Long term, I think that you have to look at it like this: most desktop computing is very very 2D centric and touch centric. If you want to, e.g., buy a product on Amazon, you're dealing with photos and imagery of a product, and reviews. But if you had a "Metaverse equivalent" you could view a 3D model, see it in action, and physically size compare it to other objects in your house much easier than manually checking dimensions.
Obviously the applications and benefits aren't as clear cut right now. I'm not sure that the windowed operating systems we have today would have been the obvious way that computers would be used if it weren't for constant iteration on keyboard centric UI and experimentation over many years. That same innovation trend hasn't happened with AR/VR, and "the metaverse" that people talk about now will likely be totally different 20 years after it becomes a thing, post-iteration and innovation.
There are two kinds of people you can meet in VR: Friends and strangers. Friends, you can meet privately. You don't need a public space 'verse for that. And as for jostling around or randomly talking to strangers, well, you can walk outside or go to a bar.
It seems pretty nuts that Facebook would actually put its chips on this proposition. I can only view it as a totally desperate attempt to distract from the train wreck of their core business model.
if you live close to one another. If you don't, I guess this could be interesting? I don't really see myself using it but I am so old fashioned that I prefer my laptop over my phone so I get that the world doesn't always agree with me.
This might lead to people becoming more tone-deaf and having less empathy when reading others.
I think for a lot of social interactions, it doesn't, or it offers rapidly diminishing value.
This conversation would not be meaningfully better as a virtual/augmented reality 3D live chat.
The Google Hangouts (or whatever it's called this week) meetings with my team at work would not be better either.
I'm not even sure it would beat playing a pen-and-paper RPG with friends over Discord and Roll20.
Now, there's two ways this could end up panning out:
1) The "metaverse" ends up sticking to the scenarios where immersive experiences add value. I'd expect this would be mostly gaming, media consumption, and some specific built-for-the-platform educational products.
2) We figure out new paradigms that make it worthwhile to replace current collaboration or communications tools.
What confuses me on point 2 is that I think we're going to have to basically invent new paradigms for "window management". The thing I'm picturing is doing a PowerPoint presentation in VR. We'd have people jostling for the best view, and whatever "immersive" metaphor for presenting is likely to be clunkier than a classic Zoom call where the slides are just walked through on one big window.
I'm not sure the 3D shopping model will come to meaningful fruition. We have plenty of retailers who can't even get text descriptions right, especially when it comes to huge catalogues. Are they really going to spend bazillions of dollars building accurate models, making sure the sizes track properly, etc?
As someone who has given a couple presentations in VR (and spent ~400 hours coding/working in VR), there's a lot to be done here. Some very basic examples of value-adds are:
- You (or your audience) can manipulate the presentation "viewport" to any size and/or replicate it wherever each viewer prefers in their own space (e.g. you can sit down on your couch and watch the presentation on a big screen, or have it as a "second monitor" next to something else, or treat it Hololens-pinned style and have the screen follow you around in your vision while you're working on something with your hands). IME, it's much nicer than effectively giving yourself a limited vertical screen monitor when you split screen a meeting/presentation on Zoom.
- Streaming a replicated presentation video (like a powerpoint) to each individual person instead of streaming a singular one over a Zoom call lets viewers refer back to / rewind to previous slides without disturbing others' views.
- Having a large view of a presentation yourself means you can also take notes directly on that presentation in real time, circle/underline text, draw arrows between concepts, whatever you need to help yourself remember what the speaker said later. I helped beta an app (that unfortunately shut down) for taking notes in the margins of videos in VR which would probably be a perfect use-case for things like presentations/classes. You could play back or scrub through the video later to see your notes in time.
- Obvious, but any presentation about a 3D _thing_ will benefit from being displayed in a 3D space. I'd much rather see a new Tesla in front of me than look at a 2D image of it, or see the scale of a new roller coaster, statue, building plan, etc. In "physical presense" situations like this, there's also a value-add over the real thing because you don't have to "jostle for the best view" -- you can just phase through (or not even see) other viewers and always have a front-row seat (and teleport around if you want more angles). For smaller objects, being able to manipulate the scale of the object (especially without also affecting the scale other people are seeing it at) is a nice QoL, too.
- For meetings and things with audience participation, it's way more intuitive in a 3D space to split up into groups (and e.g. only be able to see/hear people near you) by just... walking over to a group and joining in. I can't imagine doing something like small group icebreakers in a company's Zoom presentation.
There's probably a lot of new paradigms and workflows to emerge when the VR space is a little more mature, as well. I've been out of it for a few months now (moved and haven't re-set-up base stations) and I tried to limit my value-adds to just presentations, but I'm excited to see where it goes in the productivity realm.
I’m just curious, have you ever actually used it? Caught up and had a beer with an old buddy. There’s a reason chat is currently the killer app for VR
The metaverse is not competing against the 2D internet by trying to make it immersive, but rather against the physical world by trying to make it more useful. From that perspective, VR offers value everywhere the laws of physics are inconvenient, which is just about everywhere.
Take the example of walking to a college class on a rainy day. In the physical world, you have to carry an umbrella, and the walk takes 15 minutes. In the metaverse, you can tell the rain not to make you wet, or you can teleport to class without ever going outside.
In the physical world, you have to buy that laptop and maintain it. You need to keep it close to you in order to access Zoom. It takes up space, has weight, and has one screen of fixed size which may crack or degrade. The layout of the keyboard can't be changed if you decide you want to try DVORAK instead of QWERTY, or if you decide you would type faster with a numpad. Any of the keys may stop working. Fashions may change so that the laptop looks ugly or retro, or simply looks bad to you, and your only recourse if you want to change that is to buy a new one. If you are using the laptop and someone is standing behind you, he can see your Zoom call and hear what you say regardless of whether you want him to. Earbuds give some privacy but come with a lot of the same issues as the laptop.
Eventually, there will be none of these physical limitations in the metaverse. There will be limitations on the headset, or whatever hardware you're using to access the metaverse, but that's only one item instead of every aspect of your life.
We're living in a prison of physical constraints, but we see them as so inevitable that we don't even bother to complain.
In that respect the metaverse adds rather than subtracts physical constraints compared with a world where we interact with people remotely over low bandwidth video rather than expensively rendered high definition virtual environments
I feel like the concept is pure hype with a trivial amount of userbase interest (at best). They're late to the party. I don't see it as anything except a failure in waiting. Secondlife is still holding up to this day, since its creation in 2003. Try and figure out why SecondLife is still around and you may see why I see no future for this "metaverse". The only way to bring users is to have users and content, and the only way to bring content is to have users, and they don't have the users. I don't know a single person who is looking forward to it. Of all the social chat groups I am in, it's come up in only one, and the overwhelming response was just pure negativity about it sounding dumb, being a waste of money, and a failure in the making.
Somebody sold the idea of Metaverse to someone really rich and now they are going to pour all the money to this stuff.
There is no consumer demand for Metaverse and there won’t be any demand for quite a while until they craft comfortable AR/VR eyeglasses that don’t weight a ton.
That being said I’m sure all those billions spend will produce valuable stuff like GPT-3 of today but is it really cost effective way of advancing the tech?
The metaverse, as I understand it, is just Facebook Games but in VR, for kids and bored adults.
I think the outcome will be the same, though. I can't imagine how anyone at Facebook thought this idea would work.
To me it's a way to signal to outsiders that Facebook is still cool and hip. That's it.
Now when recruiting they can play the Meta-not-Facebook angle.
Now if they can pad earnings calls with the amazing success the metaverse is seeing (so what if it's losing us money, that's the future!)
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It's like an inverse Alphabet. Where Alphabet silently serves as an umbrella for moonshots, Meta is a moonshot that's an umbrella for boring old Facebook
I am going to start using this term to satisfy people that argue its not called Facebook anymore.
would be better, because in case of the Meta-not-Facebook, 'not' might be strong enough to remember that way.
(Yes I know market cap != war chest, but expenditure on Meta is nothing compared to the "soft power" it provides FB)
I dont see a ton of fb recruiters hiring for VR skills, I dont see a lot of training/certifications /open source libraries /platform Sdks for other devs etc that feels like $10B a year kind of budgets are behind VR/AR.
That's a lot of money, Hard space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin which have big hardware expenses spend only 1-2 billon/year and have thousands or tens of thousands of staff working and their progress is visible .
Does FB have 20,000 + engineers working on metaverse? even if so, doing what exactly ?
I am sure FB is recruiting, my point is not that reality labs is fake , I am sure it is real and they do recruit, it just that I don't see recruitment that would signal that large a number of investment.
I wasn't saying from a personal engineer anecdotal experience, but as some one working in recruitment tech, I keep an eye on industry patterns.
I could be wrong in my impression but I think they are just doing bit of creative accounting on existing expenses to show high spends on their flagship project.
