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Comment by SLHamlet | Hacker News Reader

Love the Neal Stephenson quote in here:

“The assumption that the Metaverse is primarily an AR/VR thing isn’t crazy. In my book [Snow Crash, published in 1992] it’s all VR. And I worked for an AR company [Magic Leap]--one of several that are putting billions of dollars into building headsets. But I didn’t see video games coming when I wrote Snow Crash…

Thanks to games, billions of people are now comfortable navigating 3D environments on flat 2D screens. The UIs that they’ve mastered [keyboard and mouse for navigation and camera] are not what most science fiction writers would have predicted. But that’s how path dependency in tech works. We fluently navigate and interact with extremely rich 3D environments using keyboards that were designed for mechanical typewriters. It’s steampunk made real.

A Metaverse that left behind those users and the devs who build those experiences would be getting off on the wrong foot… My expectation is that a lot of Metaverse content will be built for screens (where the market is) while keeping options open for the future growth of affordable headsets.”

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Where I see VR go the most wrong is, particularly when business people get involved, is the mistake of trying to recreate reality. I have at least a Library of Congress on my computer, which I can access without having to deal with Euclidean Geometry. I don't schlep through miles of shelves looking for something. I just look for it. That's profoundly important to the reasons why we went to digital from analog.

If you want to make VR "work", you have to also have non-Euclidean Geometry. Things need to be smaller on the outside. You need to be able to affect the "world" through intention, not action. In a word, you need magic. Which dovetails pretty well with video games.

Some of this is people wanting to recreate the artificial scarcity of the real world so that they can profit from it, see the recent land rush in some nascent proto-Metaverse platforms, where people are betting that their purchase will have some medium-term value and an appreciating long-term value.

But this is also similar to the idea that some people want their MMORPGs to have a single, non-sharded instance, where everybody can play at once, which sounds hellish to me TBH. Millions of people all competing for the same items, quests, etc. If you were offered a VR version of Disneyland, which would you prefer? One where there were very few people and you could walk more or less directly onto the rides? Or one where the streets are packed and the queue times are multiple-hours long?

The rush to reproduce these less desirable experiences in VR is utterly depressing, and for that matter the descriptions of The Street in Snow Crash didn't sound that appealing to me either.

There's a happy medium where the scarcity is logarithmic rather than volume versus area (what is that, n^2/3?).

You could have a row of clubs on The Street that are proportional to each other but not to their interiors. All clubs are 5 meters wide. Large clubs are 7 meters wide, and massive clubs go to 10. You can look at the outside and predict what's going on beneath without walking by a SuperWalmart.

And then I believe it's in Neverwhere (?) where parts of the spaces of the Underground are borrowed from other places. So the average density is always the same but pockets can still be made.

Continuing this thought instead of editing:

If you're worried about how to handle physics, a really simple solution here would be to slice your VR onto multiple planes of existence, from outside to inside. You have a virtual street full of fifty businesses, you can lay out the insides of the business into a Euclidean space, and then doorways are wormholes from a less dense plane to a more dense one, so you can walk around the block faster than you can walk through one of the buildings. Recurse that for as many layers of tesseract as you want to implement (why not rooms in the building that are bigger than the inside of the building too?). But once you've broken 1:1 people are going to want to change their minds, so you might be better off using some sort of graph to represent space instead of a 3d matrix.

The trying to create reality is simply recreating familiar paradigms to help new users hat a foothold. You can't jump right into the most modern user interface. Even voor advanced users.

This is why a 'modern' desktop still mimicks a messy desk from a 70s office worker. The very easiest computers skipped that step due to technical limitations but the mainstream users had a hard time grokking them. Only with the mobile phone have we started to really leave that behind. VR will be similarly rooted in the past until people find their footing and embrace new ways to interact.

And why meeting rooms in VR have to have chairs, tables and people have to draw on virtual whiteboards instead of just in the space in front of them in 3D. The tech is getting there, but our minds take even more time.

