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The 2D internet works though because it's an efficient means of communication and data transfer. When I search the weather, check directions, send a message, book a flight, buy a shirt, or view the daily news, I can get that done fast on the existing internet. I don't want to load a 3D world to read an article. I don't need to walk around as a 3D avatar to ask a friend what time they're arriving. It's inefficient. It's not the future of the internet. It's a gimmick or form of entertainment.

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.

I underestimated Minecraft. I knew it is important, so I tried it out two years ago but dismissed it when I got killed by a zombie. I thought, fuck it, I don't need anxiety when it gets night in the game.

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.

> The internet will basically be an extension of your brain. What the internet knows, you'll know.

I'll know that the stone masons crashed planes into the world trade center to destroy the studio where they faked the moon landing?

This is literally the worst take I've ever read on hn. What's your background in neuropsychology? On what basis besides Elon Musk PR do you have to make this prognostication?

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 have zero background in neuropsychology, however, I think I'm still entitled to share my opinion and make predictions on the future.

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.

That's the metaverse we wish for, yet it's not the metaverse FB wants to build. It is the metaverse only in name, but it's just another proprietary sillowed plateform built to milk users.

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.

Agreed. This is the linuxy open source metaverse that nerds like us will promote on forums like this.

The general public will use the walled garden capitalistic metaverse because it will be better.

You mean like facebook is better than the freaking entire _internet_ ?

Like how MacOSX is better than Linux.

MacOSX may have been better than Linux when MacOSX was at its peak a few years ago, but nowadays Apple is busy making it worse while Linux keeps improving.

Minecraft is actually a great example here—the client and server ecosystem is extremely, extremely diverse, with lots of different choices for users. Almost everyone who uses Minecraft on desktop is running some mod, if only Optifine, and the server landscape is even more diverse, with dozens of competing reimplementations, all communicating over a shared protocol. I think Minecraft is a great example in the current landscape of a naturally evolved diverse, unowned network of interactive virtual spaces. If Mojang disappeared tomorrow, the only thing the community would need to solve is authentication (and for our use-case, something like mTLS would work super well)

Agree with everything you said, but to me one key piece of the minecraft ecosystem rules it out as a meta verse contender - every one of those permutations you mentioned drops players into their own isolated environment which does not interact with any others. At best you can pop a few hundred people into a server specially configured for that, or use a discord/irc shim to bridge chat across a few instances.

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.

A server-interconnect mod sounds like just the ticket; something that connects servers together into an "internet" of sorts.

Hypixel and other mega servers already do this on their own. I'm sure some sort of irc/matrix implementation would work for interoperability.

Check out the large scale MMOs. No one interacts with everyone else. They find a guild and play with those people.

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.

> No one interacts with everyone else. They find a guild and play with those people.

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.

WoW used to have that as well until they made a few community hostile changes. But there probably is a group you interact most with even in FF.

The thing is, this was tried already with VRML in the 90s. And that totally flopped, because as it turns out, people would rather not deal with the clunkiness of excess skeuomorphism when they can instead just type in a text box or click on a button. Perhaps actual VR headsets could ease the pain of that, but it would have to be incredibly good for it to be a preferable alternative to just directly producing/consuming the relevant data via text messages, video chats, etc.

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.

It's pretty wild that Meta has gone all-in on this "metaverse" concept when VR as a platform has completely stagnated to date. VR still hasn't found its killer app, why is Meta so convinced that it's going to look like Second Life?

Do they know something we don’t?

I think they know how much money they've sunk into their Oculus property and they want to see more return on that investment.

I think this is what a midlife crisis looks like when you have dictatorial control of a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Maybe they know that VR and Second Life may have stagnated but are going nowhere and as tech improves, the "Metaverse" is inevitable? The fact that Second Life is still a thing in 2021 is actually impressive.

VR is as inevitable as "AI".

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"

> 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".

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.

>what is so hard to understand about that for journalists and companies?

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.

If the web was created today, it would not be a set of open protocols, markup languages, etc. It would be a product. That's the world we live in, so that's why journalists and companies chase that vision.

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.

And it was a trade off. I think most of us are well acquainted with the advertised advantages of open standards and web application architecture as we know it. But it came at the expense of both user experience and developer experience on par with traditional desktop applications. E.g. arbitrary languages (esp. compiled languages), fast graphics, great UI toolkits. We get some approximation of such things at a glacial pace, or it’s always just over the horizon. Everybody is leery of adopting a comprehensive framework only backed by a single corporation (is this what held Java back?) but standards bodies take 20 years to deliver a bright idea like compiling your favorite language to byte code that can execute in the browser.

I think you at least get the vision, however I believe the current web standards is what is preventing forward progress. What you describe could be achieved much easier by moving sandboxing into the OS and using containers. I'd much rather see a modern markup format for describing content and data than what we have today. Not 1000x bloated frameworks to do simple things. I believe it we are ever going to make the metaverse a reality we have to really reenvision our current technology not on what we have today by trying to incorporate next gen solutions into a failing model but create something new and expandable that is easy to get started.

It is a current form of the metaverse... and I think that you underestimate how it could evolve... but I sure hope that WebAssembly never takes over.

Plus if it doesn’t look good and have porn it’s no good.

I don't know about porn, but Minecraft has shaders and the very pretty RTX version.