At least 10k as of March
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...
I don't think that's true. Search for "Horizon Workrooms" to see an (IMHO) significant product they have in the collaboration tool space.
Also in person meetings are useful over a video call largely because there is lot of information from body language you can pick up being up close to someone. There is a lot of information on how someone breathes, moves or posture etc.
AFAIK there is no good VR solution that is able to solve that today. Even if there was enough cameras on you to pick up that level of detail , the bandwidth on transist across continents today or in next 15 years is not going to be available even for it make sense for businesses let alone regular users. VR as a replacement for zoom sure is interesting gimmick , but as replacement or equivalent to sitting next to each other we are atleast 2 decades away .
[1] real estate is only successful business application I have seen in the VR space
I keep reading about this multi billion army contract , I am sure the money is real, but whether it is actually effective remains to be proven.
I keep hearing this but don't feel I've lost anything working fully remote for the last five years. Are there experiments proving that a call with high quality audio is so much worse in business than a physical meeting?
Perhaps I'm just not perceptive enough to pick up on all the nonverbal cues. Though even if so I think calls are more equitable and accessible.
When people asked me questions, they walked up to the whiteboard and pointed directly, and then scribbled on it to clarify. I felt a lot more connected when I was able to make direct eye contact and get backchannelling. Perhaps it was my perception, but I felt like it was a lot better for communication as a whole.
I'm sure you can replicate all of this stuff in Zoom or VR, but it sure is a lot more clunky and annoying.
Curious what this refers to?
A senior developer/IC in a well run shop maybe requires to attend 1-2 meetings a day and can function efficiently for years without distractions of a work place.
However roles that require a lot of whiteboarding and brain storming simply don't work well remote on zoom. it is hard to share a meaningful simple white board, it is impossible to walk around and ideate .
Teaching a class of 20 in remote is hard. Teaching for me depends on my ability to see their eyes clearly to know see the light of understanding so to speak then changing my examples speed or approach to make sure most get the points. Many business meetings are also not that different. It is impossible for me to look at 10 boxes on a screen to do the same.
I have heard from sales professionals that without being near the customer it hard to judge what their interest levels are, what kind of discounts / packages to offer etc . Video chat simply doesn't give you the same inputs.
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When you share a public space with few others , by design the reduction in privacy also helps everyone learn and collaborate better, some just turn around for help and gets it in a minute, I look over a shoulder and see they are stuck and could use help .
Small ,informal and unstructured discussions is where lot of nuance is learnt. Slack doesn't replace this very well at all.
Agreed. And the point about eye contact really extends to any remote exchange... though I believe it is particularly important in education (where we've supplanted a human-rich interaction with staring at files or tiny heads).
If I may be so bold, our team is working on a solution to both of these issues. By digitizing contents from physical/analog surfaces in real time, we're trying to encourage folks to keep the whiteboard (or blackboard or paper...). If you have the energy, would love some feedback: https://sharetheboard.com
No, the fact is that they happen. Whether or not they are necessary is a matter of opinion.
The strange thing to me is that web browsers do support VR, and they used to even support navigating seamlessly between VR pages without exiting VR mode. But for some reason the seamless navigation was removed. And browsers are almost never even mentioned in these discussions of the Metaverse, even by people who seem concerned that some proprietary platform will take over.
This type of utter failure to understand or recognize the significance of various technologies even by groups like HN, makes me seriously support the idea of AI taking over control of the planet.
If you throw enough cash at a problem, it will be "solved".
I remember google wave. Remember that? The noise it made when it came out. What a mess. And then we got slack and discord and we must admit it somewhat solves the same ideas.
So I don't know. We might very well be in VR goggles in 10 years surrounded by 25 virtual screens, 5 notification systems and parallel windows updates while bidding on a new VR background, on a NFT trading platform using some shitty cryptocurrency we've never heard of 2 weeks prior.
Or we could just be on a terminal in vim doing the same shit as today.
I only hope we have choices. Because this new internet they're trying to push is further away from RFCs and open protocols than we've ever been. And that's very sad. Our parents gave us a free internet where everything is possible, and we're doing our very best to destroy that idea to a world of wall gardens and consumerism where the very few will even know how it works.
Most of those ideas live on Google docs , SharePoint and notion and other tools. Am not sure how discord or slack solves the same ideas.
it was a hard problem to solve especially back then CRDTs were not baked in to any out of box large scale db, however it wasn't premature .
To me it always looked like an experimental product from which mature product took the good parts, no different from Gmail incorporating ideas from Inbox
Wave, Lively and Second Life have some useful lessons in them that it may be worth recalling. Second Life is/was of course the most ambitious attempt to build a metaverse, by far. It never broke out of its niche in the way Minecraft did partly due to insurmountable frame rate and resource usage problems that Linden Lab assumed at the start they'd inevitably overcome, but which they never really did. It's also the reason SL couldn't have been used in VR. Lively was to some extent an attempt to solve this problem with Second Life. However it simply created a different, worse set of problems. Lively also suffered from being seen as the pet product of one of the (at the time) extremely rare female product managers at Google, so she was basically given a team and budget to do what she wanted because hey! Isn't that great! Go women! But the project didn't actually have any executive support and the cutesy design was seen as wildly out of step with Google's brand at the time. So when it failed to set the world on fire immediately it was quickly shelved and the PM moved on.
SL's biggest problem is that it's very difficult to render user-generated content performantly, in ways that look good. Minecraft solves this problem by sacrificing the 'looks good' aspect, partly because it had no pretence of being a metaverse, but SL explicitly wanted to do the Snow Crash thing and thus allowed you to place more or less arbitrary scripted 3D meshes inside the world. Unfortunately the structure of the world, and how users wanted to use it, were the opposite of how you do performant 3D graphics:
1. SL is set outdoors. Thus draw distances are huge and many, many objects can be captured by the camera simultaneously. This places huge load on the CPU and GPU. At the time, the standard was for 3D games to be set indoors, largely to limit draw distance.
2. Many constructions in SL are buildings that contain translucent windows. This is much more intensive to render (requires overdraw).
3. Many constructions in SL are very odd shapes which make it difficult to rapidly determine if they intersect things. Part of why "land" in SL was so expensive was the need to run physics simulations and collision detection against objects that were not designed to make it cheap.
4. Because every object was fully dynamic and the user could change the world at any time, all optimizations based on batch processing of static data e.g. lightmap baking, were unavailable to SL, trashing their performance still further.
5. Because land was all adjacent in one uniform world, at the edges renderer performance was effectively a tragedy of the commons. Even in the rare cases that an SL content creator learned about the limits of the SL 3D engine and worked within them, their hard work could be undone by someone in land next to them constructing a giant tower filled with translucent windows.
Lively attempted to solve these problems by limiting art to a team of professional 3D artists. However this gave the world an entirely predictable, sterile corporate feel that appealed to nobody. Same problem as why Lego Worlds failed to compete with Minecraft. Additionally the Lively team had to spend a lot of engineering effort dealing with Google's infrastructure decisions, which at the time were optimized for apps that could use eventual consistency. See my comment from a few days ago on this topic [1].
The relevance to Wave is mostly that Wave was sort of the 2D content version of Second Life. It went all-in on very hard computer science problems, and did so in a web browser, on the assumption that they'd just figure out how to make it performant later. But they never did. Moreover the flexibility of the tool meant it was often confusing to figure out and quickly developed a perception that it was half baked, buggy and required a mastery of the tool to use. For something explicitly about collaboration rather than content creation, that was fatal. Finally it also suffered the same problem as Lively in that the project was basically a gift to the co-founders of Maps for their success and the Australia office as a whole. The team played corporate politics very badly, adopting a culture of internal secrecy within Google that was not only alien and controversial but which also meant they pissed off other teams (whom they were competing with), and failed to build support amongst the senior executive level. When they failed to take off quickly enough they lost executive support and the project was quickly killed.
We do have choices. There's a LOT of innovation happening on Ethereum right now with Decentraland, VR gaming, NFT's (so you actually own your own items) etc. The open, free Metaverse is coming.
NSFW content will always find a way.
Always.
Meta has a very dominant position in VR headsets. All they have to do is add add a "teleport friend" button to message notifications inside of Oculus Quest 2 when you are in the default home environment, allow some movement in the space, and they will have by far the most popular version of the Metaverse. If they want to start doing brand deals, place some store portals near the door.
You really think that won't start taking away a ton of business from VR Chat and the rest? They will win by default. They completely control the experience. From the moment you turn the headset on, you are already IN their Metaverse. It's just a shit Metaverse with no features. But regardless of what Zuck understands, there are too many highly paid geniuses around him absorbing some of his billions to not take advantage of the situation.
I also barely know people that use Facebook. And many that are not willing to create a FB account for whatever reason.
