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Comment by UnpossibleJim | Hacker News Reader

This has been said before, I'm sure, but the problem with "The Metaverse" is that it's trying to be controlled; to be captured and caged, by a select number of corporate/quasi governmental agencies who sell themselves as "an open platform, welcome to all".

If "The Metaverse" truly is to take off, it needs to be an open standard, like HTTPS or websockets, that any virtual device can connect to and let anyone with the compute power to create their own "virtual world". And, just like the internet, it will be pretty basic at the start, and there will be disgusting sites because there will be no gatekeepers.

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This has been what every techno-optimist has said about every technology since the dawn of the commercial internet, and it's always been wrong. There will be open standards up to the layer the user actually interacts with, and that final layer will be proprietary. It's basic aggregation theory (to continue the Ben Thompson point). There's too much money to be made, and modularized systems are too complicated for most people.

Why did XMPP fail? Why is Discord more popular than Matrix? Why does Twitter still stomp Mastodon? Etc.

Hmm. The closest analogue to metaverse is probably the internet. And the way that played out is probably the most notable counterexample to your claim. It's not clear to me that it's a foregone conclusion how this will play out.

Well its true the internet's most valuable open layers are TCP/IP and worked up to the user interaction layer (HTML5), but then shifted to proprietary/locked experiences. I think the reason is the answer to this simple question: What creates a better experience for an individual user? more money invested into the platform? or agreement of a protocol? It's money. And thats a deleware c corp. Until incremental investment leads to only infinitesimal experience change, we will be operating in this mode.

I think a better example is the app stores.

HTTP + HTML was "pre commercial" or commercial-dawn. Adding JS was a pro-commerical act, and it enabled richer experiences.

We later got mobile-apps, which are often website-adjacent in function and UI. They're less common standards in how they're built (proprietary device api's, competing languages across brands, etc). We still have the ability to deep-link across apps, but its much less common than on web, and its not as easy to "extract" a deep link for sharing, its basically the developers choise.

I predict the commercial metaverse will be the same, we'll need deep-linking, and we'll get it. We need some standardized file formats (for things like 3d models, avatar clothes maybe), but mostly it'll be siloed experiences that are made for each platform. We're a little better off here than with phones because we already have game engines that allow some portability of rendering and UI logic. Is that enough to re-create the HTML-style free web? probably not.

XMPP failed only in the sense that Facebook and Google decided to stop participating in the federation. Other than that it's still alive and a good way to communicate.

What do money and modularization have to do with Twitter stomping Mastodon? IMO it would happen because Mastodon mostly looks like the same product to most people, just more complicated and it's not as easy to find and follow interesting people. My anecdata is that I joined out of curiosity and quit the same day, because it just looked like the same sarcasm and shitposters that made me drift away from Twitter.

As I understand it, that's exactly the plan. The metaverse will be an open, standards based network of VR environments, each analogous to a web site. Each could be based on different products, in the way that a web site can run on apache or nginx. The key to it will be a public set of standards for avatars, identity management, authentication and persistent assets which is potentially where a blockchain comes in as a public ledger for shared information. Imagine being in Minecraft, then walking your avatar through a portal that takes you into Roblox. Or more likely just hitting a button and being there.

This is exactly what Zuck is working on, plus of course a proprietary VR stack and suite of applications for his own implementation. there are other firms working on pieces of this too though and they are talking to each other. Here's another voice on this, independent of FB/Meta:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/11/02/herman-na...

I'm a skeptic that it will be as big as they reckon, we're physical beings living in a real world and I think that will always be prime reality. Also mobile isn't going away, I'm still going to have my phone on me all the time, not so much a VR head set, but they do seem to have thought all of this through.

My hesitation about this is that he also said that Oculus was going to operate independent inside of Facebook:

https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-why-facebook-boug...

That lasted a few years and then was tossed away. It looks like, after a fairly huge backlash and a lot of technical issues, they've finally decoupled the Facebook account requirement.

