spot heals??? THAT COULD BE SICK (although that skill floor/cap might be too high to balance boss fights well).
I’m not smart enough to predict the actual implementation. But I know there is enough money to be made that someones will iteratively make it happen.
Give it a few years and every new VR headset will have facial expression sensors.
I'm sure some clever folks will find a way to build a MMO that works for VR. Maybe characters will have magical x-ray glasses that renders other characters semi-transparent, so they can look through the crowd? Perhaps VR MMO games will be grander in spatial scale with lots of small towns to limit players clumping together city centres. Maybe, trying to find something in a crowded marketplace with lots of distractions, could be a part of the quest?
A lot of home office workers never learned to touch type. How the heck are they supposed to do office work if they can't see their fingers on the keyboard? Voice recognition is no solution, it still sucks for text entry and is completely useless for anything like slide presentations or spreadsheets.
There is legitimate potential for workers doing 3D stuff like CAD, architecture, and data visualization but that's a tiny niche of the workforce.
I’ve switched out my keycaps for blanks recently to try to force myself to get better at working in VR but I’m still struggling a bit with all the symbols.
Good typing skills are a super-power in today's world.
These days in Teams it will tell you when someone's typing. It amazes me how long people need to type just to get a simple point across.
To clarify, when I say "tracking", I don't mean just being able to use your keyboard in VR. I mean being able to actually see your keyboard in VR, along with being able to see keycaps on the virtual representation of your keyboard.
0. https://uploadvr.com/immersed-real-keyboard-support/
1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/typing-in-vr-how-to-connect...
Also most CAD users would probably not want cludgy UI like VR has today, they want keyboard and mouse too.
I suggest looking at the demo/videos of Horizon Workspace (by meta). It works really well, although the resolution is too low for me tooday.
Then there is this guy that was on HN recently:
I have seen a video, IIRC it was from SimulaVR, in which the user had a virtual window which showed a camera view facing the real-world keyboard. So this is easy to solve: these people who need to see their fingers on the keyboard (and probably everyone else when doing a real-world action like getting a cup with a drink) would open a window with an external camera view.
When smartphones were launched there was a simple description - "oh cool, it's a traditional phone but it has a computer running inside of it? makes sense"
To quote (some) of Larry Ellisons famous statements about it:
"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. … The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion."
"Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
The point of "the cloud" was the concept of users not needing to think where their device is communicating. The device might as well be talking to "the cloud" in the sky.
The point of "the cloud" was the occlusion to the end user.
I don't see much value in the phrase as it doesn't help me know what is going on in any way.
It took a decade from the first smartphones until iPhone/Android like devices with a mostly uniform appearance and UI had decisively won, though. There was a lot of rapid exploration of design space first.
As for VR/metaverse, there's been constant exploration of this space for decades. The VR boom in the 90s was killed by cost and primitive hardware, but we still have surviving persistent 3d worlds that came out of that wave.
We've also seen a lot of non-VR exploration. Aside from Minecraft, we have Roblox, which while a lot more limited in some ways is also a lot more meta: you have an identity that persists across worlds, with a social layer across that. Minecraft looks to be slowly moving in that direction.
We'll see people exploring a lot of other variants, and most will fail. But in the process we'll start to learn what will work.
I doubt Facebook, or Minecraft/Microsoft, or Apple, or Google will turn out to be the winner though.
Maybe they'll manage to buy the winner.
So all the interesting parts of the metaverse going forward are all the VR aspects which is why the discussions are focused on that.
Sure, if you pay me to work in the metaverse I'll be happy to hang out there. Otherwise I'm not interested.
In practice, excluding resolution, wearing a headset for hours on end seems even more straining both for the neck and eyes than the alternative real life workstation.
The VR-sickness persisted for hours until I realized that the solution was to try and reset my system by walking outside and gazing at the horizon (which also works on seasickness to a point).
Therefore the metaverse isn’t a replacement for a video games or TV. You would simply watch TV or play a video game while in the metaverse.
The metaverse in that regard isn’t a new concept, because VR spaces have existed for a long time now. I’ve watched movies in Minecraft more recently, for example. I’ve seen every idea in the metaverse attempted in some game or application already.
The reason these VR spaces have not taken off, however, is because the medium to access these VR spaces have been pretty disappointing.
It’s the reason why the Internet took a long time to take off: using the Internet on a desktop computer sucks. When smartphones took off, so did the Internet.
Facebook has not fixed the medium problem as I see it. I have never gotten motion sickness, but I do not want to put on a VR headset for more than a few hours. I don’t even want to put on a VR headset to be honest. I’ve owned one for two years and it just sits in a drawer. I can’t imagine that many people want to put on a VR headset either if they could just watch TV while sitting on the couch, grabbing real drinks on their real table, and texting their friends.
What?
I was listening to a podcast on Flat Earthers and the host basically traced the explosion of True Believers to the advent of the smartphone circa 2008 onwards; suddenly hundreds of millions more people were spending hours a day online.
Not Zuckerberg.
I think the issue with winning it with adult content will remain unchanged, at least for a while. Porn is so classic, that it cannot tunnel through this potential barrier.
People use their Apple devices for porn, controlling sex toys, and much more.
Amazon sells lube, sex toys, lingerie, and a whole host of other totally NSFW products.
Netflix has a ton of shows with nude actors bearing their breasts. Their show "Sex/Life" shows penises in a very sexual way.
Twitter, though admittedly not FAMNGA, notoriously allows and supports porn. They're very much the opposite of Tumblr, which died the moment they banned it.
Patreon thrives on porn.
This is not true, the Internet took off in the U.S. in the mid-90s: https://ourworldindata.org/internet
The driving force was the WWW, not smartphones.
Personally, I would say exactly the opposite, the only advantage a smartphone has over a desktop computer for Internet usage is portability, otherwise the experience is worse in every way.
I could attribute the little use of internet pre-1994 to lack of ISP services, or the fact that people preferred html and modern search engines to the old protocols (ftp, archie, gopher), etc. But 2008, seriously?
I spent lots of hours in internet in college (pre-www) and later paid for CompuServe. By then www was already becoming known. Again, 2008. In what country do you live?
And you should try consuming internet in a desktop or laptop. Even a Chromebook works ok (but a gaming PC is better). Most apps offer a limited experience in mobile, or tablet (it sucks) and seriously, sites render much faster on a fast PC. I can right-click 10 links on the browser, send them to open in the background, consume each tab a close what doesn't work. It is so much nice and faster experience.