In the 70s, it made sense to use metaphors based on experience with the physical world, because we had no alternative. Here in the 2020s, you can skip the clunky skeuomorphism and just assume experience with the digital world. The problem is that VR has always been sold in terms of being a replacement for the physical world, and as it turns out, that's just plain worse than the digital equivalents that we already have. I don't need a VR library full of fake volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanica, because I already have Wikipedia, whose UX is far more convenient, and would only be made worse by imposing a physical metaphor. Unfortunately, anyone who's sunk a few tens of billions of dollars into VR will naturally be resistant to the idea that the spaces that they've so painstakingly made are worse than what they were intended to replace. Why would I want to strap this phone to my face? Nobody has yet found an answer to that question, aside from a handful of first-person video games.

>UX is far more convenient, and would only be made worse by imposing a physical metaphor

Convenience is contextual and no doubt the way 2D WIMP screens have been built work and will keep working, but nesting that in a 3D experience makes new room for new feature interactions to complement the same datasets with more interface layers doing things you just can't do with real world physics.

> Why would I want to strap this phone to my face?

This is VR’s biggest problem. Normal people aren’t willing to put on a bucket on their face, even if it represents the future. Instead most people would rather form all kinds of weird and untrue speculation. Case in point: “I don't need a VR library full of fake volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanica, because I already have Wikipedia”

No one has actually built a library in VR because the screen resolution is too poor for reading large amounts of text. All you’ve proved is that you still haven’t tried modern VR.

That's where Apple comes in. Apple convinced people that wearing iDweebs in their ears in public was OK.

I think that illustrates the scale of the problem: wearing headphones in public was already normalized at least as far back as the Walkman craze, AirPods are arguably the most successful AR experience on the market with their unobtrusive experience, and they’re towards the higher end of the price range but not outliers for a premium product.

It is not unreasonable to fear that personal AR isn’t going to get popular until goggles are comparable in size to regular glasses.

> It is not unreasonable to fear that personal AR isn’t going to get popular until goggles are comparable in size to regular glasses.

They're not all that far: https://www.engadget.com/2019-01-03-vuzix-blade-hands-on.htm...

I agree, but I feel that even Apple isn’t very confident in this space. It’s rumored that they’re selling their upcoming $3000 headset at cost. I feel that the entire industry is waiting for Apple to magically make XR socially acceptable. If they can pull this off without Jobs and Ive, it will be a miracle.

Sorry for the many autocorrect errors, it was late.. It's too late to edit it now. The correct post should have read like this:

The trying to create reality is simply recreating familiar paradigms to help new users get a foothold. You can't jump right into the most modern user interface. Even for advanced users.

This is why a 'modern' desktop still mimicks a messy desk from a 70s office worker. The very earliest computers skipped that step due to technical limitations but the mainstream users had a hard time grokking them. Only with the mobile phone have we started to really leave that behind. VR will be similarly rooted in the past until people find their footing and embrace new ways to interact.

Does anyone want that? A meeting room?

They are familiar sure, but who wants to put on a headset for a meeting….

I feel like being familiar here is also being uninteresting.

Conversely, who wants to look at flat boxes of people on a flat screen? Imo the best use case for VR isn’t in replacing reality. Its best use case is to mimic reality for people who are remote. VR meetings are way better than zoom or teams video meetings. I can also tell you that VR ping pong or VR mini golf are both way better than just having a FaceTime call. People who refuse to even try modern VR aren’t going to come to this realization.

VR ping pong (Elevens) and VR mini golf (Walkabout Mini Golf) are awesome.

Feels pretty damn close to the real thing, close enough I think skills gained there would translate to the physical game. And you don't need good weather, have to travel, or have to wait for other players to play the mini golf.

Also being a video game allows Walkabout to do some courses that just wouldn't be feasible (not physically possible or too expensive to build) in real life, like the Myst puzzle one, or that one hole that's based on M.C. Escher's Relativity that alters gravity depending on where your ball is at.

Still need to play them multiplayer, but I want to. I watched a game played in VR which was basically an interview with the creator of Myst and that was a lot of fun[1]. I think this is what you're referring to, meetings being more fun over a game of mini-golf than just a Zoom call.

