Ask HN: What will developers work on in the metaverse world?
With Facebook and Microsoft making big pushes, what can developers work on? Ethereum/Bitcoin are very dev friendly but the metaverse stuff seems orientated towards game development.
(1) People write application software with frameworks like React, JavaFX, etc. They could be writing application software with the kind of frameworks that are used to write games. I think that's going to happen more and I think ideas from game frameworks will migrate into application software frameworks.
(2) Many video games have interfaces inside them similar to application software. Consider a game like Pokémon Sun and Moon or Hyperdimension Neptunia where you have a large party of characters with loadouts to configure, or where you navigate a database of information about the world.
Ideas from those interfaces can be stolen for things like photo viewers (I am doing it) and product configurations. Personally I never felt like I "found my voice" in mobile UIs until I got this idea. I am at about 10% of where I want to be now but I know where I am going.
(3) I think there is a gap between the technology used to create humanoid video game characters and uses outside of videogames. The best emotional scenes with 3-d rendered video game characters are better than the worst emotional scenes in Hollywood Movies. There is this
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alter+ego
but also we can do so much better than Clippy and the Bonzi Buddy today, a self-checkout at the supermarket could have a character on it that can look you in the eye. People in the labs in the building next door to me at my uni are working on social robots, but my N+2 side project is to do a sketch comedy performance with a video game character reflected in a mirror. It has sensor and control issues like a "social robot" but no moving parts.
You tend to see rapid technological progress after a long period of slow technological progress. That is, the technology is ready but was held back by something. For instance futurists circa 1970 expected the World Wide Web to come around 1980 and in some sense it did in the form of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceefax
but until the economics got so favorable that people didn't have to think about the economics there was no single entity that that could afford to develop a service that was really affordable and compelling.
I think that's going to happen with video game characters.