Zuck wants to know where your eyes are pointed, in what order, and for how long. Whether he is showing you "user content" (user generated for free) or "sponsored content" (customer generated for free), they will build an adaptive attention model for you. Then they will show you what is most distracting/engaging. You have no control over where your eyes look. It is a gold standard in advertising. That attention model is likely worth more than even an extremely high end VR/AR/MR/XR setup.

Guess what high resolution low latency binocular video requires, eye tracking for foveal rendering. You can do the calculations for 2x120Hzx(100deg)^2x(60pix/deg)^2 and multiple gaming GPUs can't keep up, transport HDMI/DP can't keep up, and display (MIPI/lpDP) can't keep up. Foveal rendering allows ~10x reduction in bandwidth, which makes it possible on mobile/wireless.

"Sorry, honey, for all the billy goats in high heels... it was just a phase in college"

It seems to be against the fiduciary duty of Meta the company to encourage a truly open environment where it would be easy to escape their advertising and other modes of generating revenue. As usual, the corporation says one thing while intending to essentially do the opposite.

It's not against facebook's fiduciary duty to allow you to post links to other sites in facebook, so I don't see why this would be different.

> the fiduciary duty of Meta the company

This argument for public comapanies needs to be de-bunked. This isn't a real thing, "fiduciary duty" means don't burn money and don't fraud your investors not don't do a slightly-less-shortterm business decision.

Also zuck owns a majority, so even if it was a real thing, if he approves, no other shareholder's opinion on duty matters.

"Imagine being in Minecraft, then walking your avatar through a portal that takes you into Roblox. Or more likely just hitting a button and being there."

Microsoft has actually been experimenting with this technology for a while - their implementation is quite sophisticated, and it's shipping in Windows now. You can actually try it out today: open Minecraft, then press the World Switcher hotkey combination (press the Tab key while holding Alt), press the Windows key, type "Roblox", and press Enter. If done correctly, your avatar will now be in Roblox!

It's pretty groundbreaking stuff, to be honest. Under the hood, the old universe is dynamically unloaded (possibly swapped out to disk) while the new one loads in. And, even better, if you press the World Switcher hotkeys again, you'll be right back in Minecraft - exactly where you left off.

...

Of course, I'm sure you meant that you'd somehow share information between Minecraft and Roblox- I'm sure you'd agree that arbitrary in-game items are unlikely to be transferable, but at least avatar appearance, surely? Well, hmmm, that'd make both games look worse, with awful art-style clash. Well, I guess you could store a few parameters and transfer those, and let each game interpret them to render an avatar that fits in the game's style?

... Ah, I've just made Miis again.

Okay, well, hm, if transferring avatar appearance isn't especially interesting, what about stuff that doesn't directly correlate to anything in-game? For example, the social graph, friends list, communications. Imagine being able to see what worlds your friends are in, talk to them while in your current one, and join their worlds with just a cli-

... oh, that's just Steam and Discord.

So... what's new, here?

Right, Miis and Steam chat, but in VR and shared between services. I'm the wrong person to boost this stuff, I think it will work but I don't think it's the next big thing.

What you are describing is custom built individual partial integrations, many of which aren't even VR. They're the equivalent of Gopher while the Metaverse is the equivalent of HTTP web sites.

Right now you can't seamlessly transition your digital presence across thousands of virtual worlds and service, with a variety of independent services having integration points and presences in each other's virtual worlds and interoperating with a variety of VR equipment. That's what they're building.

> The metaverse will be an open, standards based network of VR environments, each analogous to a web site.

I think an important enabler of websites is the click-to-download nature of web surfing. You download the HTML site at read-time without worrying about installs. This makes it a lot easier to jump around.

High Fidelity tried to build this and failed. I think one of the issues they had was that the whole hosting thing was pretty tricky and created barriers to having worlds up all the time, this meant there were never as many places to explore as other more closed systems like VRChat. I'm not totally sure how you solve for that, maybe they should have hosted some sites themselves?

There are plenty of places that already solve this for game server hosting. You pay, they pull up a VPS on their preferred provider with the game server installed and running, and you get a dashboard to control it.

