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Comment by herbst | Hacker News Reader

So far every metaverse project I've seen has zero idea what they are going for. I don't even get Facebook's concept.

Meanwhile we have things like Second Life or even WoW that serve a perfect example for a metaverse already and for years.

At this point nobody really seems to know what a metaverse is. Especially not journalists

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I really can't figure how metaverse differs from Second Life, especially if SL added VR support. Maybe someone can enlighten me? Or maybe its just hype.

I'm thinking of it like Amazon's mechanical turk.. where you become enslaved to do work and solve tasks in a virtual world for fractions of pennies in the form of credits you can't pay your rent with. Zero point one star.

This is also reality for some in second Life and wow too. Hence why they are great examples

Neal Stephenson wrote a novel (Reamde) about pretty much that exact scenario - companies putting mechanical turkish tasks into an mmo-type interface for players to grind out digital currency.

Makes you wonder if Zuck read it and was like "this sounds like a great idea".

Nothing. No metaverse concept differs from second Life other than better graphics and less loading pains. VR also ist just a visual layer.

My guess as to what will concretely emerge is protocols/standards for things like 3D user avatars and world hopping, so that worlds hosted by anyone can be linked up, rather than only uploaded to a proprietary game with rules/technical limitations decided by the game's devs. The "Metaverse" would be to 3D environments what the Web is to HTML pages.

But the article's "Ask 50 people what the metaverse means, right now, and you’ll get 50 different answers" is very true. I have no idea if this is what Facebook or Epic Games have in mind.

> So far every metaverse project I've seen has zero idea what they are going for. I don't even get Facebook's concept.

Neither did 99% of those who jumped on this World Wide Web thing about 20-25 years ago, and yet it turned out to be a big deal after all.

Not saying this is clearly headed in the same direction, and I couldn't think of a worse steward than Facebook, but there's a chance this will also be a big deal so people (and companies) are staking claims, associating themselves with it and hyping things up. It sounds like a load of bullshit, but hey, I've been wrong before. On the other hand, I have been wrong about being wrong before, too.

> Neither did 99% of those who jumped on this World Wide Web thing about 20-25 years ago

Since when was this true? As I remember it there were many strong and obviously articulated visions of what the web could be.

I think the metaverse concept is supposed to enable you to cross between virtual worlds (like WoW and Second Life) without losing your assets or identity. That's the "verse" part: a universe.

But also that might not be what Meta means. I don't know.

This video by a game dev does a decent job explaining why transferring assets won't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKzup7XDyq8&t=3s

It's in the context of games, but virtual worlds have similar dynamics.

Sorry, I should have been more clear: I think the decentralization of shared digital assets is nonsense in theory, and it's even more absurd in practice because of the realities of software. I was just trying to present my understanding of the vision these people seem to have of it.

Thing is nobody is actually planning to do that. Right now some are trying to build their own small 'metaverses' but a connection, like a open standard is delusional at this point.

I am not delusional enough to think Zuckerberg wants an open standard. I think he wants "Login with Facebook" to apply to cross-platform immersive digital spaces.

This is similar to an idea we have been playing with:

https://www.betabytes.io/blog/introducing-the-metaverse

For instance, here is a video of a shared canvas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unVzxgjJNdA

Your idea is interesting (if not practical) because it opens up some weird questions, like: what if Second Life were a life simulator for some people, but a FPS zombie shooter for other people? Or: what if Fortnite became a dating app, like Instagram has over time?

Your PoC at least proves that you don't actually need cooperation between developers to achieve something. You just need a compatibility layer.

Here is a different model that we have been working on:

https://www.betabytes.io/blog/introducing-the-metaverse

Connecting existing worlds that people already choose to participate in.

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