Thats the point. The answer to "when do I have time to use the meta verse" is "you have time to watch tv/entertainment, so yo have time to meta verse". Because people think of this as _something added_ to their life, not something augmented.
But that hasn't happened. I'm thinking the problem isn't lack of good VR, it's that a truly shared metaverse isn't really something we want.
We want our own spaces. We want to have the option to just "watch", to be invisible to the world we're exploring (or to lurk, in forum/chat terms).
When even better VR comes, I think it will be used for far more solitary activities than social ones. We do see some hints of a dose-response relationship there, with reasonably popular VR games like Half Life Alyx.
I hope he plans to be spending 8 hours a day in "metaverse" but I'm sure as fuck not going to be.
With this metaverse stuff you have to wear the stupid goggles. You can't just have it on in the background and glance up if something interesting comes on. This is why 3D TVs failed in the market. The technology worked fine but most regular people didn't want to wear the goggles just to watch a movie.
I can't be the only one who feels this way?
Also you should get 8 hours of sleep, buy food at the farmers market, spend time with your familly, meditate, get this GTD rolling, and learn a new skill for your carreer.
But honestly, the truth is, as soon as VR is cheap and comfy, I think people will rush to it anyway for one reason: porn. So the metaverse can grow, if like in second life, it allows for porn to develop. But since FB tend to want a family friendly experience, I think we got a betamax vs VHS situation here.
There was a side dish of turn of the century real estate hucksterism. Buy because everyone else is buying. Buy high sell low as retail always does LOL.
And pr0n as you mention.
Also 3d modelers and CAD folks built elaborate structures that were always empty but impressive to admire. The supply of skilled draftsmen and architects willing to work for free VASTLY exceeds the demand.
The most interesting meta activity on second life was stuff that doesn't require second life or 3d or any of that, it was just a fancy screen saver behind people doing simple IRC texting, etc. The philosophy club meetup sounded fun but it was basically walk to a virtual campfire then watch people too high to think, try to instant message philosophical stuff to sound wittier than the next guy. Like karma farming with people too high to succeed but its OK because the platform doesn't have karma LOL. Didn't go many of those LOL.
Second life had a weird attitude toward real life where it was not allowed to use your real name. To prevent "funny names" they gave a huge list of first and last names and let you pick. I found Turbo Pascal and thought it witty because I used that once rather expensive ($250 for a pascal compiler used to be a bargain compared to what D.E.C. charged...) software package 20 yrs previously (now more like 40 yrs) and unfortunately the only reactions I got were confusion and "hey did you know your name is an actual program my dad used?" so it wasn't so fun. I'd rather have used my name.
But that was it, those five things and the rest was empty. I was there, that's how I remember it.
Some people are just not going to want to spend 8 hours a day interacting with people to go home and interact with other real people in a reality-like medium.
None of that I can do when fully immersed in VR. Which is probably why Facebook cares about it. Ads on TV are time to get up, in VR they can fully measure you engagement. Fully engaged in game and hungry, food delivery is one button press away.
1) I'm definitely willing to believe that most adults spend a lot of time vegging out, even if I/we don't. Does this mean that one goal of the metaverse is to suck cash out of those folks? "People already waste a lot of time. The metaverse is great because it makes money off of that." I could also interpret this one in a lighter way. Perhaps the metaverse is somehow better than regular vegging out; gives you exercise or something.
2) My take here is similar to some sibling comments. This just sounds like a VR application, and I'm not sure where the "metaverse" comes in. Unless by "metaverse" we mean "internet", which already exists and is (thankfully) not run by Facebook. And even then, I don't see where the internet comes in either! I can dev/create offline, can't I?
Isn't that still about <25 and > 60, or those without kids? I hardly can find a calm 30-60 mins per day to just sit and read, sometimes play for 30 mins (2 kids) just before sleep.
I don't really want "Meta" to own all of that largely because what made the internet successful was having no gatekeeper and a very low barrier to entry. Not that that's true anymore, but having no initial gatekeeper let people do crazy things for 30 years while the current gatekeepers were establishing themselves.
It's an even better experience when there's a modpack on the server with a near-infinite number of things to do, too.
I've been having a great time going the other way - Skyblock! Start with very little, build up from there.
Metaverse would also wrap itself around a lot of the things people do already, like watch movies or concerts, coupled with games of any size and type. So as opposed to a stereotypical 6-hour WoW raid lifestyle, you could, for example, watch a virtual concert with friends, then afterwards jump onto a couple rounds of some Fortnite game variant, similar to how we do it today but just within the 'verse. But you could also immerse yourself for longer if you want to.
Honestly Metaverse seems more to me like a digital version of a big shopping mall with a bowling alley, arcade, and movie theater. You can hang out all day there or just drop in to get something from a store, or just get dinner and a movie.
Go outside, people. Talk to your friends in reality if possible. Experience the place you live in; participate in something physical to improve it materially. There's no end of socialization and minigames in reality, the graphics are better, and it's free.
But I don't think that's really the point. People use those 6 hours in a bunch of different ways. Some of those hours might be replaced by a metaverse experience entirely (as in, "I used to do play video games on my console, but I can get the same experience, but better, playing games in the metaverse"), and other activities might get nudged out because they aren't as (subjectively) enjoyable as the metaverse to some people. And other people will just not do the metaverse thing, because other activities are more fun to them. FB is betting on the user group being very large, and I don't know that I'd disagree with them.
And the same thing will always happen: people will continue to kick themselves for not finishing that book, or getting that extra workout in. That will continue to be the case with or without the metaverse.
Also consider that something like a metaverse could become the standard way for remote knowledge workers to get in a "room" together to collaborate. That alone seems like a large user base.
My kids bounce between a multitude of shared digital spaces (games, chat, social, videos etc) and they would be right at home at some kind of metaverse that would bridge them all (if that's even possible).
In every single age group, the average person spends over 4 hours per day on leisure and sports activities, the majority of which is watching TV (and very little of which is exercise or reading).
This is true even for people with children, with the exception of those with a child under 6 years of age. They spend an average of 3.86 hours/day on leisure and sports activities, 1.91 hours/day of which is watching TV.
It seems as though there is plenty of time for the metaverse.
Kidding. Kinda.
Obligatory Futurama:
Two years ago I have built a base on 2b2t[1], located millions of blocks away from spawn, it took many hours of travelling through nether highways to get there. Before starting the journey, I had to escape spawn (a very dangerous area since 2b2t is an anarchy server) and I had to find valuable items from scavenging abandoned bases. After I finished my base, I made friends on the server, I have also helped building one of the highways, using a hacked Minecraft client that includes tools to build tunnels automatically[2].
