The Missing Link to the Metaverse | Hacker News Reader

The Missing Link to the Metaverse

webvr.dev

38 pointsgodber63 comments

If you have a rich social life with friends you can interact with in person frequently (say in San Francisco, Manhattan, or locale of choice) why would you want to be in VR all day?

I understand the scenarios where your friends are far, or you're tired, or you're introverted (like me!), or you want to do things you cannot do in reality like fly, but I don't see how it will be anything more than a niche.

I know people like to compare VR with the internet, using the internet as a counterexample, but the internet is different because the internet does not require you to isolate yourself physically the same way VR does.

I know the metaverse is not VR, but right now it seems AR is very much in its infancy.

edit: and to clarify, I think even 10 million yearly active users would be "niche" (fb is ~3 billion active users for comparison).

I'm not arguing VR is the future or anything, but people with rich social lives in SF or Manhattan aren't a great measuring stick. Doubly so during pandemic times.

I haven't read the earlier works but this metaverse thing does seem like someone read Ready Player One and thought "this sounds cool, let's make this reality" forgetting that the world of Ready Player One is dystopian.

I’m very into in-person socialization. VRchat is the first time I’ve been able to make internet-first friends. It don’t feel that it’s in any way introvert-specific. It feels like hanging out with people in real life. I got on there because of pandemic shutdowns, but I’m still using it. It allows me to fit some social interaction into an unplanned one or two hour block of time, which was hard to achieve before. It’s sort of like living on the same block as a bar that is populated by people with my interests and is open 24/7, except I can access it from anywhere in the world.

  > I know the metaverse is not VR

I hate saying "VR/AR/XR" is the metaverse.

Because as far as I can tell the metaverse is VRChat.

  > If you have a rich social life with friends you can interact with in 
  > person frequently [...] why would you want to be in VR all day?

VRChat is immensely good. Teenagers and 20-somethings in particular eat it up. They make games, fantasy worlds, have improv shows, gameshows, LARPing, dance and talent competitions, etc.

VRChat is great for the younger generation that has trouble socializing, and that's a larger demographic than you think. Anime fans, classical nerds, furries, LGBT in conservative towns, etc. This is their social life. Their vacation spot.

VRChat is the closest approximation of what the metaverse will be. Log on and see what it's like.

The most contrarian reason this doesn't map to Zuckerberg's vision is that you can import your own models and don't have to pay anyone. Just like you can set anything as your Twitter profile picture.

VRChat is the metaverse. It's free. It's such a tangle of rights issues for any would-be acquirer that Zuckerberg won't touch it. And it'll be much more fun than any corporate playpen they come up with.

err, VRChat seems to only have like 30K peak players a month. That's like nothing.

https://steamcharts.com/app/438100

Even if we say it's off by 1000 that's 30 million. Not even 10% of Facebook.

I like VRChat, but it's pretty niche, still.

There aren't 30 million working VR headsets in the world.

yeah - there have been about 5 million oculus quests sold. so VRChat is basically less than a percent of all VR users, if that steam stat is to be believed.

it's niche.

I think you would have to compare against total users currently in VR games to get a percentage popularity. For example I own a Oculus and am not currently playing VRChat on Steam, however that doesn't mean I've never played VRChat off of the oculus store.

Steam charts is only tracking players in Steam with the software launched, VRChat is also available through Oculus's own stores for desktop and quest, where it has 8,000 reviews for the quest version and is fourth overall in popularity after Beat Saber, Rec Room and Youtube VR.

Rec Room (which looks more like what Meta has in mind, they even did laser tag) is at 13,000 or so reviews, but is only at a 30 day peak of 3,600 users on Steam.

[1]https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/section/55416991837...

who says the metaverse has to eat the world?

just because there’s only 30,000 people means it’s not meta?

The general idea of "the metaverse" at least as it exists in sci-fi is that there's only one - it's the metaverse, a singular, canonical, ubiquitous layer of VR over the real world. The assumption here is that, because Facebook is doing it, it will eat the world through sheer force of will. Every other platform will either be assimilated by Meta or rendered obsolete by Meta's control over standards and influence over governments. Facebook wins without even stepping into the ring, the game's already over, omae wa mou shindeiru.