It's just anectotal. But I don't see how this walled garden will find any widespread use around here. Just as I know no one who uses Apples walled garden chats, simply because apple never reached a critical mass and people don't like to be locked out of their friends.
It is interesting you know many people with Playstation and HTC VR but none with Oculus.
Tldr: I did not bring up any of my own world experiences
Switzerland may is different, but also representative of a wealthy kinda smart economy.
I don’t know where your first question comes from. Myself and this other parent are merely saying the stats say differently. Nothing about your first question.
I FaceTime with someone in Switzerland. It doesn’t mean much. I know Apple’s ecosystem isn’t big in Europe. However, when I interact with people across the ocean, they have a pretty easy time using Apples FaceTime if they are on iOS. Sometimes even if just iPad.
In this situation I’m the one pushing friendships more. Otherwise it would be douchey to have someone pull out an iPad just to FaceTime with you.
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Sorry if any of my messages seem confrontational. Sometimes I’m upset with my own life and don’t speak as nicely as I should.
A lot of my thoughts come from the small organic free virtual coworking community i cofounded (in my bio :o). Before that, my experience with talking to Europeans on a near daily basis had never been there.
I agree with the broader point, but Facebook owns three of the most popular apps in the world. They have at least some idea of what people want.
They do more than just buy apps. We shouldn't underestimate Meta -- they can do to Oculus what they did to Instagram.
it's interesting to note that cory and babbage and beez and a raft of other lindens wound up at FB between 2009 and 2011. i went to pitch the idea of continuing the "open metaverse" and try to get FB to fund the VWRAP work, but no dice. 2010-2011 was way too early for virtual worlds or augmented worlds to be on the FB radar.
at linden, at the end, we wanted to build a shared world which could be fed with real or made up geo data and with a common protocol different organizations could use to cause a consistent, shared experience be delivered to end users.
the key here is "different organizations." by the end we were trying to build an open protocol linden could be a key player in, but not own it as a walled garden.
i think the prime difference here is FB wants to own the venue (walled garden) and sell different data layers to different communities.
i would be very surprised if they weren't working on an AR experience where advertisers could buy a data overlay identifying most likely consumers for specific services. so you're minding your business at the mall and someone walks up and says "excuse me ma'am, i notice you bought floral print shirt last week. we're having a sale on slacks that would complement that shirt and your colour pallette."
not to mention strossian "cop space" or a raft of less intrusive layers for different communities.
so... "own the venue" and "sell distinct value-added layers to different parties"
1. VR rebranded (Facebook’s approach)
2. a specific family of games that allow you to buy and own land/territory, mediated by the blockchain (see Bit.Country[1] as one of many examples)
3. a term used widely in crypto/web3 world to refer specifically to the fact that we can finally build networks that people can own (buy/sell but also control directly via programmable governance) and built on without being rent-collected by extractive web2 companies (mitigated platform risk); using web3 platforms which externalize most of the value they create
Hacker News tends to understand the 1st but not the 2nd or 3rd. The 3rd is most interesting and less well-understood: the metaverse is about much more than a new viewing device (VR headsets). It’s about new kinds of economics around ownership and control.
[1]: https://bit.country/
Facebook is going to have nothing of that. Money will flow into one direction only and it essentially never be more than an VR entertainment hub.
I honestly feel insulted in some way that zuck claims the word metaverse for something that will fail horribly anyway.
Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication. VR and AR have the necessary capabilities to do so, and deliver social presence on par with face to face. With a fully immersive experience, you can feel like you are standing next to a person talking to them, regardless of their physical location. Body language, eye contact, etc all come through.
That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if. The current hardware clearly is not hitting the mark for sudden mass adoption. The hardware will eventually, even if we have to wait until it becomes something like sunglasses or even contact lenses.
From first principles, having computers override what photons you see will have huge effects, but don’t focus so much on the shiny video game world aspects: it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence. This is why Zuck bought Oculus, and why he has pivoted his company around the entire thing. It’s not because of “Ready Player One”, but because he feels that hardware/software will modulate most person to person communication soon, and he wants it to be his stack.
Even without those technologies current VR is quite different in terms of social presence to interacting on a flat screen. A lot of body language comes through even just tracking the head and hands.
I think we’re quite a bit away from having mass adoption of VR though. But that’s more form factor and comfort.
The bottleneck for adoption is probably mostly about UX, comfort, norms, marketing, etc. Not raw capabilities.
The uncanny valley on the raw capabilities of these current products is a grand canyon. Holodeck it ain't.
There is a limit and a point where this can make things worse, but if it approximates what a person expects well enough and never conflicts with that expectation it’s a good tool.
Mobile phones offers people a very comfortable and easy UX that blends well with the requirements of the real world, you could say it does it too well as you often see people walking down the street faces glued to their screen and not looking where they're walking.
VR needs the power of immersion, but right now it comes at great cost. The friction of entering and exiting is big, the time between task switching of virtual and real is big.
You mentioned this:
> In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment. So there is no deficit there.
You cannot and bring all required tasks into the virtual. You can't quickly check on your dog, grab a drink, glance over to a person in your physical space, grab that note from your desk. We rely heavily on the real world and VR right now presents a big barrier. Phones do not, you can watch a movie on TV and glance at the message that pops up on your phone. Even desktop computing allows you to comfortably multitask by glancing between monitors. Some stuff can bring virtualized into VR windows, but it's limited.
I exited VR in 2018 after a few years of working on it. My conclusion was that we're still too early to get bullish. We still need to overcome some big technological hurdles that bridge the gap between comfortable and complete immersion (100% audio & visual simulation), a blend (AR), and 100% real world. We also needs to better address other immersive factors such as haptics and interfacing, because as you increase the potency in one area (visuals) the requirements in other areas start to rise as the playing field demands completeness or risks breaking that desired immersion level.
I disagree with the whole “value of ownership” thing. Making knock off nfts is trivial, so this relies on people caring enough about provenance to police this and shame people that have knock offs in their virtual environment.
Digital goods can be copied for free. It’s the killer feature of digital. No more scarcity!! Any system that fails to embrace this will be outcompeted long term. See the music industry.
Because the bullying at school for having non-brand clothing or things wasn't enough. You'll need Supreme(TM) nfts, or become a digital pariah?
The web 1.0 and 2.0 way of thinking if we build the product, then we own the community.
The web 3.0 way of thinking is there are existing communities out there (BAYC, Punks, etc.) that we can enable to use our product and come into our space.
And this is already happening.
Their parties this last week in NYC for NFT week pretty much locked them as the model to strive for. I don't know if others can do it, but they've set the standard.
C'mon. This is very "rich nerds desperately trying to be cool", it's not an actual thing that normal people will ever care about. We already have status symbols that you can show off in the real world.
It seems to me that they need Twitter (and Discord, etc) way more than the other way around. No enabling required.
People care about status and authenticity.
Imagine a virtual world where
1. You have the validate you are an avatar you own
2. You can be anything you want
The virtual world 1 is way more interesting because it's authentic and the people of status will want to use it and people of less status will build towards being higher status.
E.g. if someone _does_ try to create an NFT for the Mona Lisa, our ability to refute / accept its authenticity is premised on the knowledge that in the real world, the French Republic itself owns the work. How would we trust that the keys associated with minting the NFT were controlled by the French Republic? Presumably we'd need some public statement of attestation from an official French government body, and perhaps with the concurrence of others, to have confidence that this wasn't a rogue intern at the Ministry of Culture, or a hacker that got control to some official accounts or pages.
But applying this logic to "avatars" seems to be either broken or creepy. Who has the authority to say that you are or aren't you?
To my layperson's view (this is def not my wheelhouse), either such an authority exists (even if it's a foundation backed by several "actors who align based on shared interests"), in which case we're going to be required to trust it so we may as well drop the overhead of the blockchain, or no such authority exists, and there's a potentially high degree of fragmentation among platforms recognizing different subsets of ownership (or identity, or canonicity of speech or whatever), in which case ... is it a metaverse or just a bunch of distinct rooms?
> There really won’t be another platform turnover to try to correct the error and disrupt the existing players as there has been for the last several computing platform changes.
What makes you say that with such apparent confidence?
As far as “the final platform” bit, it’s an opinion but if you presume we get to a point where most humans are having their auditory and visual systems being overridden by a hardware/software computing stack, it’s hard to think of a breakout event from that that is analogous to eg PC -> mobile. There will be competition and iteration, but overall the inputs and outputs to that system are (body state) -> (photons, sound) and that seems like it won’t really change for a long time, if ever, so harder to disrupt at the root.
The "metaverse" (not Facebook's) can be an open source platform where anyone can create their own worlds which accept the items they've added support for. This is the direction Decentraland is going in.
The core libraries to build your world will be open source and standardized, like a game engine, but the actual content will be up to the creators.