There is also another server that I have visited regularly, MinecraftOnline[3], I built a house there and I made some friends, this one has rules and moderators unlike 2b2t which is an anarchy server. On both servers there is a rich community, a subculture specific to the server, and even specific activities that stem from each server's subculture[4][5]
Based on my experience, I have to agree with the article, Minecraft is an amazing and diverse metaverse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2b2t
[2] Highway Tools demonstration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwkDk_Xn2Y4
[3] https://minecraftonline.com/
[4] https://minecraftonline.com/wiki/Pigchinko_(Game)
[5] Guide to Crystal PvP on 2b2t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOImrm9ldTY
I don't play much but I do like spending a few hours on occasion spending time with friends, playing a game we started to when we were teens.
My recommendation to anyone who wants to play something creative, get on a voice call and get with your friends.
The metaverse is the result of instrumenting the real world to capture and interact with the data the real world provides. Think "Digital Twin" of the world that refreshes at 100Hz.
It's not a place you go, it becomes the landscape you live in, because everything becomes a data source.
pack up bed. unfold desk. eat breakfast. put on headset. take off headset. eat dinner. pack up desk. set up bed. go to sleep.
There are other people who very much don't care. To them, progress might be watching the next episode of a show, or grinding in some game they love.
I'm fine with either type of person, really. It does explain why what seems like an impossible use of time to us is actually very appealing to others. Why would we be in there when there's a book to read, a concept to learn, people we don't see often enough, etc? And yet, why wouldn't they?
I think the metaverse aims to appeal to us as well eventually; imagine interactive classes on X or Y to help you learn faster with tools that are currently impossible? What if we could save time by seeing loved ones more easily in the metaverse, making more time for those things we want to make progress on? I'm not bullish on that, though. It sounds creepy. I want to hug the people I love, hear them laugh in person, make them nice food. I'm not interested in expediting that facet of my life.
Even now, despite growing up with webcams around I still find FaceTime fairly impersonal and uninteresting. I use it only when I really need to.
I wonder if anyone has run remote team meetings or virtual classrooms in Minecraft as I imagine it would be a lot less fatiguing than Zoom style teleconferencing. The fact that in MC you can easily see where other players are looking adds a lot to the experience.
Also it does sound like you're mixing your run of the mill grindy MMO with Minecraft. Your MC world will still be there if you don't touch it for a week. Even on a server.
Okay, it may depend on the culture of said server, but that's exactly the point of the article.
I play MC on an 18+ server that's building oriented. That means everyone has a job and other interests. We just show up and place our blocks when we feel like it. I just logged in yesterday after a 2 week break. People disappear for months. Nobody sees a problem with it.
If HN was on metaverse where I have to get an immersive headset on to use it... Yeah, I wouldn't be using it nearly as often as I do.
As you get older, the best feature of our existing 'metaverse' is its ability to integrate with the 'meat-a-verse' seamlessly. The higher the barrier of moving between the *verses, the harder it is to use the one in which we can't actually keep our meat fit and fed.
But what do I know (old man yelling at clouds).
The metaverse is the immersive internet, as a successor to our current one that is more 2D oriented around photos/videos/text today. It's a paradigm shift in how we interact, but most importantly there will be many of these virtual worlds/spaces interconnected together to form an actual network that nobody outright owns. To get to this future, we need protocols/standards to allow virtual worlds to talk to one another and agree that users can hop back in forth between them seamlessly, across all platforms.
More specifically, the way we use the web today to navigate from webpage to another is how we we traverse the metaverse. The core problem that needs to get solved right now is interoperability, to enable the "web of 3D".
Look to WebGPU, WebAssembly, and WebXR as cornerstone technologies here. Our startup is building the "3D/VR web" in this way, and our current focus is getting proper HTML5 exporting from the native game engines, currently Unreal Engine. We're also building out a suite of tooling to empower developers and creators along with our hosting/discovery platform that includes advanced texture compression + asynchronous asset fetching to enable 3D/VR websites that load as quickly as a regular 2D page. If you're a developer and are interested in our work, you can join our Discord here:
There's obviously no way to be sure, but the only reason the web was created how it was is because it was a bunch of academics, nerds, and hobbyists who saw a need and filled it. There was no perceived money in it from the private sector's point of view. Now that there's no question that there's money to be made, it's like blood in the water. And the capitalist sharks can smell it.
An open standard that's given away for free isn't attractive to the people who have the means to create it.
They've gotten used to redefining existing words to better fit a desired narrative, a habit picked up from your given tech company marketing department. It's funny that you mention XR, which was itself coined in part to get around Microsoft's co-opting of "mixed reality" (which itself evolved to encompass all forms of n-reality after initially being coined to replace "augmented reality", I believe by Magic Leap). It's a mess.
That being said, I did think it was the future of the internet 15-20 years ago when I was taking CAD files of products and turning them into interactive 3D Flash websites. Then I realized my mistake. People don't want fancy graphics or animations when browsing the internet. They want data. They want it fast, and they want it organized and presented to them in the most efficient way.
For that reason, I don't believe the future of the internet is the metaverse. The future will be something along the lines of neuralink, where information is instantly sent and received from the brain. Instead of spending 20 minutes reading a Wikipedia article, the information will be instantly sent to your brain. Instead of pulling out your phone and checking directions to a restaurant, you'll know where to go just by thinking that very question. The internet will basically be an extension of your brain. What the internet knows, you'll know. That's the future.
But then a friend of my son played Minecraft.
I installed Minecraft on a Chromebook then I watched the children figuring out Minecraft. I figured out lot of things, too.
When I discovered that they created a railway and put monsters onto the trolleys, first I had a hearty laugh then I got intrigued again. I discovered that Minecraft Education Edition has a coding environment similar to Scratch from MIT. I showed them how to create a giant ice cube and dig narrow aisles inside it. Next they created a giant cube of TNT and set it off.
Anyway, I think what will happen: you can't centrally create a world. You need people. So when I read the article I found myself just nodding.
People will find ways how to define and use the metaverse, not that company.
I'll know that the stone masons crashed planes into the world trade center to destroy the studio where they faked the moon landing?
It's never going to happen because that's not the way the human beings work. Which anyone with any knowledge of the brain (i.e. not tech bros) will readily tell you.
I'm not suggesting this will happen in 5 or 10 years. However, I would be very surprised if a few hundred years pass and we don't have a more efficient means of transferring data into our brain, and we're still slowly reading books and spending decades of our life receiving an education.