I personally don't think it will go that way - I think no matter what Facebook does, it's just going to wind up as one of many attempts at VR in the marketplace (it's too late to capture the market and own it now IMO, and i just don't trust VR to ever be more than niche, even in gaming) which means the "metaverse" in this case is just marketing and hype.

VRChat is broken in many ways and there’s no way it can gain mass adoption in its current state. But the experience of using it at its best convinces me that billions of people will use something like it in the future.

A common experience is you might log in and just get sexually harassed by a teenager.

> If you have a rich social life with friends you can interact with in person frequently

I think this does not describe a large and growing segment of the population.

"I have a rich social life, why would I bother with a dumb thing called a telephone" "I have a rich social life, why would I bother with text messages?" "I have a rich social life, why would I bother with a social network?" "I have a rich social life, why would I bother with VR?"

None of these things replaced IRL, all of these have waxed and waned, but all these have, taken together, eaten up a MUCH larger piece of our life that we'd like to generally admit. None of this is a real replacement, but the only parts that have gone away have been replaced with something stronger.

none of those things require you to literally be isolated. it's funny you use those examples because they've all exploded in the past few years.

A phone call takes you away from any local social activity. Sitting in front of a computer isolates you. Listening and watching a movie with headphones requires isolation. Why wouldn't VR be similiar? Were isolated now looking at our phones all day.

people can do all of those things with groups

People take conference calls with other people all the time. So much so entire companies have been built around the idea. Sitting in front of a computer to video chat with other people is hardly isolating. Plus computers can be used while others are present.

Movies are watched with other people present very often.

Again, VR is the only thing here that isolates you and literally blocks you from your surroundings, nor can anyone else see what you're doing.

Lots of PC gamers play with headphones on, fully immersed in the onscreen play. You can use VR in groups as well. The most popular VR applications are social, like VR Chat. VR can also be broadcast so that others can see. When my family plays BeatSaber, it's almost always in a group where others watch, keep score, cheer each other on, and take turns, much in the same way people engage in RL sports, like horseshoes. MR even blends RL and VR.

You would do all of those things in a vr environment.

Have a video chat while in vr. You can appear and feel as if you are sitting across a table.

Conference call in a virtual board office.

You can go to the movies with someone from anywhere in vr. It makes the perfect safe first date.

Shared VR experiences is the future of VR.

Social and VR are different because they are platforms and substitutes. Phones and sms and letters are tools.

The same was said about "classic" social networks (like Facebook and Instagram) when they first appeared. What happened is that they didn't replace IRL interactions -- instead, they invented new ways of interacting, new social dynamics. Why can't this be the case for VR? To be neither real-life nor classic social media, but something else entirely.

the difference is that VR requires you to literally isolate yourself.

instagram, facebook, text messages, phone calls. you can do all of those things and share them with real people in real life. you cannot do so with VR. it's literally and inherently isolating.

just the other day I was at a restaurant and a group of people were typically all on their phones while waiting for their food. eventually one of them found something amusing and put their phone on the table propped up by a salt dispenser and they watched some video together.

that's the difference.

Sure, this is something you can do with smartphones, but people used Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, etc. before this was a thing. In other words, the fact that they can show their memes around the table isn't the reason they use this apps.

we'll have to agree to disagree. I think people being able to enjoy things together in-person is exactly the point.

Multiple people will be able to use vr in the same room and see what each other are doing/join in. They will also be able to see each other's IRL bodies through depth cameras or camera reconstructions, and dynamically replace the hmd in the depth capture with face and eye capture data. Video of the eyes/face can be passed through to people outside with parallax/Pepper's Ghost making it look lined up close to their real face.

If you're not physically together, which you aren't for the majority of the time, you're isolated anyways.

The solution, of course, is to give our virtual avatars virtual smartphones that they carry around in their virtual pocket, running virtual versions of Insta, FB, their text message apps, and even their calling app. You could do all of those things from within VR, no more isolated than before. Arguably less isolated, in fact.

Does the waitstaff at the restaurant have to be in VR too?