You’re presuming a scenario where the structure of government changes is the same as a civilizational collapse. That’s not a given.
> Future metaverse platforms will partner with high quality communities
How does one decide authenticity?
> That's the whole innovation behind the blockchain. Decentralized ownership claims.
And once you have an answer to such a question (relying on some preexisting system of ownership in the real world), then why should we care about tokens?
> For example, you could care about the token for the specific "metaverse" you're playing in
Who has the authority to say that you are or aren't you?
> I think you're touching on a very philosophically deep question of who you are. You think that the things you are and that you own are inherently yours, but I would argue your stuff and even your identity is all a social construct.
> For example, if you woke up tomorrow and everyone around you collectively agreed to say that you're insane and that you're an alien. Are you going to trust your own memories or are you going to trust the people around you.
> But I think you're missing out on the core innovation of blockchain which mimics the same way we determine who owns anything, which is completely a social construct.
What use are NFTs in such a world? If it's permissioned anyway, and there's only a few approved vendors, you can do this with a database. Suppose you already developed a Roblox/Fortnite/Minecraft metaverse, why do you want NFTs on top of that?
Ponder that question and you'll have your answer.
What does a Google/Facebook/Microsoft metaverse want NFTs for? Once you start enforcing permissions on which issuers the metaverse honors, the metaverse might as well skip the whole NFT thing and use a database.
It's unlikely there will be one decentralized world (maybe a lobby of some sort, akin to a website directory on the early internet), but instead an Engine + SDK that allows anyone to build their own worlds and choose what NFT's are useable inside it. These worlds can be registered to Ethereum and then users can easily explore and congregate in whatever worlds they wish.
How about a virtual world of no ownership? Why must we give the wealthy yet another venue to lord their status over us?
I am very tired of watching humans constantly try to impose real-world economic scarcity into a digital land of infinite plenty. Rather than fight the nature of a digital economy, why not embrace it?
Besides, NFTs actually embrace your philosophy: allow copies, and shift scarcity elsewhere to things like social status. It is not DRM, obviously. You should be a fan.
Permitting ownership enables an unnecessary layer of stratification that humanity is best without, in a rare environment that actually allows for the lack of it.
Such is the nature of idealism. It is a shame we allow a world of plenty to artificially lock up value so a few people can feel better than others
Alternatively, why is a piece of data not allowed to just be? You can see this everywhere, even outside the digital world and in the realm of the mind. An idea is never allowed to stand on its own merits, we always have to attach our bullshit culture to it
Your proposed world is to say we ought to just not have people create lots of stuff they would have otherwise, in the name upholding a philosophical principle. Which is fine, but own that, and don’t act as though its the just the deficiencies of others leading to a world where you do not get a endless stream of value from them.
If it would mean less profiteers, less fakers, less pretenders, less sharks, less debutantes, less tourists... I'm all for it.
There are plenty of ways to profit as an artist without locking up one's work to a privileged few
Will the artistic landscape be different? Sure. But it would be a worthy change.
NFTs are dumb but so is the concept of no ownership in a way that conflates definitions so.
If it is popular to have say a World Tree in a pool as your spawn point and said map is a popular one you would still have instance ownership even if the map itself is free software. Having your own instance would be found preferrable to most compared to a common flooded one with millions clipping through each other and trolls rampant.
I don't really understand how lack of ownership strips the ability to shard instances.
> because they are the ones making, running, and maintaining the goddamned servers in question!
They are, because they are most capable. But do not underestimate that others do so as well, often in a much more just and equitable fashion. (See: The Pirate Bay/private trackers vs Spotify or Youtube)
And watch what you call juvenile, that perspective explains the world so much more clearly than any explanation that the guilty might offer
For example, I'd much prefer a "mirror-sized realtime video" (i.e. a "window into the other office") kind of experience, where I don't actually need to wear a helmet.
And there aren't even that many technological obstacles to that; just good TVs, with good software, and fast enough internet connection. Add a bit of eye/head tracking (to approximate 3D from different viewpoints) and it'll be very real-like.
Further, VR does not work well for switching - you can't be in VR and scribble notes at the same time. AR might be an improvement, but not by much.
Video conferencing does not suffer from any of these problems, and works pretty well for collaboration. 'Zoom fatigue' is definitely a thing though - it's unclear whether VR fatigue would be better or worse.
VR/AR will see limited adoption for certain specialised use cases only.
You could do a LOT of avatar face reconstruction with that.
https://i.cdn.turner.com/adultswim/big/image-upload/thumbnai...
Please read this, and then read up on why everyone is talking about web 3.0.
This isn't a phase of the metaverse that is going to be different because of screen and control technology, it's an ownership and control shift.
In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment. So there is no deficit there. I think you haven’t tried these things before so you are just speculating.
Writing/typing would be really bad in VR though, and that's a major need for meetings, I don't see a good solution for that.
Video conferencing didn't fail because video conferencing is fundamentally bad but because:
- meetings are often done in a fundamental bad way, where people don't have any "felling together" even is they sit physically in the same room.
- people having bad microphones, the video part in a video conference is the least important the audio part is what makes it work or fail (because meetings are all about speaking, except if you are mute/deaf, in which case VR might help).
- technical difficulties all over the place, there is no reason for this to get better with VR
- peoples homes being fundamental unsuited for conferences (i.e. a lot of background noise), again nothing which will change with VR
- also VR headsets and mimic don't work well together, proper gestic is possible but often requires full body tracking which put more requirements to the environment you use it in.
- VR headsets are much more straining to use then audio-only conferences, and somewhat more straining then video conferences. Which can be a major no-go for anyone doing many conferences, like the management deciding weather or not to buy into it.
- Companies want virtual meeting rooms not a meta-verse, something which already exists, and looks better then the honestly crappy looking thinks Facebook presented.
Video conferencing has certainly been wildly successful in actually getting (collaborative) work done - though in fact it is screen sharing that is the secret ingredient here. Would screen sharing in VR be any different? I guess 3D models or images could be shared usefully.
It is notable the difference between tele conferencing and video conferencing - and that difference is faces (and screensharing). Until VR can show faces, it is basically a tele conference with a puppet show.
My point about switching is that in VR you are completely immersed, so are limited to what the VR provides, whereas with a vid conference I can e.g. go make some coffee while still participating. I'm limited mainly by social convention, not the technology itself. The nature of modern work is we are at the centre of various tools and technologies (half of which are a bit broken) that we choreograph together to get useful stuff done. No VR system could hope to replicate it all.
Actually I'm currently working on a VR project (amongst other things), so these concerns are real and pertinent to me.
(As ever with engineering there is a tendency to focus on the what and the how, instead of the who and the why. Furthermore, people will use technology as they see fit, which might be quite different from how it's inventors intended or envisioned. To develop on this point, even the most 'non-technical' human is an accomplished tool user, and they won't be reading the manual anymore than they absolutely have to.)
In what terms does it "beat it"? I still have Zoom meetings where people just dial-in, have crappy video, etc. In other words, video conferencing is still being adopted decades after it was introduced.
> In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment.
Multi-tasking isn't a real thing. The overhead from context switching is real and no amount of technology will improve this human deficiency.
It's out of question that Facebook (and other companies) did a good job in progressing VR headsets technology (through I wouldn't call it a miracle).
But the meta-verse idea as presented by Facebook doesn't look too promising IMHO. It looks out of touch with reality and it's from Facebook. A company well known to try to force their world view onto all other people around the world, ignoring any ethical questions arising. Sure by renaming themself they will manage to somewhat run away from their responsibilities, but as they don't really change their ways it's just a mater of time until we will have the next batch of scandals, now attached to the "meta"-name instead of Facebook.
I am deeply skeptical meta is going to make the kinds of fundamental breakthroughs that will make VR mainstream and useful to people. Right now they are basically brute forcing the issue with tons of money and even then I am a bit underwhelmed and I use my quest almost daily.
In VRChat, you could write something in the air by hands, or even play the piano. The problem might be the user experience is not as good as real world hand writing/typing, and there is no physical feedback when writing/typing. That might make people feel weird.
However, that has nothing to do with the "metaverse". Metaverse is just a fancy word Facebook is trying to establish to somehow rebrand their walled-off social media platforms.
Edit: All I'm saying is that the metaverse is not some new concept. It's bascially social media enabled by the internet, but for some reason we start calling it metaverse when access through the medium of VR.
All this "body language" talk neglects that vr tracks at most your head and hands. Not how people are stood, or even facial expressions. "Body language" indeed. Too day nothing of the whirly Hurley motion sickness from it.
Maybe one day, but I put it in the same bucket as fusion.
Motion sickness goes down with each generation and is also largely a function of software design anyway. You’re very behind the curve.
High-fidelity, lifesize, no stuttering, etc. plus collaborative docs and I'm pretty sure you may have a better experience than VR.
