My favorite metaverse is RuneScape, but I unfortunately haven't visited in a decade or more. Steam might also be considered a metaverse. Which would imply Xbox Online and all that are too.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/meaning-of-met...
[2]: https://about.meta.com/what-is-the-metaverse/
[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/09/23/fortnites-...
The consideration of Steam and Xbox Online as a metaverse is one I'm not too fond of. It kind of messes the entire idea up as you're not really using 3D avatars to communicate with others in a way that sort of replicates reality. If Steam and Xbox get considered as metaverses, we're now suddenly calling Twitter and HN also metaverses which is a bit absurd when we have perfectly reasonable names for them.
Also while the current implementations of metaverses are quite limited and mostly game related, people are setting their sights on future goals. Mainly interoperability. Right now you can't go from Runescape to VR Chat in any seamless way, you lose your friends lists, items, accounts, expectations and standards, etc. There is some work being done here, for example Epic created EOS as a layer of interoperability between any games without the usual restrictions, however the project is still very much in early stages and acts as nothing more than a universal friends list/account for now.
Prior to the misuse, it had always meant a single unified network[0]. I maintain that if there is no one metaverse, there are none. Don't let the confused BS that comes from marketing people change the meaning of words.
At its most basic, a metaverse is just a persistent virtual space shared among multiple users. We have lots of those, and have had them for years, and unsurprisingly they're pretty much all video games.
Aside from how it was specifically used, the way the word is formulated alone suggests there should only be one. Meta loosely means above, and encompassing, on a higher plane. Verse comes from universe obviously. The unified world, above everything.
This is just another case of people confidently misusing words so prominently that the meaning changes, which "is allowed", obviously.
> a metaverse is just a persistent virtual space shared among multiple users. We have lots of those, and have had them for years
Yes, we've had them for years, and we didn't call them metaverses, and nothing was lost in that time. That's good evidence for my prior assertion that the word (with its new definition) is practically useless.
I think the word is not only useless, it's actively off-putting to most people.
I want to also dispute this point. The idea of the metaverse from Snow Crash was one that was federated and interoperable, like the internet was historically, and still remains, at a low level. The standardized nature of the metaverse's spacial analogy was key to the concept. It was the internet, but represented and navigable as physical space. I'd say it's "independent metaverses" that are antithetical to the concept of a metaverse.
This alone makes Zuckerberg's project not a metaverse IMO. The whole thing exists to enforce scarcity.
It's the one redeeming moment in Horizon Worlds that I have had. I continue to check in once a month or so but have had no other meaningful interactions since.
This is a topic which I am currently experiencing and thinking a lot about.
For those who truly cannot be in lively areas, technology can provide at least some level of connection to the rest of humanity. But I realize now that living location choice can make an enormous difference on quality of life just based on the availability of good social options. And as a techie who has lived most of my life behind a computer, I have recently discovered that real life is much, much more rewarding - if you're in an area where people are not just boxed up in their own homes every night from 6pm+.
Unless 'metaverse' is supposed to only mean 'VR platform sold by Facebook'.
That is exactly what Zuckerberg is shooting for, and why he is failing on an epic scale. He doesn't really care about VR and virtual universes so much as he cares about ownership of the 'one true metaverse'.
VRChat, I think everyone with a VR headset has at least tried it, plus plenty of people using the desktop client.
Rec Room was also a popular early "metaverse" type setup in VR, though VRChat has mostly supplanted it.
And of course, if VR is not a requirement for your metaverse, basically every mmorpg is also a metaverse.
I also went into a cinema, thought I was alone but when I turned my head to the room realized that people were staring at me lol. I screamed of surprise, they heard it and laughed, it was too real so I disconnected.
I did VR chat a bit but in general the feeling of presence was too strong when I wanted to chill so didn’t experience as many things as I could.
I’ve had friends visit my space and play chess with me there as well. But at the time our headsets would only last for like 30min and they would overheat easily. I got the Quest later and every problem had been fixed. Perfect headset. Can’t imagine what the quest 2 feels like.
Wrote about some of it here: https://p1x3l.com/story/239/social-virtual-reality-and-the-o...
I was involved in Second Life around the turn of the century. I've been ignoring the metaverse since giving up on SL a long time ago. Obviously the resolution, frame rate, and software integration in metaverse will be somewhat better than SL; aside from that, can anyone tell me the difference between modern metaverse and SL, also how does that difference translate into profitable sales?
The new hype wave for SL sounds like someone hyping up the "new" idea of a CLI, and me feeling, uh, I think I've seen this before...
VRChat is significantly more voice-heavy than SL, which is better or worse depending on your use-case.
The best thing about VRChat is that you get to wear a toaster on your face and get physical interaction with people. If you want to take a dancing course in VRChat, you can. Buy a few gadgets to track your limbs, and it'll be shown accurately.
VRChat is essentially the next step in the user-programmable social video game, and the community seems more ambitious. The platform is so open that they've ran emulated Linux on user avatars.
Most of the modern metaverses are worse than Second Life. Their big advantages were VR, browser and mobile clients. Second Life is getting most of those features now.
Their dev team finally got out of "can't do" mode. (That's client side. Server side, they still have trouble fixing long-standing bugs.) They hired some good game devs, and graphics started to get better.
* Frame rates have increased substantially. There's more multi-threading in the clients now, and the servers have been upgraded to better AWS instances. Still OpenGL, but work is going on to use Vulkan.
* Graphics realism has increased, again. Physically based rendering with high dynamic range lighting is in test. Not subsurface scattering, though, so skin still looks plastic under some lighting. Graphics realism is becoming comparable to GTA-V, but not Red Dead Redemption.
* There's a mobile viewer in test. Uses Unity as the graphics engine.[1]
* Full body tracking is in test, and being demoed. It's striking to see how someone rigged for full tracking dominates a meeting.
Second Life may end up being the metaverse, after everybody else fails. It's one of the very few systems with a large, continuous world, one about the size of greater Los Angeles. Facebook failed to deliver much, the NFT guys delivered even less, and the people who announced and didn't ship probably never will.
Outside of my regular group of friends, I've met people who were regulars within AltSpaceVR which has now closed. They've now shifted to Horizon and avoid VRChat which is full of kids or people pretending to be a mouse in a race car.
Horizon has given me the ability to make friends from other parts of the country and the world. People that are actual friends, not just people I talk to online.
I'm a bit too old to feel comfortable doing that in person anymore. So it was nice to have that feeling again, as fleeting as it was.
Too bad it has to be in an environment that looks like it came out of the PS1 era with the blandest art direction possible.
Thankfully it's not the dystopian warning of being a "browser" with unlockable ads, tracking (including new stuff like always on cameras, eye tracking, and everything you fit in a fitness watch/ tracker), and all wrapped up by like a proprietary walled garden.
This is one of the many metaverses. Minecraft is a pretty readily available one too. Neither required VR gear, either.
The Metaverse I am convinced is pretty dumb unless we can make it significantly more immersive - as in adding sense of touch or other senses.
Everything spontaneous was empty.
So more like event based like cinema than a hang out space