I think you spelled "AI Agents by DoorDash" incorrectly.

In what way is socializing with others in VR "isolated"? Real people interacting in social VR applications with other real people are not isolated. In fact, I would argue that they're less isolated than people who can't interact with humans from all over the world, and are only exposed to the same group day in and day out. P.S. are blind and deaf people "isolated" in ways you think make them unable to enjoy social interaction? That's a very narrow approach.

Affinity Groups form naturally on the internet because it is so much easier to find dispersed individuals who are into “niche thing”. I imagine it will be like that - but more directly social.

You can attend concerts around the world for a fraction of the cost. Maintain relationships in higher dimensionality with people who aren't in your immediate neighborhood. Keep in touch with parents who don't live near you, or are in an elder care home.

Visit space! Visit worlds that don't exist! Walk around ancient Rome or see the inside of pyramids.

I’m not saying there isn’t value - there is. I’m saying it’s unlikely to become as mainstream as a phone, Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp, etc.

Fair point. I would always take the under on that comparison, however. Point at any one thing and I would bet that it won't reach that level of popularity. However, something will - I just don't want to bet on which one it would be.

> why would you want to be in VR all day?

I think the benefit of VR is not just about social stuff, but our ability to augment/improve certain experiences.

For example, fb's worksrooms is a virtual office. There is no digital watercooler, but it offers a virtual desk and a virtual conference room. You have a private space that is distraction free to work in, and a great space for remote workers to simulate an IRL meeting. I've used it only for social calls, but we did plan a trip (so kinda like a business meeting) and the whiteboard/monitor is super useful especially when combined with the ability to point and see who is talking.

> he internet does not require you to isolate yourself physically the same way VR does.

VR today is terrible when you have to walk around because it breaks the "illusion", but for tasks that take place in one spot and are immersive/require focus (offices, etc) they can be great. If you live alone, and/or in a small house, why buy a big and expensive TV and not just a vr headset?

I agree its a bad comparison. VR is like a desktop computer IMO. Its not comparable to a phone, in use or convenience or power or whatever. If you want to sit and focus on a single thing as a "destination" activity, VR may be better. (example of destination activity: "go to my desk/office to work" "go to tv room to watch tv" "go to arcade to game", etc.

People want the metaverse to be like the internet. I think its circular and silly to discuss. Its like wanting the web to be the internet. The web is kinda the internet, but also kinda a subset. Most of the internet for most people was APIs or crud apps with a HTML gui. We did get smartphone app guis but they're not as well interlinked, and now we may get a VR/AR gui. Ideally, you'll be able to inter-link between experiences, but as mobile dev showed us, its unlikely to be as natural and rich in linking abilities as HTML based "www" is.

>Rule #2: The Metaverse is for everyone.

>Rule #3: Nobody controls the Metaverse.

I'm no expert and to be honest, a bit like I was with the internet back in the day, don't see the point but if those two rules aren't adhered to then the "metaverse" is dead on its feet.

I feel the internet had an advantage in that at the start there was no Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, either around or interested in it. If these companies get in at the start of this thing their wall gardens will kill the metaverse just like they're current effort to create wall gardens on the internet are chipping away at what made the internet what it is today.

Well yeah, but walled gardens are there, right? On mobile phones which appeared after google and facebook. No one cared that their rights got taken away, they just want new shiny toy. VR has all the 'wow' effect to be that toy.

Never will buy any of facebook's shit but I damn well did invest in their stock cuz it's evident that no one sees the problem with selling their souls away be it in the browser or in virtual reality (where there's even more opportunity to influence you).

Those are not rules. Those are fantasies. As long as humans are implementing all this, struggles to control it are going to be a thing, and the very people most likely to abuse the situation will be the people who wrest control of it from others.

In some ways this isn't a new problem, though. The challenge here is defining a collective good and valuing it over individual power, and that might not be a wholly solveable problem but it's certainly a negotiation that takes place as long as there is not only one power that exists.