- full photonic override (HMDs -> passthrough visors (lynx-r is a half step) -> passthrough swim goggles -> contact lenses)
- partial photonic override (HoloLens -> AR glasses -> contact lenses)
- magic windows (google’s thing)
They all have trade offs but the first track in particular it is an error to look at current form factors as a fixed condition. They will be changing rapidly insofar as traction and/or investment continues.
As in you'd have an external VR unit that's as bulky as needed to handle face tracking, photonic override, etc. without any direct physical contact or uncomfortable accessories. Does that kind of tech sound further or closer than contact lenses, or would it be so different as to be hard to say?
Do they fail? I don't thinks so, when I e.g. play D&D like games over voice only chat + a shared map it totally convoys the "felling of being together" (just one of many examples).
On the other side when in-person sitting in a conference room where a person takes 30min to convey some (for me) mostly irrelevant facts which could have been summarized in a single slide there isn't really any "feeling together" and weather I'm sitting there or at home or use a headset on a train station makes literally no difference.
What makes people "feel together" is interaction and being focused together on a specific think. This doesn't need VR or AR at all.
Also what people totally forget is that moving company meetings and similar into VR has a number of problems:
- everyone needs to have a VR headset with them and a reasonable good internet connection
- everyone needs to be able to use a VR headset, but even with the best headset there are tons of people out there which get motion sickness from it (or from many things which convey 3D weather it's in VR or in a PC game) this people are much less rare then many thing.
- the platform needs to convey the feeling, as I mentioned above "just putting it in VR" doesn't mean it works. Also more important the "virtual venue" you meet has no reason to be anything like the real world, like at all. So there is no reason to replicate all the limitations from the real world. But Facebook seems to be exactly trying to do this.
Facebook positioned themself well by owning one of the most affordable VR headsets.
But the meta-verse thing isn't looking too good IMHO.
What companies want isn't a virtual world, but a virtual meeting room.
What people want is being whatever they want to be in VR, and potentially have different identities for different social cycles (mainly work, friends, family). So not quite what Facebook is building, to some degree even the opposite thing.
Would a high quality VR version of Zoom/Teams be awesome? Of course it would, it would be freaking amazing! But the “metaverse” ain't that, it's supposed to be a virtual universe (hence the name), where everything happens, including games, watching movies, etc. A gigantic MMORPG, containing every possible kind of online interaction and games. And this part is complete bullshit.
Which user story seems the most likely:
- the user open the app, select their contact or group, puts the VR headset on, join the chat room.
- the user puts the VR headset on, login in in “virtual flat”, go out, jump in his virtual (flying, as a DLC) car, and go to a virtual bar where your friends are waiting.
Only the second one is worth the “metaverse” name (the first one being just a “virtual chat over the internet”®), and even if it could be really fun in the beginning, and could even have a decent success as an MMO, it won't be the mainsteam way of communication.
When we have Star Trek's transporters, we can achieve "social presence". Until then, you can have "this is cool". There is a real problem with VR: it requires way more focus and attention that being live, in person. Where VR does shine is shared experiences you can't have in real life. Those shared experiences are really cool, but are not such that people want to have them whenever they want to interact with grandma or Bob in accounting.
> it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence.
We already have technology that may be "good enough". The issue with VR is that it requires so much cognitive effort to work... so you really are dealing with something that is cool. Cool to the level that it seems magical, but not cool enough to beat the ease we can communicate via other channels. Playing a flight sim with VR? actually great. Trying to have a conversation with my kids via VR? Not so great.
Note this has nothing to do with photo realism, seeing the physical form of people, or cool immersive environments. It’s the feeling of unmediated communication.
I suspect you haven’t actually tried hanging out with your kids in VR on a reasonable setup when they are physically far away from you. I’d suggest trying it to get a more concrete view on what is probably going to happen with regards to physical co-locality and it’s value prop.
> That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if.
Sure, but the "when" is trying to be forced down our throats. The media is perplexed by it in the same way they are about autonomous vehicles. We know its the future but tech oligarchs are trying to slam something down our throat with marketing/pr BS because they're scared shitless they'll lose their position on top of the throne. Most revolutionary tech has come from underdogs (Apple's iPod and iPhone come to mind, Zoom for video conferencing) and not from already established firms saying "this is the future, take this now".
The idea that we will work and play in the metaverse is blocked by the hardware right now. If the hardware is amazing (say, a regular looking pair of glasses) and can actually enable an immersive computing experience, that is more productive and better at connecting people, why wouldn't you use it? Regardless of who builds the platforms and experiences.
The idea that I will work and play in the metaverse is forever and eternally blocked by which particular group of assholes is trying to wrangle me. If it's a group that allows me the same access they have, which enable me to wrangle the tech and myself? I'll pay triple the premium, just to stick it to Zuck and other proprietary scum.
You are in the extreme minority, if smartphone trends are to be treated as any kind of indication. So your actions likely would not matter to Meta/Apple/Google.
Oh and there's no way in hell this corny Horizon Workrooms will ever, ever take off.
To me, Meta is a more nefarious hint at the collection and backroom sale of users' metadata.
Thankfully, for now, VR is not mandatory. If it becomes mandatory in the long dusk of my latter years then I will be content as a grumpy old man humbuggering about the kids with their newfangled record players.
And, yes, I am in the extreme minority. It has a negatively, and severely, impacted my social life (on top of being socially ungraceful, I have relatively far less space to ply my social wares). I'm so thoroughly radicalized that this is merely another price I'm happy to pay.
My actions don't matter to them, and I aspire to a day where their actions have a similar impact to me.
It's impressive how comprehensively consumerism has persuaded people that you have to buy something.
I live a fairly tech-minimal lifestyle already. I have my computer, which is largely a tty machine, and my phone. All of my media is either downloaded music files, pirated lectures, or physical books.
I think of VR/AR, the Metaverse, etc. ... and it fills me with a sort of vertigo. I'm desperately in love with my physical existence, as such. I very much abhor any attempt to make computers _more_ present in my life.
I'm happy to wait 30+ years for a Metaverse that doesn't repulse me. If I were to die without ever having worn a VR headset, I'd be likewise happy.
I'm much more interested in finding ways to meaningfully, socially, connect via my terminal. I've been happy with IRC for the past 5 years and see no reason why I won't be happy in the future.
EDIT: thanks to mosh and termux, my phone is also largely a tty machine.
I don't know what the next evolution of this is, but if it involves "wearing" something, it needs to have characteristics like being featherweight, as trivial to take on and off as a pair of glasses, 0 friction to operate, and be extremely robust and durable. IIRC, Google Glass, for example, had none of these properties (and it wasn't VR/AR in any sense).
Are we anywhere near this? How far off is hardware that's really mass-market ready?
Only time can tell whether Metaverse has something that Second Life did not. My guess is that it will be considered a joke in 5 short years, but I don't actually know. Overall, I think Silicon Valley is overestimating people's willingness to wear headsets and paddles for extended periods of time. Just because 12 year old boys will do it doesn't mean that everyone else wants to.
My best guess is that until we can beam visions directly into our eyes and brains, VR will end up in a similar domain as 3D printers (remember all those articles touting how we would have "santa claus machines" in every home by now?). For the average person, 3D printers don't solve anything despite how many people would consider a 3D printer to be a "cool" thing. Most people won't deny the cool-factor of VR, but that doesn't mean they will use it for any reason. After all, personal computing didn't really take off until it started to solve more problems for the average person other than word processing and playing Oregon Trail. (yes I'm oversimplifying, don't jump down my throat, I was using computers before we had the web)
Again, I don't really know, and nobody really does. Maybe people will want to join the Metaverse. Hopefully Zuckerborg doesn't set back the adoption of VR by virtue of association with Facebook.
A similar “you’ll know it when you see it” applies here I think.
For iPhone it was “everyone has a phone, and now that phone can give them turn by turn directions anywhere. Everyone will want this.”
For vr, there’s no incumbent device to disrupt. Glasses are the obvious choice, but they’re not in the same category.
I don’t think there’s room for more than one digital device that people carry everywhere, which means vr will need to disrupt the phone again.
Carrying that to logical conclusions, apple seems like the best bet to pull this off.
Facebook making this move seems very strange. Building tools for a gold rush that isn’t possible yet or even in sight. I’d imagine it’s more about recruiting than anything.
VR suffers from a number of technological problems still (eye strain, etc) but a major issue is how much a departure it feels like from other things we do.
* Apple also utilized the proved wild popularity of iPods to wield tremendous power over its carriers and partners to keep them from interfering with the experience. Other smart phones of the were sold with carrier firmware mods that kept you doing things like transfering photos unless you paid the carrier a dollar per photo.
