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Comment by dbingham | Hacker News Reader

Given that Second Life is still around - just stagnated - what makes so many people think that now is the time the Metaverse is going to work? If this was going to work... wouldn't it be working right now in the existing version of it that is Second Life? What's different?

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Third Room isn’t remotely trying to be decentralised Second Life. It’s trying to be a blank canvas for building interoperable spatial apps - that could be something like Figma, or 3D Figma, or visualising 3D data, or anything. The Tech Preview just does the typical Second Life / Hubs style social hangout experience, but the intention is to be a generic building standards-based building block for secure decentralised spatial collaboration.

I guess Roblox is the most successful metaverse app right now. The game aspect is important, what else are you going to do in the metaverse otherwise?

- now can be a better timing (if true - it won't matter that something similar existed before when the timing was worse)

- SL look and feel differs vastly different from what is expected from metaverse. Fortnite or Roblox looks more close to it.

Consider the metaverse is already here; from message boards, Minecraft servers, COD matches, and chat networks. It's just not as seamless as stepping through doorways to jump servers / software. Or at least not yet.

Given some of the constraints of the immersive web currently, Matrix can provide some critical pieces of that user experience. Third Room worlds are Matrix rooms hosted across homeservers. You log in with your preferred client. You can now traverse worlds seamlessly without losing your virtual identity. This can even extend to WebXR where currently you can't traverse across origins while in the headset.

Seamless interoperability is what the "metaverse" is all about and we want to work with people who want that as well.

As a former Minecraft server operator, what differentiates a Minecraft server from any other kind of game server in terms of "the metaverse TM"? Is Nextcloud or Plex "the metaverse TM" too just because someone can spin up their own Docker container? Just sounds like "the internet" we've all known for decades.

I feel that second life needed some sort of property tax system to prevent endless stale sprawl and promote a lively city center.

VR Chat is massively popular right now. The idea works, just requires a top quality implementation.

SUN Microsystems was doing company meetings in Second Life in the 2000s... Old is new again.

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