In that way, these rules (fantasies as they are) become valid. They're not laws as in 'gravity', they're laws as in 'enforceable and societally agreed upon'. I'm a bit puzzled how you enforce 'nobody controls the Metaverse' but it is quite a stake in the ground: you can sure tell when it's NOT being honored.

They are not fantasies. They're one set of potential outcomes.

The fundamental laws that determine whether decentralization or centralization dominates is the rate of accessible content creation.

If a centralized organization (AOL & Yahoo, early and late 90s respectively) can create more content than the Internet (decentralized, early/mid 90s), then the former dominates.

If the greater number of content developers afforded by a decentralized system can create more content (Internet, late 90s - 10s), then it dominates.

Attempting to co-opt both strengths via platforms (Google & Facebook, 10s - now) is a newer phenomenon, but fundamentally still has the same tension.

If anyone wants decentralized metaverse to prevail, work on open dev tooling, content creation tools, and client standards. Not because they'll shift the balance, but because with them creators will shift the balance.

I've lived through this with aframe.io and as part of the original WebVR team. It was one of the top frameworks with a large community, but content creators at a nascent stage can't shift the balance without control of the browsers or spec

Can you elaborate? You mean Content creators need control of the browser (development) ?

Some control over the direction of the spec to avoid situations like taking years to rewrite a working shipped spec, removing controller support, removing haptics, adding unneeded APIs, focusing on Cardboard and 3DOF, removing or not supporting link traversal, fuzzing headset tracking data. Or to be able to get useful features such as access to the headset camera or a way to bind textures without giant framedrops

If there was to be a "standardized/decentralized" "metaverse", things would have to move much faster. Think of all the features a "metaverse" might want, and each item would have to go through spec gatekeepers that don't even use/develop VR

Yeah that seems like a problem. In the early days of computing, you had consortiums competing against eachother. That might be helpful in speeding things up.

I wonder if it is possible to build a Verse on something like Godot, which is open already and has VR tools.

You can build verses with anything, but something standardized and decentralized like the Web? Competition back then may have been possible, but it's daunting now when you have winner-takes-all corporations with Google and the Web, and Mark Zuckerberg with VR.

You could do it with Godot, but distribution is also important. I built a VR browser before that browsed standardized VR worlds, but control of hardware also felt important. Perhaps there was a long-term path to success there.

Exactly.

Let's say we lived in a time where the internet didn't exist but we somehow knew its potential could lead to what it has today. You better believe that someone commercially minded (think AT&T) would be sitting on DARPA's shoulders to make sure they captured all of the value.

Peter Thiel's obsession with naturalistic monopolies is no coincidence.

That may be it. The internet was not a business project ( attempts were made before Darpa, but those failed ), but rather some technically-minded people trying to make it work. Metaverse, if such thing is to come forth, should be in the same category.

But it won't.

Internet was already too much of a proof that we are not ready for it as a species. I am not just talking about powers-that-be getting riled up over how it took some of the power away. I am talking about how it laid bare how downright awful average human can be.

But I hear metaverse and I chuckle, because the best comparison for it for me is Fed-issued crypto coin. Completely misses the point, but it runs on blockchain. Yay.

There are some groups talking about "metaverse standards", but they're off in philosophical territory and nobody is paying much attention to them.

We need metaverse standards in at least three areas:

- Portals. You should be able to move your avatar through a portal from system A to system B, and it should Just Work, assuming B will let you in. That's what the author is talking about here. Systems not resident inside a web browser need to do more work to do this, but it should be made to work. This is what makes multiple virtual worlds a metaverse.

- Assets. You should be able to take your purchased asset, if you really own it, from system A to system B, assuming B will let it in. The NFT crowd does not have this. Try to export an NFT from Decentraland.

- Money. When in system A, you should be able to buy from anyone who wants to sell to you, and not be required to use system A's currency or payment system. This is what Apple and Epic are currently litigating.

For standards purposes, it's time to talk about the mechanics of this. If it works and some systems offer those features, users will clamor for interconnection. (And third parties will somehow bolt it on whether the systems like it or not.)

Following a link in VR breaks the user our of the browsers VR mode to show the "2D" browser window. It's time to improve this behavior.

The example works perfectly fine in chrome fullscreen mode.