Or, maybe you're right, and this will never happen. We'll forever be reading, writing, and using speech as our primary means of data transfer with our brain, and that'll be the peak of efficiency until the end of time.
However, given that I can play billiards with someone on the other side of the world, in real-time, in virtual reality, I don't think it's too crazy to imagine a future where I can get a Wikipedia article into my brain faster than reading.
Hint: we don't actually have anything like the AI you read about in the books in play - they're just algorithms that search patterns.
I expect the same for "VR"
I get the sense something more integrated at the user experience level is being suggested here as ‘metaverse’. I guess part of my read on that is cynical - if true it suggests a winner takes operator all at the centre with some kind of app/content ecosystem alongside. Perhaps I’m reading the roblox comparisons too literally.
It's not that hard to find a different minecraft server, there are bazillions of server lists. That would be the equivalent of changing guild or being in several guilds at the same time.
I don't think we humans want to be part of a large crowd. More like part of one or more small groups. Before the internet it was mostly one. Now you can easily do several.
This really depends on the MMO. In World of Warcraft, yes this is majorly the case in the past few years. In games like FFXIV, this is most certainly not the case.
WoW enables the behavior of only playing with your guild because the community at large is toxic which is also enabled by the game.
FFXIV has a much stronger community, players greeting each other in cities, sitting down to watch a Bard play video game music on a harp or everyone chatting in party chat through cutscenes in main story dungeons.
There is a sense of community in these games that draws people to them. I think certain groups of people do want to be a part of a large crowd, but not when doing so puts them at risk of being put down like in WoW.
A metaverse should have an HTTP-like protocol, with the goal to interconnect, to give power to the client, while allowing an ecosystem to build, because it would be defined as an open standard.
We need a 2021 Tim Berners Lee, not a Mark Zuckerberg.
The general public will use the walled garden capitalistic metaverse because it will be better.
May be I lack vision, but I'm not able to understand why we need this. What I have realised during lockdown is that I don't want to or can be fully immersed in one thing. I'm always multi-tasking different things on a computer and in a real world around me. Metaverse seems to be opposite of that. So while it was an interesting demo, it felt very unintuitive to me at this point.
On that note, I feel that Microsoft has a better approach here of just "Teams but in VR", a nice simple scope compared to trying to reinvent the entire internet.
Well, Zuckerberg didn’t give a clear definition, the term itself is made up, and it doesn’t currently exist (otherwise, what would we be building?).
So no you don’t know what it means or how it will turn out, and neither does Zuckerberg. He might have a vision of what he’d like it to be and how he’s going to make money out of it, but he’s very probably very wrong.
It’s obvious a deeply immersive experience will eventually arrive but it seems far from obvious how it will be used, much like predicting the rise of Tik Tok in 1990 based on email and usenet.
The best way to predict the future is to make it. Hackers built much of the early internet, so let’s go build the early metaverse and at least make something insanely experimental and magical and beautiful before the next Zuckerberg comes alone and devalues it.
This is like "self driving car" obvious. It seems like we're close, but we're really really not.
This metaverse is a VR video game and Facebook has demonstrated zero abilities to make a video game.
I would bet on Minecraft and Fortnite creators to be a better position to create this "metaverse" because they've done this before.
Minecraft, no. Minecraft has failed to truly innovate since Microsoft acquired it, imo. I think the evidence of this is apparent in the existence of both Minecraft Bedrock and Java editions.
The metaverse is about creating the one true videogame. The final videogame. The holodeck where gamers themselves can make new games at a rapid speed.
The Unity Asset Store is actually a treasure trove of value for Unity in this regard. I could see Facebook buying Unity for a massive sum or licensing the engine and asset store somehow to make a play towards this vision of the metaverse.
That is, unless Epic just makes it first.
The point of the article is that the metaverse is here and it's decentralized enough that the other 7 billion people that don't care about the opinion of one specific HN commenter are doing their own thing.
But if I had to define it one way or the other, I feel like I already have, and interact with, a sort of metaverse. I play various video games with various people, talking and interacting with friends for these games on Discord, interacting with the larger community of these games on Discord/Reddit, engaging with influencer communities on Twitch/Youtube, and follow game news on Reddit/Twitter/Youtube/Forums.
In the same vein, I've learned a tremendous amount about computer science, software engineering, job hunting, smaller hobbies, and plenty of other various things through the same set of things that make up my gaming metaverse (Forums/Discord/Youtube/Reddit/HackerNews/etc). It doesn't overlap with the same people I interact with for gaming, but I wouldn't expect the people to overlap much. The platforms are still the same.
And it doesn't really stop there, these are just the two big things I can think of.
So I guess I'm asking, what is the "Metaverse" trying to do? Take what we currently already have, but make it more cohesive? The only other thing I can think of would be a full-dive VR world experience, but I'm fairly sure we aren't even close to that.
My understanding is its just a way to do all the things you do currently but in a more "connected" way.
What exactly are you arguing against?
Very odd that on one hand there is a push towards saving the Earth and the carbon crisis, and on the other hand excitement towards technology that lets everyone stick their head in the sand.
Well TBF, isn't that what culture has been for since the invention of the first song and story?
Here is a comic series that was made based on the server, and a neat video animation someone created: http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEg5UPKPY70
The comic series is legendary, but I don't think people can make something out of the animation video without context.
I wouldn't touch a MC server that has no grief prevention. But you can have your 4chan and I can have my builder server and we're both happy. Because there's no central authority telling us how to run our pieces of "metaverse".
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\versions\1.17.1\1.17.1.json
Look for: client_mappings & server_mappings
https://launcher.mojang.com/v1/objects/e4d540e0cba05a6097e88...
https://launcher.mojang.com/v1/objects/f6cae1c5c1255f68ba483...
The tricky part is they don't provide deobfuscation tools, so everyone makes their own and it's a mess.
But Minecraft is for all practical purposes open-source since 2018!
Legally you cannot distribute the deobfuscated binaries, so most people map the code.
I would probably use the 1.17.1 as the last "open" minecraft and start a fork that you compile and work with after deobfuscation and then re-obfuscate at each release.
Dunno what the legal team at Microsoft would think about that!
I’m sure they would think something like “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Here Zuck and friends are trying neurotically to keep their fingertips at 1cm distance at any time. Waving their hands as if they were mockups.
In recent Apple event recordings Tim, Craig and the gang cannot get their feet together like anatomically unchallenged humans would do when standing casually. Always more than shoulder's width apart. I've observed something similar once after a mountain biking contest, got to do something with the saddle.
