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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

You need to check out "Metaverse Twitter". You're missing out on a lot of fascinating developments.

The field is in its "90's internet phase" right now. The tech is still immature, but is rapidly growing in capability and ambition.

Just like most people in the 90's had no idea how "internet" would be used, I think our ability to conceive of VR/AR/XR/metaverse is similarly myopic.

I would give it a 10-15 year timeline before it fully eats the world. But now is the time to build.

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In the 90s, the internet was very much being used. It was so exciting that my friends and I sat waiting for 20-30 seconds to see content. We exchanged messages, played each other on Comamand and Conquer, looked at edgy content on forums.

Now, my Oculus headset sits gathering dust in a cupboard. Nobody I know wants it because it's so boring using it for more than half an hour.

I agree with you, but my 9 year old uses our Oculus more than her tablet. She plays games with her friends from school mostly, but also watches movies on Netflix, etc.

I don't get it, but maybe I don't have to.

Which games does she play?

Just because your lived experience is that "VR sucks" doesn't mean it's like that for everyone.

As a total counter example, I'm in my 30s, live with my girlfriend (in her 30s) and we play with our Valve Index together several times per week. We also have friends over for house parties where we play VR together (as well as Nintendo Switch.)

Now, imagine this is still "v0" of VR, that I am playing it on a weekly basis etc with my non-gamer girlfriend, I can easily imagine this being massive in 10 years.

VR hype predates the wider adoption of the internet. It's been in this "90s VR phase" since the 90s.

We've been wanting to do this for 27 years

https://youtu.be/UzRjtvMQds4?t=75

Disclosure (1993), otherwise not much of a sci-fi movie, had a nice VR scene too: https://youtu.be/qk3PK3W_wvo?t=16

sure but the ground has shifted dramatically, in large part due to Meta because of standalone devices. You can't overlook that and pretend the tech is still 90's era.

I remember walking into a computer shop in the late 90's and saying I wanted to install Wifi in my house. They looked at me like I was an alien. One of them literally said "Why would you want that?"

It was probably less than 5 years before Wifi was ubiquitous.

I 100% believe in VR/XR/AR just not one driven by Meta.

Edit: To be clear, IMO most disruptive technologies are not driven by established mega-corporations.

Gmail?

iPhone?

Facebook Mobile?

(And earlier, Bell/IBM/Oracle)

Not really sure those were that disruptive. They are more prefecting an existing thing, which is not really what people mean by disruptive.

what is Facebook Mobile and how was it disruptive?

There was a time when Facebook existed primarily on the PC web. Everyone thought Zuckerberg was dumb for pivoting substantial company resources into mobile (initially HTML5, then pivot to native app).

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/21/when-zuckerberg-said-faceboo...

Trying to make my point or just confused. Not really sure how to read that.

The most disruptive thing about gmail was that it was obscenely expansive webmail space compared to your typical webmail provider. But webmail was already pretty damn common when gmail came out, and email had been the killer app of the internet for a decade already.

Facebook Mobile is... I'd have to think hard about what it actually is, so I'm not sure that qualifies as disruptive.

Now the iPhone was disruptive. But although you'd fairly classify Apple today as an "established mega-corporation", it's a lot harder to do so when the iPhone came out. To the extent that Apple can use its market share to wield a powerful bludgeon against those who dare cross it--which is what I associate the phrase with--that market share doesn't exist until the phenomenal success of the iPhone. It certainly couldn't do that on the basis of its OS or computers (indeed, you can argue that it still can't do that today). The iPod, or more accurately iTunes, may have given it that power against the music industry, but that's the closest to any sort of tyrannical power it might have held at the time.

The most disruptive thing about Gmail had @&$@ all to do with user features. It just needed to be "good enough".

The key feature of Gmail was scale, which allowed it to offer much better spam detection, which allowed it to capture more market share, etc.

Facebook mobile is the idea that you have something (Facebook) that was popular somewhere (PCs), that for strategic reasons (TAM / global penetration, location-targeted advertising) pivoted to a completely different medium, and invested non-trivial company resources in making that happen.

The iPod/iTunes were pretty damn big. And specifically, big in demographics that were ideal iPhone customers. Apple in 2007 was very different than Apple in 1997.

Gmail was an already popular concept whose differentiator was a company was willing to set money on fire to have two or three orders of magnitude more storage than their competitor. AFAIK, that's been their only differentiator - free storage space.

iPhone was a breakout product from a decidedly no-longer mega corp who practically died in the 1990s. I guess they had already made a resurgence with the iPod, but I think iPod leading to iPhone is similar enough that it's the same jump.

A mobile app from a company is a breakthrough product in your eyes?

Sorry, don't buy into this. The main difference to me is "the people" in the 90s were nerds. Now in the best business scenario for facebook its the opposite: the more nerdiness, the worse business outcome. They have to cater for folks looking for anything but.

> The field is in its "90's internet phase" right now. The tech is still immature, but is rapidly growing in capability and ambition.

This has been said to be the case (though for the first several waves with a different analogy, for obvious reasons) for every wave of the VR hype cycle since at least the mid-80s.

But it keeps not sticking, and I don't see any convincing reason to believe that the people pushing, or buying into, the hype understand why it keeps not sticking, much less have done anything in the most recent wave to overcome those problems.

The fact that "Metaverse Twitter" is a thing, implying that even the people most religiously devoted to the metaverse are still using Twitter rather than a 3D metaverse space tells me all I need to know. It smacks of the old skeumorphism craze: why bother "migrating" to a virtual rendition of an obsolete part of meatspace when you could just use the novel solution for interaction that already works great in meatspace, and would be unchanged in the metaverse?

I had thought that "Meta" was supposed to be a cool-sounding conceptual name, but it seems that folks are taking it literally to mean a very specific reference to a "metaverse" in an actual 3D virtual reality environment.

If that's the real intent, it seems kind of sad.

what are some of the developments you find most fascinating ?

i own two vr headsets but don't really use them for more than casual gaming with friends. haven't really seen the killer use case yet

google glass style AR still has the most "futurey" appeal to me

> The field is in its "90's internet phase" right now.

Second Life was launched in 2003

The difference is that the internet was in its "90's internet phase" for a single decade.

VR is in that phase for multiple decades already.

If this is the 90's internet phase, what was VRML?

Any Twitter account suggestions?

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