Having that sort of layman-can-do-it feature seems pretty vital.

The problem with the metaverse is that people don't actually want to live a virtual life in a virtual world for significant periods of time. I honestly think the only people who are interested by this are grifters.

Sooo many people already live a virtual life in a virtual world by using social media, netflix, youtube, etc for hours and hours every day. Imagine a VR platform where you could have a virtual living room and hang out with your friends while doing those same activities. Imagine the headset is so light as to be hardly noticeable and the resolution is indistinguishable from reality. You don't think people would want to use that?

And my friends and I already hang out in virtual spaces to play games. I would jump at the opportunity to play board games in VR.

Facebook, TikTok, Google aren't open standards, and they "took off". They use https just like the metaverse will.

This x 1000.

Standards are not the issue. Content is. There is no metaverse; just a lot of empty rooms and walled gardens with not a lot of compelling stuff to do in them. All the content is where the people and the audience with money are, which is the walled gardens provided by Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc. Then there are various social platforms. News, games, etc. All vaguely connected and accessible via this thing called "the internet" which despite the fact that is half a century old at this point is still a surprisingly loosely defined something. Creating more standards just adds more empty rooms. It's the content problem that needs to be solved.

There's this notion that "the metaverse" is going to require special hardware, special software, etc. Of course many of us have been playing 3D games on 2D screens just fine for the last few decades. Adding goggles to the mix makes some of those games a bit more immersive of course but mostly they work fine without the goggles as well. It's not clear to me that the metaverse actually requires new hardware.

Which raises the question why we don't have it (whatever it is, which is a relevant thing that people seem to be asking). A lot of those games are multiplayer and basically involve people socializing for large amounts of time. I never really engaged with world of warcraft but I know multiple people that spend enormous amounts of time on that and other games. Is that "the metaverse"? Maybe. It's definitely an escape from reality for some. Is doing the same with some VR goggles going to be massively different? Some people probably already do that.

If you stop focusing on hardware and formfactor and just ask the question if having the same stuff that we have today (aka. the Internet), but with AR/VR goggles is actually worth having, the answer is probably going to be no. That's the problem. Either we have the meta verse already and it's a bit underwhelming or we don't really have it just yet because it hasn't actually been invented yet.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is 30 years old now and actually predates much of what we now are used to. His recent books are also quite nice and features some updated musings on what the internet used to be and could become. E.g. "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", published three years ago or so, features blockchains, ar goggles, post truth society, people using bots to spread misinformation and drive political (and other) agendas, and a few other things. It paints a pretty dystopian near future (or even present day). But no Metaverse. A nice observation in that book is that "the internet" stopped being a special thing when multiple generations had grown up with it and mostly a term used by older generations that actually still remembered a world without it. That would be us.

This is going to be an unpopular opinion here on HackerNews, but I think that potential protocol is Ethereum. It will be the tool that enables all sorts of Metaverse type things to exist (via NFTs), but I don't think that's where it stops. The metaverse and the real world will eventually be one in the same and are going to become interlinked. In game items, Car titles, house deeds, and any sort of asset that requires proof of ownership are all going to be part of a future society/metaverse.

All fungible as well as Non-Fungible tokens will represent the value that the users bring to the platforms/systems and reward us for participating.

For example, imagine playing a video game where all in game items are built on the NFT standard. A super rare item in game might end up having some sort of real value that a user can then later extract for time spent in game. They could either sell the item via a decentralized market, or leverage that item and take a loan out on it by using it as collateral. And why shouldn't they be allowed to do that? If a user pours hundreds of hours into an online game, they are generating value for that game network by being someone that other users can play with.

Why would anyone want to play a game like that though? That sounds significantly less fun than playing a game where everyone is on an even playing ground. Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?

NTFs provide an elegant way to deal with this that an SQL database can't.

1) The ability to sell/trade items you've purchased is valuable and I don't believe is universally supported. NFTs make this trivial and supported on a number of marketplaces (like OpenSea) in a standard way.

2) Game makers could build resale revenue into the smart contracts of NFTs they sell through their games.