It's obviously not pleasing to the eye (or is it me?). But I cannot see a compelling reason and I refuse to take this as a coincidence. Why???
Just read the transcript or the summaries in written news.
I think we’ve reached a turning point in history and society, aided by lockdowns, where young people spend more time interacting online than IRL. This has major consequences for society and tech.
Young people present themselves to the world primarily through their online persona. The physical world is secondary. To reiterate, what happens online, what is shown and seen online, is more important to them than the same in physical space.
You could probably write a book about the consequences of this (maybe someone has?) but two particularly salient points: (1) if you’re not an onliner then it’s hard for you to understand how the future will look, and (2) your desires are just going to be fundamentally different from other people.
I know from talking to CEOs that those entering the workforce now are most comfortable interacting through Slack and WhatsApp. Physical interactions are sometimes difficult, because people have less experience of it - usually it takes them longer to bond, and more formal social situations are challenging because they’ve not had much practice and to learn the rules governing behaviour in certain physical spaces.
It’s easy for oldies to mock Zuckerberg with his embarrassing meta presentation, and indeed I think his influence is waning (because he’s also out of touch) but for sure the future is going to be driven by people who are living online. Avatars may seem like a 90s throwback but that’s just because of how we conceive of them; the truth is _we already have avatars, they’re just messy and distributed and mostly text based_.
Personally I don’t like this conclusion. I think the physical world is superior in many ways, for example physical activity and exercise are fundamental to wellbeing, and I can’t see that being properly and healthily replicated in the virtual world for a very long time. I think there are more noble and worthwhile goals to be pursued in the physical world. But just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it ain’t true.
I’ve half a mind to join ‘em, half a mind to go build a log cabin.
I don't mean to be derogatory, but you sound exactly like an "oldie" who is out of touch as described by the GP.
Zoomers are absolutely spending more time online and less time IRL than previous generations.
I'm only 23 and the difference between my childhood and my younger siblings is massive. They generally prefer to socialize by playing online games with their friends rather than hanging out with them in person, and they do so for hours at a time. I used to go to friends houses to play games. That doesn't seem to happen anymore.
General rule here I think is that if you don’t think there’s a tectonic shift then you need to go talk to the Zoomers.
Who knows how this turns out but I’m pretty sure it’s not something I’m going to feel comfortable with. There are so many implications: how will different facets of being human translate online? How will this affect our health? And perhaps most critically, in an online world there can be an ultimate power in a way impossible IRL
You're looking at your younger siblings and I'm looking at my kids. We see different things and honestly I think this is a bit of a moral panic like we saw with rock and roll, comics, TV, video games during my youth, kids playing online games when I was your age and so on.
I really hope that's true. How do you reconcile that with, for example, teenage psychological problems and suicides linked to social media usage?
Video games of the past were quite different from today. I feel like the closure of the tight feedback loop, and the sensorial immersiveness are just a fundamental step change.
I used my siblings as an example. The impression I get is that behaviour similar to that of my siblings is very common in general.
Btw I do actually feel somewhat like an "oldie" already.
At first Twitter didn't support images and the Facebook feed didn't either. Then Twitter did and the Facebook feed did. Whoop dee doo
There's nothing mysterious about this. Just see what's popular and imagine it blue, boxy, and boring. Congratulations, that's Facebook's next feature.
Even the strategy itself is just a copy of the Bill Gates playbook from the 80s and 90s.
They should have renamed themselves "Derivative" instead
The uncreative part is best seen in how businessmen think you should buy books online by simply emulating, 3d game style, the experience of going to a shopping mall in 1980 and walking the aisles and waiting in line at Waldenbooks. The actual way books are sold online is instead of a very user unfriendly POS terminal based on a 5150 terminal connected to an AS/400, its a pretty and easy to use UI web based point of sale terminal. Essentially Amazon tricked us into doing free labor for them, being our own cashier/salespeople. Gotta admit that's more creative than "put the mall in GTA3 (Edited: more like GTA Vice City, and that was an awesome game LOL) as a map and pretend to visit the mall in 1980" like the businessmen thought online shopping would resemble.
The cargo cult is the businessmen never think thru how to scale and make things work. The main reason it took until 1900 for heavier than air flight was too many of 'those guys' in charge trying to make airplanes by emulating birds. Just make a 747 by packing ground beef around glued together chicken bones and I'm sure it'll eventually fly real well, says the businessmen. Obviously one makes railroad engines by building steam powered fully articulated four legged mining donkeys. Obviously teen socializing using technology will be putting a "Mall Rats" movie map as a level in Doom. (edited: Jetson era portrayal of robot factories, lol.)
Meanwhile I lived thru the 90s 00s where the legacy media, which is finally near dead, decided everything internet and VR was actually bad special effects as an analogy for a LSD trip. Why bother with actually "doing VR" if you could replace all the hardware in a video game console with a acid tab dispenser. I mean, they're not wrong in a sense, but only Hollywood people would have expected/demanded that everyone wants to be high all the time.
Maybe it's always been here, perhaps it's just another abstraction or simulation of a perceived reality. One could say that MUD systems are metaverses(metaversi?)
What I would like to see are more decentralized simulation systems with extensive accessibility features
There's a concerted push to foist this buzzword on us either way.
I'd argue that scifi examples (like Ready Player One) show that it can be proprietary.
I'm not saying it's good to be controlled by one org. Just that the number of orgs controlling the infra has nothing to do with being the metaverse or not.
Facebook itself would be a better example to your point as it's the largest social network.
I've been seeing a lot of ads lately for an iOS game (an awful looking game, but that's beside the point) whose major claim to fame in their ads is that you can earn Roblox's Robux by playing. They probably aren't using any sort of federated Roblox "metaverse ecommerce platform" today, they are probably just laundering Robux gift certificates. (I'm not entirely sure, it's not a game I have reason to download as awful and creepy as it appears.)
So there are at least some game spaces they don't own. (Whether or not you agree those are worthwhile game spaces.)
https://education.minecraft.net/en-us/discover/impact
This is the kind of product I hope for with the Metaverse but will probably never see.
I also regularly sim race (1-2 hour races on iRacing) in VR and that's a much better experience as it's 3D than just starting at a screen - VR feels like it's reached that critical mass moment where it's not going to fade away as a fad.