[1]: https://youtu.be/LhScgbtUos4

There was an article a while back where there was some debate about how the metaverse had failed to provide a stadium like quality experience with thousands of attendees, rather they created a sort of conference room experience.

I couldn’t help but think that I wanted neither and the folks pushing this idea were people who wanted conference rooms or stadiums of people watching them, but I’m not sure anyone else would be interested.

Jenova Chen, creator of Journey, got 4000 avatars per server into a show over the holidays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrOZgyBPF90&list=PPSV

I remember my mind being blown in the videogame Descent on (I think) the Playstation - you fly your ship into a little cube and enter a vast space. It's how I imagine people would have felt playing Pac Man with its screen wrapping - a thing that's only possible (in realtime at least) in videogames. You're watching a world being created with new physics.

If a rich, interconnected 3D world at the scale of the WWW added significant value, then interest and uptake of Croquet would have taken off 10+ years ago. Croquet is technology-wise as close to the science fiction ideal of the Metaverse as anything that has existed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_OS

With Croquet, you could literally jump from, say, your favorite 3D game into a virtual business meeting, controlling your same avatar, and without either 3D space being hosted by the same entity--directly or indirectly. It's the embodiment of some of the most fanciful visions of a Metaverse, and it has existed for quite some time.

But Croquet hasn't taken off, despite intensive efforts, which tells me that not only will our 2D interfaces continue to stick around, the 2D digital world is likely to remain overwhelmingly predominate for quite some time still. At least outside isolated islands.

And in any event, I don't see how that could change unless and until a fundamentally open, interconnected, and extensible platform like Croquet sees adoption. A world of closed gardens could never be as immersive and expansive. As large as Facebook has become (and as AOL before it), it simply doesn't and couldn't have the same underlying impact as the WWW collectively.

[1] NB: the Wikipedia article for Croquet_project now forwards to Croquet_OS, a commercial project. I hope Croquet OS finds success. I can understand the thinking that on the modern internet new technologies necessarily require commercial backing. But ultimately I think that's a reflection of some fundamental dilemmas on the modern internet regarding the uptake of new technologies; a dilemma that likely has no real solution unless or until something else comes out of left field to toss the ecosystem into disarray. That something is unlikely to be the Metaverse because otherwise Croquet or something substantially similar would have already taken off long ago.

It's amazing that I've never even heard of this. As we have seen time after time, the best technology doesn't always win, marketing is a huge factor. Does the organization behind this do any marketing?

I like to say that with Croquet, Alan Kay built the Metaverse from Snow Crash... but that was just a step toward his actual goal, which is to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age (Dynabook).

An important consideration for me is that a 43" TV with a 4K HD screen is beautiful to look at, while Oculus screens are not. For 300 dollars I can get a beautiful portal into 3D worlds in the form of a monitor in front of my face and I don't have to wear anything or change anything about the way I see or hear. And also, I don't like the way things move in the VR I've seen. It lags and jumps bit and does not scroll smoothly as I look around.

On the contrary, the immersion still amazes me every day. The quest 2 screens are not beautiful, the blacks are a milky grey and the colors aren't particularly popping.

But wow who cares, when I'm playing a third-party VR mod of half-life 2 from 2004, it seems so real. Despite the low-poly meshes and blocky textures that come with games of that era. Blown away by the feeling of actually being there. I get vertigo balancing on the de support beams of the huge bridge I have to climb, disgusted at the howling zombies attacking me while I hurriedly try to stuff shells into my shotgun.

Those too-big and underwhelming pixels? I really don't have time to notice them.

I bought this headset for only $50 more than the $300 you mention (yes now it costs more). For desktop work yes I prefer my $220 4K monitor hands down. But wow this is something else and it's only getting better.

No offense, but you sound like ChatGPT

Edit: Sorry. You deserve a serious answer. I'm old and not someone who wants to walk around and spin with a headset on. I'm someone who wants to use something similar to a flight simulator or Google Earth, so I put a premium on the niceness of the view.

ChatGPT doesn't use my kind of language, I've never seen it do exclamations like 'wow'. I'm just very enthusiastic about VR from using it a lot, and it has allowed me to relive some classics in an amazing way. As well as some amazing new content of course, but there isn't that much of it yet.