This is just one example where it's a win-win and improvement over what exists today.

People already play a lot of games where items are bought and sold for real money (not just gacha but e.g MMOs, Diablo etc.) so you can look through gaming forums to find what drives them.

>Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?

I also don't see that many benefits to be sure it's worth it but there are some in theory. One people mention is that games can easily share items - e.g. owners of a cool sword NFT for one game can use it in another or cryptopunks can have cryptopunk skins etc. Trading would be more streamlined.I guess another potential benefit is you can also have them listed forever like Xbox achievments that can be looked at by others even if after the game is no longer active.

> Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?

I think future game development in the metaverse actually will be mainly open source and community driven. Imagine if you will a DAO that players of the universe can interact with and basically vote on new features that will be added to the game world. Rather than waiting for a centralized developer to patch and update the game they want, players will pool assets together in a sort of tax that helps fund future game development. Pair that with a Retroactive funding and other cooperative mechanisms and you will be providing incentives for player themselves to build out the game that they want to see.

It would almost be like building a town in the real world, but this is in the digital world.

>I think future game development in the metaverse actually will be mainly open source and community driven.

Nope. The cost of generating these assets are insane, and assuming that some nebulous, non-existent community will build Rome for you is a recipe for disaster. We made the same gambit ~2010, and all we got was a lousy Github acquisition by Microsoft. The reality is that our socioeconomic disparities will be exacerbated in a digital world, particularly if the majority of content is owned and operated by private interests. We can hope that a vibrant open source community comes out the other side, but you can't build a metaverse on empty promises and vaporware.

> The reality is that our socioeconomic disparities will be exacerbated in a digital world, particularly if the majority of content is owned

I definitely agree with this sentiment, but if it's not centrally owned by a government or a corporation what are our other options? We sit around and moan about how centralized entities are ruining the world and how we don't have alternate ways of coordinating? Ethereum and projects like it are the only ones actually experimenting with changing up the formula and seeing if you can combine typically contradictory ideologies.

In my opinon, if we can't find a way to decentrally coordinate we are doomed as a race and will eventually destroy ourselves via capitalistic/corporate greed or by the tyranny of a government.

> house deeds

(HN, June 5th 2028): "Ask HN: I was phished in Meta Horizons and they stole my house deed NFT. They've already moved in, my wife is furious. How can I get my house back?"

I find this to be a null argument with the potential future development of smart contract wallets that help secure hot and cold assets and require multiple users to sign off on a transaction for cold assets. You can delegate sign off authority for transactions to multiple other wallets of users that you trust in the real world. That way there are multiple tiers of asset transfer authentication.

For example I wouldn't be able to transfer my house deed NFT without first getting a relative to sign off on the transaction via their wallet as well as maybe my best friend. The beauty of a smart contract wallet is that there can be multiple if/then statements that determine when cold assets are allowed to move, all of which are up to the discretion and preference of the end user.

An alternative solution is altering how we manage assets in general including the suggested Harberger tax from the Book Radical Markets. But I feel that's a deeper dive into more theoretical territory.

What happens if your relative or friend is incapacitated in some way?

You have if/then statements that act as a clause allowing you to bypass that system for that specific person. Since all identity will be intrinsically built into the system, you can hypothetically initiate this bypass mechanism which would require multiple associated wallets to confirm that that particular wallets owner has become incapacitated and can't fu-fill their duty as an authenticator to your wallet.

I don't have any specifics on what that type of mechanism would look like (I'm just spitballing), but it's a something that definitely is interesting to think about. Maybe that mechanism randomly selects wallets that have no known correlation to your own and ask those individuals to confirm that the specified person is incapacitated. Since those people wouldn't have any stake in your transaction (allowing it to go through or preventing it from going through), they would be incentivized to be truthful.

Edit: to add to this last thought, maybe the wallet requesting the incapacitation confirmation is abstracted from the users confirming the incapacitation. The wallet essentially probes other active wallets and requests them to confirm that person is incapacitated without revealing who is requesting the information. this could help prevent collusion

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