Right now the talking heads are trying to sell us a metaverse on the idea that one account could have a persistent inventory between Minecraft and Valheim and Terraria, but anyone who's ever played a game can tell you immediately that this makes no mechanical sense whatsoever (cross-game promotions are common, and welcome (e.g. an Aloy costume in Monster Hunter World for PS4 owners, or Nintendo Amiibo giving you random rewards in various games), but don't involve literally round-tripping your character between games of potentially wildly disparate genres), and anyone who's ever written a piece of software can tell you immediately that this would be an infeasible logistical nightmare to implement.
not really, we just have to get into some semiotics here and consider the difference between the signifier and the signified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier). In semiotics, a signifier is a physical artifact; the manifestation of something. A physical stop sign, for example. The signified is the concept embodied by a signifier. All of the stop signs in the world correspond to (roughly) the same concept of stopping, but they are separate instances of that concept. Separate signifiers (instances of "stop sign"), all with the same thing signified (the idea that you should stop).
Now in games, we have the notion of the signifier and the signified, too. Let's take an example item from WoW. I'm using this as an example because it's a game I'm familiar with. An item like Staff of Westfall (https://classic.wowhead.com/item=2042/staff-of-westfall) expresses several things. The first thing that it expresses is that it's a weapon so it uses your weapon slot to equip it, and the stat bonus of +5 intellect that gives you additional mana and +11 spirit that gives you mana regeneration. Great, that's nice. Those things can be taken to be the content of the item: its in-simulation properties and effects. But what does the existence of this item signify? The Staff of Westfall can only be obtained by each player exactly once, cannot be traded between players, and can only be obtained by going to The Deadmines, a particular dungeon, and defeating the final boss. Equipping the Staff of Westfall has the effect that it gives you mana and mana regen, but it also communicates something non-mechanical: that the player carrying the Staff of Westfall has gone to the Deadmines and fought and beaten Edwin VanCleef.
Now, can the Staff of Westfall be transferred to another simulation? Yes and no. The signifier, the physical (virtual?) staff can be transferred to another game in some sense. The 3D model can be transferred, the physical appearance of the item can be transferred. But that was always on your computer all along; it's not particularly meaningful. The effects of the item may or may not be transferable; if a game is not the exact simulation that WoW is, what does +5 intellect and +11 spirit mean? The game operator may elect to translate that to some other concept in their game, or they may not. I think this notion of "transfer" is what you're eluding to: the transfer of the signifier. This concept is probably very useless. It's also the concept that people are generally talking about when they talk about the transfer of items between games. I think it has no merit at all.
But there's something else that can be transferred: the thing that ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies: the concept that the person holding that item has slayed Edwin VanCleef (in WoW). Transferring the Staff of Westfall may not mean transferring the physical model or its attributes, but it may mean something more along the lines of transferring the meaning of what the player has accomplished. Admittedly, I'm not sure why this would be useful or what the applications of such a system would be; what I'm getting at instead is the idea that transferring an asset may mean many things, and that transferring an asset from one simulation to another is not necessarily the opposite.
> But there's something else that can be transferred: the thing that ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies: the concept that the person holding that item has slayed Edwin VanCleef (in WoW). Transferring the Staff of Westfall may not mean transferring the physical model or its attributes, but it may mean something more along the lines of transferring the meaning of what the player has accomplished. Admittedly, I'm not sure why this would be useful or what the applications of such a system would be; what I'm getting at instead is the idea that transferring an asset may mean many things, and that transferring an asset from one simulation to another is not necessarily the opposite.
What the "ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies" is a relatively easy problem to solve. In a way, it's a list of achievements. So the only thing you need to do is to link that list of achievements (or facts if you want to be more general) to a centralized or federated identity. That's easy to do. The 3D object is already harder: not all engines render 3D objects the same way. Maybe there's a "3D object standard" like SVG and you could use that. That's maybe not easy, but not the hardest.
You're hinting at the hard part when saying "it's a weapon so it uses your weapon slot to equip it, and the stat bonus of +5 intellect that gives you additional mana and +11 spirit that gives you mana regeneration". If we remove that part, the "usefulness" of the item, the only thing that's left is appearance and signaling. There's no substance. What's a pen without the ability to write? What's a computer without the ability to run programs? What's a car without the ability of moving? This is why I say that taking an object from one simulation to another is not compatible (at the same effort level) with having different simulations.
> "Yes, everything is possible with enough engineering time. My point is that you can easily do horizontal integration (lots of simulations, mostly cosmetic, almost no behavior) or vertical integration (lots of behavior, few simulation). Both of those have a small surface. But if you want the two at the same time, your surface begins to grow rapidly. You have to implement N behaviours for M simulations. That's not impossible of course. But it's hard."
but the more I think about it, the more I think it's wrong. It's not hard, it is impossible, depending on your definition of different simulations.
For example, what would the Staff of Westfall be in a virtual coworking space? Could you beat up people with it? That would make sense, although I'm not sure it would be suited to a virtual coworking space. Let's just hope your colleague doesn't play shooters. Would it make you "smarter" in a way, by increasing the speed of your computer for example? That is starting to be a bit weird. You could have a badge, or title to say that you've slain the boss, this could work. But how about all the generic equipment? The consumable? How would you express a mana potion in your coworking space? Stimulants maybe? But what would they do? WoW is a game where you (can) try to make your virtual character stronger than the others players/NPC. But that's not really how real life works. That's not how a virtual coworking space would work. "mana" doesn't even exists in your virtual coworking space.
And if your solution to that is to establish some base rules that all simulations follow (physics, capable of executing code contained in an object), then at this point all simulations start becoming the same.
A good analogy for that: how would you reconcile the world in people's dream and the real world? The more you want to bring things from one to the other, the more they lose their distinction. I think the key point here is that a "simulation" is not a name you give to something, but a bag of behaviours, expectations, things. When you bring those things from one simulation to the other, they start being the same. Thus my initial point, having diverse simulations and bringing objects between them are two opposing wishes.
You go in a lot of detail about the "Staff of Westfall" topic which rises some very hard problems, but not all of them need to be solved for a "minimum viable metaverse" (and perhaps not all of them should be solved - likely the optimal spot is somewhere in the middle between those two opposing wishes) - however, there's nothing metaverse-like until we do at least the basics of such connections e.g. ability to link and/or transfers of users, names/identities/aliases and at least some aspects of avatars; and in the case if two simulations are sufficiently similar and want to interoperate, then developing common standards to enable that avatar/item transfer.