Outside of VR, AR glasses need to be all of the above, plus offer something that works better in glasses than on a phone - like indoor wayfinding, using the cameras to allow people to search by image for things they are looking at, virtual assistants that are proactive and context/location aware, or just being able to do things quickly and privately without pointing a phone at something. Or it could just be that the immersive/spatial experience is just better than looking at a small phone window.
Facebook / Meta is working on all these things, so I think the Metaverse talk kinda distracts from some of the more concrete and useful applications and paints an unrealistic picture for how much time people will want to spend in VR worlds.
There are so many challenges and so much interoperability required to make this happen and be useful - I think it will be some time before it becomes a reality. But, the original iPhone was pretty limited initially, and I can remember lots of people saying "Why would I use a smartphone when I can just browse the web and send emails on my computer more easily?". I think it's likely that VR/AR will follow a similar trajectory with it becoming much more powerful and easier to use as time goes on.
From what I've read, you'll more or less have the opposite effect. People assumed Google Glass wearers always had the camera on, or were taking pictures, even if they were unambiguously not. Wearing any gadget with this capability will not be significantly different from pointing a phone at something, I believe.
I think the issue is that a significant portion of the population will have issues consuming the content and not ending up with eye strain or getting sick. It was one of the factors which killed off the resurgence of 3D in the 2010s and VR headsets suffer from many of the same problems.
Bumping up the frame rate didn't fix it, nor did all the other tricks cinematographers and cinemas employed to make stereo screenings less jarring.
I have a feeling that future generations will simply know how to mentally process VR in a way that fully grown adults can't easily adapt to.
For what it's worth, there's no record of that ever happening. There's been no account of this sort of thing, even in newspapers of the era, which at the time tended to exaggerate spectacles with catchy headlines, nor are there any police reports describing panic. As far as we know, people enjoyed the film and sat and watched it just fine.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/did-a-silent-film-abou...
These can be solved some day though by following the eye's aperture and focus and adjusting the "world" with minimal latency.
I can count on one hand the number of people I know with something like an Oculus.
Two of those people don't use it because they couldn't feel comfortable using it, but they like seeing other people try it out the first time, as a novelty.
I don't see any reason why I would want to have VR meeting. I can see point with in person and white board, but VR? Not really...
Talking around, I don't think I'm the only one.
If you have to "wear" your Desktop on your head and put on a "sensors" body costume, guess how much people will do it voluntarily. Yep. Small group of people.
You have to provide something "out of this world" to even think for mass adoption. This in my view is just another data-grabbing platform and push to walled garden SaaS. It is logical big tech to push it hard. Microsoft, Apple, you name it.
And this is in my view the controversy with Facebook. FB is mass social network. Successfully integrated in the daily routine of the "normies" trough several apps.
Suddenly they push Meta, which as I mentioned is clearly small use-case. Branching this as a tool for "immersive" experience is vague attempt for justification and clearly PR move for distracting public from the toxic reality of the company which used dopamine hacks and psychology driven dark UX to become "the next advertising" platform.
Until AR/VR is hologram driven, nothing will come out of this Metaverse. Just some corporations capitalizing on "enthusiast" market and suckling more data than usual.
But now, people shop online all the time. The technology caught up to the point where people don't go to physical shops.
VR/AR builds on that to allow for a more realistic display. So that's a natural extension that will come into play.
The same changes in buying behavior affects things like direct car sales and house sales. Spinning a 3D car on a 2D screen is not the same as being able to walk around it and (figuratively) "kick the tyres" yourself.
We're at the late stages of the "early adopters", and the rate of change in technology is exponential so is increasing at an increasing rate.
I don't think it's different. I think if you went back in time and asked 18 year old Zuck what the future of online interaction would be, he'd basically tell you about second life.
The only difference is that now the technology is better and enough people who are not Zuck are talking about it, so Zuck can steer the ship without everyone jumping off.
The interesting long term stuff that will come out of this is computing more integrated into your whole life with AR. This is going to need a more networked, spatially aware, OS like abstraction than we’ve had to date. The scary part of that is FB making the play to own it and presumably all the data that can be harvested by being implicitly jacked into your entire life.
Apple are presumably working on the same thing for the same reasons but want you jacked into their ecosystem instead.
I believe the net result of what we’ll get is several competing walled gardens with interop at the app level as we see with phones these days.
The Web3 side of this is a mix of vultures taking easy money, well meaning people without backing and VC backed companies preaching decentralisation but offering themselves up either as middlemen or the beginning of another platform with the attendant lock-in. It primarily seems to be a way to get out of the rent seeking world of platforms into a rent seeking world for everything.
Money is always needed, but money alone is not enough. Every funded startup has some money, many have raised a ton of money only to fail badly.
Also it is not his money i.e. he is not selling/leveraging his FB stock to invest personally. FB is investing shareholder money of which he only owns 16.7% .
Two very different companies and scenarios. Jobs as famous for cutting down >10 products product offerings down to 1-2 to refocus the company. His skillset was very much product strategy. He used money mostly for marketing and design. Two things Apple is very much well known for.
Facebook is known for copy, acquire, kill. They offer tons of money to try to acquire competitors. If they say no, then they hire tons to engineers to clone your product, then they kill your product.
Money is required by both, but arguably how both companies spend money is vastly different. Facebook very much uses money as a powerplay than Apple under Jobs.
> Money is always needed, but money alone is not enough. Every funded startup has some money, many have raised a ton of money only to fail badly.
This is such a generalized statement. It's not even worth commenting. Water is wet and the sky is blue.
> FB is investing shareholder money of which he only owns 16.7%
No. Its company assets. Although he owns 16.7% equity, he has >50% of the voting power. Meaning he has absolute authority to dictate how that money is spent. The other 80% can only sell their equity and this doesn't mean they get to take away 80% of the company assets.
You made two statements that he is spending his money and spending money makes it not an achievement if it successful.
Neither of it is true , bootstrapping your way to success may make it even more impressive achievement, but success with or without money is difficult achievement that shouldn't be belittled.
Say I have >50% control:
Can I make it a dynastic company and ensuring my kids gain control of the company? Yes.
Who can stop me? No one.
Can I dilute everyone else's shares and issues dividends when I want? Yes.
Can I issue dividends only to a certain class of shares ensuring those shares which I own a super majority get paid? Yes.
Can I fire the board when I want? Yes.
I mean sure. Its not his money, but its his company. Through and through.
> His money is only small fraction of the money being spent.
Company assets is not equity. I am not sure you fully understand how equity works.
> spending money makes it not an achievement if it successful.
No. Depends on how you spend it. Again, read my last comment.
This argument is getting boring so I am going to stop here. If you still think you are right, then I wish you all the best in the real world.
Meta seems like there was a wall of post-it notes in Zuck's office with a bunch of ideas to stop FB from becoming MySpace and the dart he threw landed on this one.
My gut tells me that Meta is dead in the water but with the billions that FB have in their war chest I wouldn't bet against it completely, however, the fact it requires a headset, a massive source of friction, will restrict the audience.
I dunno... seems like Zuck is living in a fantasy world here.
For context, after the success of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, it's said that Lucas surrounded himself with yes-men who agreed with whatever he said. Anyone who wasn't one of those didn't last long in his inner circle.
The end result was "Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace". There's an hour-long review video by "Mr Plinkett"[0] that dives into the all the major issues of the film, along with some honestly-not-great humour (imho) but at the end it really explains what the problem was: Lucas had absolute control, and everyone did what he said. And if the original Star Wars had been that way it would have been a disaster.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgWcNsdmoyE&t=3677s (The whole video is good, but linking directly to the important bit I mentioned).
So I can see it growing. I think AR has a better chance than full VR to be the game changing technology longer term, especially considering things like AR Facetime and equivalent.
I do think there is more hype than substance right now around the metaverse, but I don't have to squint too hard to see a world where this becomes real relatively soon.
[1] https://exponent.fm/episode-196-forecasting-the-metaverse/
Second Life has figured things out. A 3D world in a 2D screen is much easier to build and interact with than a 3D world in VR goggles with your hands tied. High fidelity and Sansar both tried it , and both failed, and were scrapped despite "enormous potential". The Oculus Quest is great, but my main use of it is to view Street View imagery exactly because it doesnt require much control or interaction with other users. I had tried Second life in VR briefly, it was indeed nice to walk butn difficult interactions made you feel like an incapacitated person. Future VR can make some interactions compelling, but they won't reach the expressiveness of clicks and keyboards.
VR is here to stay for a few million users, it's not going to become mainstream even when the FOV and resolution increase. It's an uncomfortable blindfold that creates stress and anxiety (as any blindfold should). This is nothing like smartphones, which are unobtrusive and adopt the age old tried-and-tested form of a book. AR is a cool looking gimmick as well. I will wait for neural implants until we can talk about VR worlds again.