Cool, thanks for the feedback.

Yeah interoperability and the ability to travel between worlds is key. Just the other day I implemented a portal between two virtual worlds in WebGL, it works on mobile/desktop but as stated in this thread the experience is ruined when in VR because selecting a link pops you out to a 2D view. To sustain the feeling of immersion, the user's state needs to be maintained when hopping between worlds.

This is something the folks at Oculus Browser/Meta are considering though! Ideally it needs to be a standard, just like HTTP and TCP/IP. I'm incredibly bullish that the metaverse needs to be built on top of our current World Wide Web, so the ecosystem itself isn't owned by any one corporation. The destinations themselves, sure, they can be properties of a startup or larger co like Meta or Microsoft.

https://youtu.be/r07VAb0DFgc

Can’t wait for the day we get actual virtual cookies thrown at my VR set and a pop-up that comes with it. Or maybe an NPC telling me about cookies on their Verse.

Or the NPC bouncer telling me they value me some much as a European visitor, and that they are working on complying with the GDPR. So get lost, scum. Meanwhile the American next in line gets to enter and promptly receives that handful of virtual cookies.

Sorry but the "metaverse" is a joke, and I say this as a person who loves VR and is optimistic for its future. VR is just not immersive enough and I don't think even next-gen tech will be good enough. It's not just the hardware but the whole kinaesthetic experience you're not getting just by having your brain tricked into seeing things in three dimensions. Even tiny jumps in latency between frames is enough to completely throw off any immersion, and unfortunately the operating systems we have today like to do tasks in the background at any time which can cause this.

Let's stop fantasising about a Ready Player One world and be realistic about what we can achieve with what we have.

Maybe, but I wouldn't be so dismissive. A lot of very mainstream things today started out as a 'joke', but they did start somewhere. Given all the sci-fi on metaverses, it is not that surprising that someone is trying to make that happen, unfortunately its one of the worst people one could think of for the job.

Who controls WebXR? I hope my smell is wrong, but it sounds like Chrome (Google) don't want the open Web to be the metaverse.

We have fullscreen mode. That gives complete rendering control to the content. Mouse can also be captured.

The "security" concerns are a solved problem.

It's controlled by representatives from big tech companies whose sole job became to tweak and perfect the spec

There was a working WebVR spec in 2015 shipped in two browsers. Big companies including Google jumped in and delayed the spec on the order of 4+ years in favor of "WebXR" with many "it'll be ready in just a few more months". When it was released, it was neutered with no tracked controller support, no haptics, no link traversal, and forced every site to migrate

At one point, we lobbied for link traversal, but despite having existing solutions it was pushed further and further back for improbable and benign security issues

More things kept getting added to the spec based on incorrect assumptions. 6DOF (Quest, Rift, Index) was clearly the future, but a lot of the focus was spent on Cardboard and 3DOF (Daydream)

Framework maintainers, VR developers, and users didn't have much control. As common with many other Web specs, things are done from an ivory tower, detached from developers, and just bogged down with a lot of bikeshedding and backpatting

That's just my take since I think it's relevant for HN and with the announcement of Meta. It's hard for Web to compete when someone at Meta can just snap their fingers and things will get done. Ironically, Meta has done the best job carrying WebVR with Oculus Browser.

Everytime I read about the metaverse, it reminds me of all the hype around VRML back in the late 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

Funny you mention that. The author of the Metaverse Manifesto I link to in the blog post is named Toni Parisi ... and one of the co-creators of VRML. He even brings it up in this podcast where he and Kent Bye discuss the 7 rules:

https://voicesofvr.com/parisis-metaverse-manifesto-unpacking...

The missing link is identity, and sadly open technologies have not solved that, and crypto-based identities are already demonized.

"Rule #1. There is only one Metaverse." "Rule #3: Nobody controls the Metaverse." "Rule #4: The Metaverse is open."

the metaverse hasn't even been invented yet and they are already trending false.

Yeah these “rules of the metaverse” are a fever dream of somebody who cant see the way the cookie is crumbling. Our future is looking more like a cyberpunk dystopia than libertarian wonderland.

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