Like, it's okay for a particular simulation to have a rule "custom hats are okay, but magic staffs have to stay outside" - but then it needs a protocol that allows them to separate different "accessories" of incoming avatars. And it's okay for a particular simulation (e.g. a virtual conference setup) to have a rule "magic staffs are only decorative items here", but then it needs a technical process to obtain the visual aspects of that staff so that it can properly display it with the new avatar - the simulation might be very different (VR, different styles of 3d vs 2d environment vs perhaps textual representation), so such standards are nontrivial but necessary to have a connected metaverse. (If we want to have it. Myself, I'm not so sure, but some people definitely do)
And if a simulation wants to allow the items inside but have a transformation to fit their specific mechanics - or even transform meaningful items to fit their theme (e.g. a space opera rpg representing the "Staff of Westfall" as a lightsaber) then there should be a standard for that "receiving simulation" to obtain the relevant attributes of that staff so that it can make that transformation, then they should not have to implement a different technical integration for every other simulation, that should be part of the metaverse standards.
You’re still limiting the question to the plane of content: the object’s physical (virtual) characteristics.
Consider the staff as it exists in the plane of expression: what is the person expressing by displaying the item? It would express that you play WoW, are an Alliance player, and play a caster of some sort. That might be a valuable ice breaker or conversation starter; a thing that helps people identify a shared experience or facet of their shared identity.
You have to see through the object’s simulated characteristics and into what the object’s existence means for it to have value. If the object doesn’t mean anything, then there’s not much point in moving it from space to space.
Again, that's if you consider that the only value that exists is showing and signaling. That's, in my opinion, a really limited view of things. Objets are not just here to mean something, but also to do something. In fact, that's the main point of most objects. If your objects are only here because they mean something, they could very well just be a list of facts. Linking a list of facts to your identity, even if it's decentralized, is trivial. But it's not the everything you can do. I have a pickaxe in Minecraft. If I could use it to break rock in <cool metaverse stuff>, that would be great. If I can just show a pickaxe, what's the point of the pickaxe?
The only way you can have separate simulations is if a person can define their own simulation. If you can't define "I won't let you bonk your coworkers on the head with a stick" then you're not in control of your simulation; you're not defining your own simulation, you're just running another instance of some agreed-upon single simulation. At that point, those are the same simulation. So a person setting up a space has to be free to define the behaviors of the objects in that space, otherwise it's not really their simulation.
If you take an object from one simulation to another, and it does not behave the same way in the two simulations, they're still the same object.
> Objets are not just here to mean something, but also to do something.
The fact that they do something does not identify them as objects. A pickaxe in Minecraft doesn't truly break anything. It plays a sound and deletes a cube. If you're in creative mode in Minecraft, it doesn't even increment your inventory. You can also delete a cube in a voxel editor like Magica Voxel. Is the pickaxe in your Minecraft game the same object as the delete button in Magica Voxel? Is the pickaxe in your Minecraft game the same object as the pickaxe in my Minecraft game? Obviously no. They all do the same thing, but they're not the same object.
The only thing necessary to satisfy "moving an object from one simulation to another" is that they be provably of one distinct identity and not be duplicable.
That would mean that you don't have money. Many objects are fungible. If our two pickaxes have the same properties (same name, enchantements, durability, material), then they are the same. A big part of our experience in the world is fungible. Most of the time when I want a pen I only want to be able to write on paper. I don't care if it's your pen or my pen or anything like this.
He must have a different Minecraft. Minecraft on xbox has a shop for skins and plugins and all kind of stuff right on the very first menu you see. It even has some kind of daily deal. It has its own funny money currency system. (Google "minecoins")
Given how much he talks about custom servers and mods, yes he has a different Minecraft: he's talking about the Java edition, not the Bedrock edition which is the one which runs on the Xbox.
Each account could get a range of blocks allocated to them, after Credit Card validation, to prove you're a real person.
You could pay to own some more blocks.
The blocks you get are just a land grab.
You can trade blocks you own for blocks someone else owns, and there could be a monetary transaction to go with it.
You can build what you want to on your blocks.
How does all of this pay for itself? We set up Pay To Download blocks. If you want to fly around my creation, you can, and it just costs a little bit to do it.
For the blocks I control, my Server lets me make permanent changes to those blocks. I can let other people on my Server, and I can give them permission to help me make changes to those blocks. We can make a shared Access Control List, and pool our blocks together, and edit them together.
If you visit my area, you're using some Server to do it, and you can be on the same Server as your group of friends. And y'all can make a Copy-On-Write set of modifications to my blocks. And those blocks will stay, as long as your Server caches them. But no one else sees your changes.
Maybe add some minor annual fee to blocks, so that if someone abandons their blocks, that they fall back to the public domain.
If you want to get fancy, you allow block owners to set up royalties for visiting, and clients can set some rate limiters for how much they'll pay, and etc.
I get that Minecraft itself has licensing terms that prevent us from doing this, and especially if money changes hands. I get that people build things that infringe copyright, and the only reason it's tolerated is because money isn't changing hands. I get that if someone hosts this, they'll have to deal with DMCA copyright teardown notices, and etc. And I get that it's not like the true Metaverse where you randomly bump into people you don't know, and can make permanent changes to the world together.
But I just think it's bizarre that someone will make a really cool Minecraft map, and I can't explore it, even if I have money and I'm willing to pay a bit.
If this whole system came with the ability to click a URL to immediately appear in some blocks? I mean, I just think that would be so cool.
Okay, I saved my idea, and hopefully someone will implement something like it.
Let's bring wealth-gaps to the metaverse, what could go wrong ;)
If we can transfer wealth from people who have money but not time, to people somewhere else in the world, who have time but not money, then I'm calling that a good thing.
If I can earn my wage by slaying skeletons, searching for rare flowers or hunting some virtual deers then sign me up I guess. Although I wonder how fast it would get boring, you know, because of that whole "If transform your hobby into your job it can get boring pretty quickly"-thing.
I used to play D&D with a group of 8. We took turns being DM, but none of us were all that great at it. Well, picture how much we would pay to have someone else be our DM. $10 an hour? Could easily change someone's life, depending on the part of the world.
Picture mini games that are engaging.
Picture interacting with an NPC that has rich conversation trees. At some point, it's a novel or better.
I dunno, man, I hope we do a good job of rewarding creative people in the future, because I can't see how the value of manual labor will be above $0. Robots will replace everything that's not creative, and a lot of things that are.
Unfortunately, yeah. Would've been a chance to at least make it better virtually than how we handle these issues in real life, but I think humans will take their flaws with them wherever they go and whatever they do.
Perhaps schools can hand out blocks for citizenship, and for things like the Duke of Edinburgh Award, for time volunteering at an animal shelter or senior center.