Unless mobile technology has some major revolution with battery life or Facebook/Meta can find a way to use the metaverse without a screen or sucking battery life, I think mobile tech will severely hinder users from using the metaverse.
Now to bring things back to the original quesion, when Second Life was a thing, mobile tech was mostly flip phones and Blackberries so mobile wasn't an option. Users could only use the desktop and were fine with it because it is all we knew at the time. Being a desktop only application was never an issue for the users. The current demand to support multiple platforms when many of those platforms are not capable of supporting the metaverse is what makes the current metaverse different than Second Life.
I can't comment on Facebook. The current discussion surrounding the 'metaverse' often describes something that is more open, almost like the internet. Whether or not this happens in practice remains to be seen. I think the idea is that you may be able to teleport between worlds(servers run by companies or other entities) and carry some amount of your state with you.
I remain cynical. As someone who grew up reading William Gibson and dreaming of 'cyberspace' you'd think I'd be excited but I see this as being just as boring as Second Life and There but with better graphics. The metaverse talk lately reminds me of when CE mfgs decided they needed to push 3DTV on everyone because they were running out of fancy new things to drive TV sales. This is likely just a way to create a new channel for monetizing.
Meta was created out of a life or death situation (perceived or otherwise), so they have to gain control over their future so that it isn't possible for that to happen again. None of Gibson's words can prevent or counteract this.
I see many others here calling out FB's pending decline, but I don't see anyone offering a clear thesis for how it happens. It could simply be wishful thinking. Locking down iOS doesn't mean Meta can't do targeted advertising with all previously collected data. Less effective, sure, but not meaningfully so.
It is about its relevance as a cool tech company. They will not be able to hire or retain the best engineers with current reputation problem they have.
The only people in my circle left on Facebook were the party seeking folks. Now with Corona the organisation of parties changed enough to render facebook irrelevant. Now left are mid 30 single moms who likely spend more time on Instagram anyway.
Then there is WhatsApp. I can tell it had bad news again when I get a sudden rush of 'x is now using telegram'. I can't remember the last time someone asked me for a WhatsApp number.
Instagram is similar, once a daily driver for some it now looks and appears like a ad platform where most content wandered elsewhere (tiktok for that matter)
Sure this is anectotal, but in my environment Facebook actually is visible dying.
1. It's gotta be useful (Jobs to done/value/utility whatever you want to call it)
2. It's gotta make me feel good/excited, it has to be fun ("emotional value" if you want)
3. It's gotta be socially acceptable ("what do others think of me if I use this thing?")
My take is: It is unclear how and when the current concepts of the metaverse will deliver on these dimensions. I bet there is a version that will deliver on all 3. But, we haven't seen it yet. Once we see it, we'll all laugh and say, "why didn't I invent this?".
PS: The closest thing I have seen is gather.town. It's not quite a metaverse (yet) though.
I can think of two parties that have their own answers:
1) A certain group of people who like computers and grew up reading sci-fi think it would be cool; some even tell themselves it's very important, but for vague reasons that they can't really articulate
2) Centers of capital are interested in it as yet another platform for consumption, attention-capturing, and rent-seeking
I think Zuckerberg is both. But I'm not convinced that society at large has any real motivation to buy into something like this, unless the sheer novelty ends up being powerful enough to rope people in.
Note that a world without a "metaverse" still has a place for VR/AR. Having a complete, interconnected virtual world is not a prerequisite for all the utilities and entertainment that that hardware technology can be used for. And to me it just feels like an incredibly unnecessary layer on top, which serves no real purpose to anyone outside of those first two groups.
t. Worked more than 16 years in ad tech.
And then on the non-utilitarian side, XR entertainment/storytelling is already a thing. You don't need a metaverse for that.
There is no goal to achieve for the user. Zuck is a very smart guy and knows that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, Youtube ... are activities for people. And those activities will keep being popular only a handful of years. If you don't want the Meta Inc, company's revenue to collapse you have to innovate and be part of the next hot thing.
Nobody knows what is going to be the next hot thing, Zuck just want it to be the metaverse. So the metaverse doesn't need to have a point, it just needs to be successful
I mean... there won't be users at all if there's nothing in it for the user.
The immersiveness that can be attained via modern high-end VR systems is simply not comparable to what we had a decade ago; it enables many more use cases and paradigms that wouldn't have felt usable, interesting, fun, or sometimes even particularly social in the past. To me at least, VR/AR seem like a pretty large medium shift, and I really expect them to stick around and become a large part of society.
The possibly good news is it shows that Facebook doesn't really know how to avert its own decline.
I could imagine making some money on the following: “by 2030, the number of VR users of the metaverse will be less than 1% of the number of users of other social media apps”.
(Unless they pull some definitional stunt like saying “you used AR once on the Facebook app therefore we are counting you as a metaverse user”).
The key for entertainment will be becoming someone else.
Being the QB in the game or maybe seeing things as players in actual games.
Being able to play in a concert as any member of your favorite band, being able to talk to the crowd and they respond.
Playing your favorite actor in your favorite movie.
Meet up with friends at a concert of sporting event, current ones or ones in the past.
I expect they will recreate epic sporting events from the past.
Someone creates your hometown or your college campus what it looked like in the past that you can explore in VR.
You can have someone create your house you grew up in or maybe you can even recreate the tree house you played in and invite your friends to meet there.
Virtual dance clubs for both exercise and meeting new people.
Virtual sports bars to cheer on your team, maybe even sports bars for specific games where fans from both teams can interact.
True virtual shopping, see and try out products in VR.
Oh and the adult industry always tends to be the leader in new technology pushing everyone in a specific direction.
I don't want Fbook to create it but I think the metaverse could be great.
Of course, not only is the technology to facilitate a metaverse is better, but I think society has also evolved a lot since then. Remote work/life is now much more of a mainstream/accepted thing than it used to be. Internet is now a mainstream full-blown appendage via our smartphones.
I'm much more optimistic a metaverse (in a Platonic ideal sense) could catch on this time around, BUT I'm much less sure that what will be hawked to us is the "right thing" (whatever that means).
I do think this article posted on HN last week is definitely onto something that Meta and other attempts may not be thinking about. https://debugger.medium.com/the-metaverse-is-already-here-it...
The problem with the whole metaverse concept is that the implementation runs counter to the actual infrastructure underlying it. The Internet works so well because it's very permissive/open with data transfer. It's funny how that we now try to wrangle that back in when we should be making the other layers of the network (session, application, and presentation) as permissive as the lower level transport and link layers. But it seems we want to reinvent the centralized systems of old like mainframes and computer information services but without the old trappings as if people aren't fully aware of how that all worked out (badly for consumers).
Maybe by volume, but where do they make their money?
I think people are so skeptical due to a combination of disliking Facebook and the usual "overestimating the impact of years, underestimating the impact of decades."
Wouldn't it be remarkable if 2021 happened to get the web exactly right? Think of it: in 3021, people will be using Twitter just like they do now, with Chrome and plugins and all the rest.
Projecting forward helps dispel your own preconceptions. And then you conclude "Why not build it now?" -- There's often not much standing in the way, except a whole lot of work (along with a fair bit of luck).
It seems like most of us just don't want Facebook to own the next Twitter. Admittedly, that's a scary proposition.
I suppose my advice would be to become comfortable with that sooner than later. Zuck has never gotten big bets wrong. It's possible this will be the first, but I wouldn't want to take the other side of that bet if my money was on the line.
You may think second life was a failure because it never caught on mainstream, but in many ways second life was a huge success. Many many people spent an insane amount of time in second life. Major companies, political parties, art museums, and other “real life” institutions setup shop in second life. You could get a job there building stuff, selling land or being a journalist publishing in second life. I read somewhere that a second life real estate agent became a usd millionaire from buying selling virtual land.
Some people just got totally sucked in. I met a woman who told me she would spend so many hours on it that she didn’t take proper care of her kids. She seemed like someone who was having a hard time in real life, and she found a great escape on SL. It was so easy to make friends, and the exploration of the world was endless.
Immersion was definitely a key to its success. It was good enough to make the player feel stuff. Sit around a fire on a beach at sunset would be soothing. Walking around a Western town would kind of stress you out. It worked.
It’s not for everyone for sure. But what’s scary is that the metaverse is going to pray on the weak, on people with insecurities, on the lonely and the elderly. People who can’t walk in real life are going to fly over cities with birds and meet similarly lonely people. What’s going to happen when they unplug?
Healthy individuals already experience some withdrawal from VR, saying things like “real life is dull compared to what I can do in VR”.
Now, of all companies, the one doing it has a history of optimizing for “time spent in the app”. Disregarding all kind of predatory behavior in the name of profit.
My prediction is that the metaverse is going to turn into “brainwashing as a service”.
The only hope is that VR headsets are too expensive to become widespread.