But the things you mention benefit the most from VR. Graphical resolution is indeed a bit lower with Flight Simulation but the feeling of flying is much more accurate. I've flown real Cessna 172s and I've never really felt like flying in a PC simulator until VR came around.

Google Earth is also quite amazing in VR. Of course for both experiences you need a serious PC, neither flight simulator nor google earth will run on the headset natively.

The resolution and colour depth is really one of the least important things in my opinion (and they will be solved in due course, the first TFT screens were also quite horrible and still we played sims on them).

I wasn't trying to insult you and I meant no offense. I was amused because I couldn't tell if your writing was computer generated. Your paragraph contained a level of exuberance and enthusiasm for VR that I share but don't normally see on HN. I like ChatGPT and I like your writing style when it comes to VR.

I would be happier with VR that was all done on a high powered desktop computer where the headset is just two high quality screens tethered to the desktop computer. I see the problem as trying to put all the processing power in the glasses so people can move around. I've done Sandbox VR here in the Bay Area where I can walk and spin and it's amazing. I'm comparing Oculus to that and feel Oculus comes up short because it's a home consumer setup that has to be affordable.

I'm going to shop for the type of VR I want. I realized in this thread that that's what I need.

https://sandboxvr.com/sanfrancisco/

Not really sure how you can preface that with "no offense." If you want to be rude just dive in, no need to hide.

In case you grew up in Micronesia with no exposure to American culture, see the link I have shared. I was trying to be humorous, not rude. I will never say that again because I now know people take it as an insult. It's all so new, you know?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=no%20offense

Google Earth is rather awesome in VR, if you haven't tried it.

I agree in principle that current VR screens suffer from many distortion and "pixelated" effects, which makes text especially hard to read (though this is improved with the newer lenses, the fresnel lenses are much worse for this), but:

> It lags and jumps bit and does not scroll smoothly as I look around.

That hasn't been my experience at all, not since the DK2 I originally had, maybe on the google cardboard, I never tried that. A headset with dedicated tracking works amazingly well in terms of your rotational/positional view of the world.

Maybe in 5 years it’ll be great but I found the Quest 2 to be very blurry and “streaky” compared to a decent monitor. It also still gives me nausea if I play a game for a few hours which I like to do

When is the last time you tried an extended session? It is now possible to do 120Hz on the quest for some games and on PCVR. Earlier versions were limited to 72Hz. There have been other improvements too. Maybe update your headset, tweak some settings, find games that will work at 120Hz and give it another go.

Also, the Quest 2 is kind of old now, newer headsets are vastly superior with regards to blur and streaks.

I find the Quest Pro lenses and screen to be a significant improvement over Quest 2 in terms of clarity. You’ll find many other people saying the same thing. So your 5-year timeline seems off to me.

The quest pro costs as much as a gaming pc. So I guess I’ll have to wait. Also disappointing they didn’t increase the resolution. I’m not looking to pay 5x for marginally better lenses

Yes the value to cost isn’t there if you’re not very invested in XR. But I wouldn’t discount the local display dimming, eye tracking (for foveated rendering), faster GPU / CPU clocking, and 10% PPD increase which all contribute to better visual quality.

Agreed, fantastic quote.

My personal belief is that the browser as we know it today will evolve to be more based around 3D, leveraging emerging technologies such as WebAssembly and WebGPU. As headsets become more widely adopted, WebXR is what will extend the web into VR.

There won't be a metaverse based around an app store model. It has to be open to everyone, built with standards and protocols in mind from the very start, and most importantly: no 30% fees from walled gardens.

> My personal belief is that the browser as we know it today will evolve to be more based around 3D,

I interacted with a lot of 3D content, games, apps when I was a child / teen but nowadays I largely prefer 2D for all my interactions with computers, be it games, softwares, etc. 3D just feels gimmicky and less productive than WIMP, especially on all the VR headsets I tried. I'm curious if other people feel different.