If you have ideas for how to "solve" the wealth gap, I'm all ears. Until then, I'm kind of stuck in that as a framework for how to solve problems.
I usually don't like slippery slope arguments, but I wonder how slim the margin is between "hand out blocks for time volunteering at an animal shelter" and "if you don't behave how we want you to you don't get anything" aka. some form of social credit system.
But if it truly is used for good things that sounds very promising. I also like your idea of micropayments, so just people getting paid in the background when others visit or use their creations, sounds like a thing NFTs could achieve.
Does Minecraft ban/cancel people like PewDiePie as Roblox did?
Aren't monthly active users (MAU) around 100M for each?
I think Roblox is eventually doomed to slowly fizzle like Second Life, etc. Internet history is littered with the corpses of dead closed systems. Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL? Remember Myspace?
Microsoft might eventually, say, install mandatory AI inside Minecraft that forces all players to behaviorally conform to the social and political views of the most vocal group of Microsoft employees. Then some other immersive 3D world builder with more open rules of participation will send Minecraft to its grave.
For a while everything interesting was stuck on 1.7 so while Microsoft may have shipped 1.8, and 1.9 nobody of consequence played those in the modded scene.
Even today, the newer Minecraft versions are only used for very experimental packs. Something mainstream is on 1.12 while Microsoft have already begun shipping 1.19
Because of this, you have for many years been able to pick which version of Minecraft is started, new versions don't overwrite old ones.
I just read that Mojang added no opt-out telemetry to version 21w38a.[1]
How many Minecrafters are savvy enough to understand that this happened, and the long-term implications?
I initially tried to follow guides and "mods" to disable Win 10 telemetry but eventually gave up because MS changes how telemetry is disabled with every single update.
On Java Minecraft, which is the only way you can seriously modify the game - I haven't actually run the out-of-box experience for many years, but unless it changed you just pick the version you want from a GUI.
If you play modded more than a tiny "dip my toe in it" amount you run dedicated "launcher" software (I run MultiMC) and that takes responsibility for managing a whole bunch of exciting problems, each of your Mod packs probably expects to live in a separate Minecraft environment, with a specific version of the game, it needs to track whether the Java parameters are special (e.g. more heap, different garbage collection prefs) some people prefer to play some packs in a different screen resolution.
One of the very strange things for a few years was that Twitch (yes, that one) managed this stuff for a lot of players. You've got the Twitch.tv app, which people use to watch say, Ninja playing Fortnite, and there's a tab in there for mods, and then a tab inside that for Minecraft, and that's a valid modded Minecraft launcher. It made some sort of sense because one of the few long term audiences on Twitch is Minecraft, so while there may never be more Minecraft audiences than there are people watching this week's hot new game, by next year that game is irrelevant and the same audience is still watching Minecraft. The tie-in deal that caused this eventually went away though.
There are other ways. For a while, I played on a private Minecraft server which disabled authentication (for reasons; that server also had the mod which allows Bedrock players to connect to a Java server, which probably played a part). However, once you connected to that server, you had 30 seconds to type a command with a password, otherwise you'd be kicked out, and before entering that command, the player is frozen and has no access to the inventory. The closest analogue is IRC's NickServ.
That server also had a way to allow everyone to use their own user-selected player skins, even without authenticating to the skin servers, though I don't know the details on how that worked.
My only problem with Roblox is that it's not on the Switch and they all want better tablets and computers to play it now.
Until VR technology gets better I probably don't think kids will grow up on it because I can't imagine headsets being safe to use for extended periods of time if you're under 10 years old.
Oops. Well the only reason my kids play as much Roblox as they do is only because I don't let them play the Quest2 all day. They would if they could. (Especially the 8yo)
RecRoom is a really well done VR Roblox and my kids would live there if they could. I think we'll see a generation of kids with high interest and expectations of VR.
Kids will love it for sure. It is indeed Minecraft, but with different/better graphics.
Escaping from the narrowness of a shitty appartment into the constriction of a vrheadset... Appealing.
The metaverse doesn't have to be Zuck's. He only needs to time the wave, with a pinch of wave self-creation obviously.
pertaining to or noting a story, conversation, character, etc., that consciously references or comments upon its own subject or features, often in the form of parody
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It's obvious to me that the real reason they called it "Meta" is because the entire goal is to collect information about YOU, the user. It's an entire platform and suite of products designed to extract as much "meta" information about its users as possible, and then monetize that information.
Allowing arbitrary triangle meshes is technically harder to implement for various reasons (more data, harder physics, harder for artists to create).
But I think it's worth it. I allow arbitrary user geometry in my metaverse - https://substrata.info/
Definitely a lesson for any would be "metaverse" to keep in mind.
There is Internet that’s good enough.
Play Rec-room in VR and tell me this isn't the future of gaming and online interactions.
For example, let's say you're playing a game of Checkers. That's separate from real life. You can't buy a captured Checkers pieces on eBay and then in your next game of Checkers, start with more pieces than your opponent. Being able to do those things would cause the game to break down, because the game would no longer be a contest of your wits in Checkers, it would be a contest of your existing wealth. You can't purchase points in a basketball game, you can't purchase mulligans in golf, etc. A lot of people in the blockchain/NFT space seem to be of the position that games don't currently let you purchase things with real money or sell them to other players for real money because they lack the technical capabilities, but that is not and has never been the problem. There's also the "trading an item in one game for an item in another game" but that's equally useless, it's the same thing but with a barter system, and the barter system would eventually just give way to money anyway. The problem is that introducing those mechanics causes the magic circle to break down.
By contrast a metaverse is a metaverse because the things happening in it are not in a separate, isolated space. Both games and metaverses are virtual in nature, but what makes something a metaverse is the lack of a magic circle, while what makes something a game is the presence of a magic circle. The metaverse is a virtual facet of reality; games' whole thing is that they are not reality.
A metaverse can contain a game, but not vice versa. Plus WoW is entirely owned and operated by one entity; a metaverse is pretty definitionally a situation in which any party can create their own space without needing the permission of another party, kinda like anyone can create a website without needing the permission of any party. Well, of course, you need an IP address and if you want people to be able to reach it, a DNS record and if you want SSL some certificates, so that's not a perfect analogy, but the web isn't really decentralized anyway (for these specific reasons).
the dependencies are all entangled and circularly dependent, like Facebook's data center ;)
I don't envision a future of mega skyscrapers and bullet trains, nor do I envision a world of Oculus clad employees driving a virtual forklift.
Rather I view the world continuing to exist as we currently have it: forklift driver is prompted by his UI to go to the next location to physically grab an item.