This is going to be difficult to fight. When you have a “join meeting in metaverse” button in whats app, who’s going to not click it?
We got a couple more decades at least for AR to happen.
But it's probably 20 years and a few 'Magic Leaps' away from reality, 'pun intended'.
It may happen gradually as techines buy the big googles, they then get smaller like Ski Googles, more people get on board, then they'll just be glasses and we'll look at VR headsets like horse and carriage.
I suspect we will really start to face social problems as people in that era will not be exposed to humans that lived before the internet and were 'normal' and the hyper connectivity we did not evolve for will throw us all for uge loops.
Like AR, basically getting rid of phones and a lot of computers and integrating digital into our real world, rather than just having avatars moving around in a space.
I'm talking about, putting on a set of AR glasses to watch TV, instead of having an actual TV, this way you can watch movies, your GPS not being google maps on your phone but in your glasses that point you in which direction to go.
The Metaverse is basically what Google Glass was trying to be, but will include a lot of other tech as well.
in the same way afghanistan was the graveyard of empires, virtual worlds are where corporate product development teams go to die. (and a couple open source teams as well)
The metaverse tech (I.e. immersive VR) can create the illusion of being in the same room as another person.
The next iteration of the phone, radio, tv, internet, which each shrunk the world in turn.
The problem with Roblox, is that it's geared for kids primarily, it's centralized and it also has I believe a 30% fee. You have the same issues as you have with the mobile app stores: an excessive take rate and risk of being deplatformed at any time (like the early Facebook and Twitter apps). You don't really have ownership. But it does underscore the idea that if you create the right environment for shared gaming experiences and creativity it can be very interesting and entertaining.
The crypto metaverse is attempting to use digital property rights represented as NFTs to facilitate permissionless value creation and exchange. Just as real world property rights give owners the stability and framework with which to build long-term investments, understanding they can take risks and potentially reap rewards for those risks, the hope is that digital property rights will do the same.
The NFT space is very interesting and the gaming sector in crypto is evolving pretty rapidly. Some interesting attempts I see at creating these experiences are Sandbox (https://www.sandbox.game/en/), Decentraland (https://decentraland.org/), and Treeverse (https://www.treeverse.net/).
I think it's still super early days for this stuff. It's likely that a lot of the current attempts will fail, but I believe this concept is going through its 90s dot com phase, and we'll get a few gems out of this movement that stand the test of time.
This, in fact, the real problem. Second Life really is a virtual world, not a game. You log in, and you're somewhere in a virtual world the size of Greater London. Now what? The virtual world itself is completely indifferent to you. You can do nothing, if you choose, and nothing will happen. You will not be attacked by monsters. You will not be destroyed by a shrinking vortex. You can go to an area that's not busy and sit or stand for as long as you want to stay logged in. A car might drive by. The sun will rise and set. Not much else will happen.
You can travel around and look at stuff. You can talk to people. There are games to play if you can find them. You can build stuff. You can sell stuff. But you have to find things to do. There are guides and search tools, but you have to use them. It's a "pull" system like the web, not a "push" system like Facebook.
This totally throws a sizable fraction of new users, mostly those who want a pre-structured entertainment experience. It's great for the fraction of the population that likes to build something from nothing. That small fraction.
The second part of "boring" is that Second Life is really sluggish. This is a fixable problem, stemming from legacy code from the era of OpenGL and single-CPU desktops.
Nobody has really looked hard enough at metaverse client theory yet. You have many of the problems of an MMO client, in that you have to present a real-time 3D environment. And you have many of the problems of a web browser, in that the network throws un-optimized stuff at you and you have to deal with it. The big game engines, UE5 and Unity, don't address that latter problem.
All this looks quite fixable, if you target a gamer-level GPU (even one from 5 years ago), a few CPUs, an SSD disk for caching, and over 100mb/s networking. This is what the average Steam user has. We ought to be able to get up to GTA V level visual quality and frame rate. Second Life has content that good.
A third problem with Second Life is that the social features are terrible. The group message system has been losing messages for a year due to a scaling problem. (It was designed so that you could talk to people in your party, not broadcast to your store's customer base.) The voice system, outsourced to Vivox, is flaky. There's two decades of technical debt and not much will or money to fix it.
Mainstream metaverse adoption may be a problem in the era of the $1000 phone and the $200 laptop. What we're seeing right now are new low-end virtual worlds that look like games from 15 years ago. Many run inside a browser. This may be why few people actually spend time in Decentraland. The VR headgear people really don't have much more compute power than a phone. Beat Saber, fine. Breakroom, OK. Big virtual world, not so much.
On line right now:
- Roblox: 1,446,121 users.
- Second Life: 35,008 users.
- VRchat: 29,072 users.
- Decentraland: 604 users.
- Facebook Horizon: they're not saying.
(Steel-manning the concept of course).
meh. it's a fun conspiracy theory.
Slap almost ready VR/AR tech on top of that but we'll see how that plays out
COVID-19 might've made remote work mainstream, but I don't think it will fundamentally change the way we interact with other people in our social life. I think given the choice, most people would rather go out to pubs, restaurants, parties, etc... to experience other people face to face rather than be stuck in a virtual world. The virtual world was a last resort. Even during lockdowns people had underground parties (I've even been in a few!).
I personally grew up spending much of my high school years in IRC chatrooms, having virtual friendships with anonymous people. But I'm an introvert, and most other kids did not share my experience so I'm a bit skeptical on the mass appeal of these virtual worlds.
You logged on and found that basically nothing was happening.
Covid did increase teleconferencing software usage (Meet, Zoom etc) - but I think that work-related (i.e. forcible) usages can only go so far. Online education solutions were lacking this time around, but I think next time there might be better options that end up "sticking".
Imagine a holistic lockdown going on for years at a stretch, and your only possible respite is to explore some virtual worlds, or meet others in an MMO style setting.
Something I would personally enjoy is wikipedia converted to a VR "Library of Alexandria" - which you can browse at will, or take guided tours, or attend lectures by subject matter experts, or just chat in general with others who are browsing the same topics as you. Just need to write an engine that converts the wiki graph into some rooms....
EDIT: this is not bad: https://wikiverse.io/
There is a genuinely interesting conversation to be had about the metaverse. I think lots of conversations around identity are interesting: what is durable, what is opt-in/opt-out, how do we mediate a la carte personal identity with community standards etc. That's a hugely important conversation the outcomes of which we are feeling right now. This is _much more_ important than what fucking 3D fox avatar you walk around with.
I think there are even interesting conversations to be had around AR, and smart glasses etc. But that have to be predicated on the fact that the technology just _isn't there_. Even if you had amazing smart glasses that weren't massive shitty headsets (that even if some people can tolerate, are worthless for work or on the bus), you'd still have the problem that the UIs are useless. Until we have way, way better AI assistants, you just can't have AR/VR UIs. Because you _need_ high bandwidth text interfaces. In the absence of keyboards that means voice, except the idea of using crappy voice recognition at work, or walking around, is deeply painful. So we'll need really good subvocalisation tech, and that doesn't exist. We'll need really good AI agents (and I genuinely believe the biggest concern of the metaverse is going to be how machines interface with it, not humans), but they don't exist. But that's fine, cos the headsets are crap so none of this is a pressing concern and I am _utterly baffled_ why this conversation is important in 2021. It's all years off.
So I do think this will all one day be relevant, but not now. But even when it is, I think the _absolute least interesting_ bit of it is embodied 3D spaces. Basically nobody has ever wanted that, they don't want it now, they will never want it. It's just a crappy way to do business. It's a fun way to play games, but you know what, 3D on a 2D screen is still fine.
The longer this conversation continues, the more money gets sunk into it, the crazier I feel. Nobody wants to go to work in Minecraft. Nobody wants to go to the pub in Roblox. They're just games that kids enjoy. You cannot build a trillion dollar investment hypothesis off the back of games kids enjoy.
I dunno, this all sounds a bit grumpy, I'm sorry, but part of that is that I genuinely do think there is interesting stuff to discuss here. Maybe 3D worlds are dead on arrival. But making internet spaces ubiquitous and ambient? Interesting. How can I as a human, with privacy needs but a lust for reputation, inhabit these spaces? Interesting. We're just concentrating on the stupidest possible parts of the mataverse right now and there's going to be a spectacular metaverse Winter if we don't dial down the hype.
Who’s their target market?
Reminds me a bit of 'photorealistic cg'. The gap between close and indistinguishable has an exponential curve of effort required. I remember when Final Fantasy the Spirits Within was released in 2001[1], and it was said to be extremely photorealistic. It was good for it's time, but you wouldn't think it was anywhere close to believable by today's standard. That was 20 years ago and still I don't think I've seen a full CG movie that I thought was real.
So my take is that, without the help of AI filling in the exponential curve in ways we've not yet seen, it's longer than we think.