There's an intentionality or exclusive focus aspect to 3D content. When you're working in a 2D desktop alt tabbing or rapidly task switching between monitors feels very low friction and natural. When you load up a game, a CAD app, etc, there's much more of a "ok I'm just going to do only this now" aspect that I think is interesting. For this reason I'm highly skeptical 3D will replace 2D.

> "ok I'm just going to do only this now"

for most of the games and other VR entertainment stuff, this is precisely what the producers what of you. they throw around terms like immersive. they want you in the world they created and believe that it make the experience that much more when you forget about where you really are and believer yourself to be in the virtual place. there's a definite time and place for that idea, but have never once felt that the content i was "immersed" in really had me at a level of suspension of disbelief to the level the producers had hoped.

at that point, what is the point of it. i am not one bit intrigued by theZuck's vision. i do not want to hang out in a virtual conference room around a virtual conference table looking at cartoon versions of people because it's cute. you can cute the fuck out of it until the knob goes to eleven, but it doesn't make this boring as meeting any more enjoyable.

Can you explain how you interacted with 3D content when you were a child/teen?

I think you might be conflating 3D graphics engines that render a 2D image on a 2D monitor with modern stereoscopic 3D headsets.

I would definitely take the time to shop on an AR/VR based e-commerce site that had all products as visible demos. For certain categories of products anyways.

Amazon already has at for a lot of furniture

And before we had moving 2D graphics in the form of movies and video games we had text descriptions of action with the occasional illustration or even (much later) photograph, which allowed people to build not only deep stories but rich worlds that have caused entire generations of people to enter what amounts to a shared hallucination (maybe more reminiscent of Vurt than Snow Crash). If only there were some way to use networked computers to allow users to navigate a world written by such authors... imagine how egalitarian that could be, without the large production budgets of 3D modelling and graphic artists enforcing large barriers to entry for aspiring contributors! Alas, no such future could ever be possible for The Metaverse--and it is almost ridiculous to imagine such--as the birth of The Internet in the same year as Nintendo invented the modern computer has guaranteed that no one, anywhere, has any interest in reading anything.

> no one, anywhere, has any interest in reading anything

~825 million printed books were sold in 2021. Reading is such a common pastime that people just don't talk about it. It's also not a particularly social activity unlike most video games so most people won't bring it up unless they read a very popular book that you might be aware of.

I think you might be taking my blatant sarcasm seriously ;P.

You'd be surprised how many people say the same thing seriously ala https://xkcd.com/1227/

And yet here we are on this site, typing and reading text, while Amazon has sold almost half a billion books on kindle alone.

https://wordsrated.com/amazon-kindle-e-book-and-kindle-unlim...

I know, right? And yet, clearly the World Wide Web isn't already The Metaverse because NO ONE--certainly not me--would ever spend their entire day reading ;P.

So that means that Amazon has sold a kindle book to at absolute best, less than 1 in 16 people.

Many fewer than that, since people will buy more than one book. Number of kindles sold is between 20 million and 90 million (same source). Meanwhile the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S have each sold about 10 million: https://gamerant.com/ps5-xbox-series-xs-estimated-sales-clos...

But those are fairly new, so take the last generation. The PS4 sold about 100 million, and Xbox One about 50 million: https://www.theshortcut.com/p/how-many-xbox-one-consoles-mic...

So the leading game consoles outpace the leading ebook reader, but not by all that much. There are other gaming platforms, but there are also other reading platforms. Some people read kindle books on their phones, kindle books are 72% of the ebook market, and ebooks overall are a third of the book market.

1 in 16 seems like really high market penetration for a device that (practically) requires special-purpose hardware and whose offerings are primarily in English. Meta gives away not just it's platforms, but in many countries the data that those platforms need. In some cases it's the only zero-rated app. And they have gotten maybe 6 in 16 people to make accounts.

I wonder what percentage of kindle book purchases are by people with no kindle. iPhone reader works well enough.

Not necessarily disagreeing but I wonder how that applies to the yet to be born audiences. Maybe they will be used to it. The killer app (maybe remote travel, or vocational training) delivered via VR will make them used to it. To them 2D would be like using emacs having only used an IDE

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