Now that the NFT and Meta clown cars have crashed, metaverse work is quietly plugging along. It's a niche, but it may be a Roblox/Fortnite sized niche.
Metaverse is merely premature. AI is the bigger and more general tech wave, but Metaverse will start to crest in 5 years or so.
Think about all the immersive, interactive fiction powered by LLMs and AI. That's just scratching the service of what's possible.
Games, movies, narrative, and social will converge.
The closest you could say was games have a narrative woven in. Movies are passive and everything is intentional. Games are fundamentally about interactivity. They are practically opposite forms of entertainment.
I don't even know what you mean by 'social will converge'.
Here's my prediction:
- Stories, narratives, characters, and game loops will become generative. Their capacity to generate new unseen and unwritten content will be heralded as revolutionary.
- The quality of games and GenAI will soon reach that of Hollywood films and take on a cinematic feeling.
- Players or viewers will be able to actively participate in the unfolding world (games) or sit back and watch them unfold (movies). This will be a spectrum (and not just on a single dimension).
- Narrative instances will be passive, single player, multi player, and massively multiplayer. You can sit back and watch a world unfold with your friends, or each participate as your own individual character that is an immersive and key part of the world. Cooperatively or in competition with one another, and at every point within that that spectrum. This will be similar to D&D, but at a scale never before seen. Wholly engrossing.
- Just like we've seen inklings of with YouTube and TikTok, you'll be able to remix the narratives you construct and participate in. You'll be able to world build, tweak, and share. You'll be able to take off the shelf situations and narratives and customize them as much as you want. Your previous "play through" or "stage time" can be recorded as its own personality that can become an AI agent in someone else's journey.
- This world building scene will be full of creators, musicians, directors, actors, and lots of people that just want to experience and hang out.
- Just as before, I'll throw porn into this prediction too. GenAI porn will similarly replace the manually filmed artifact, and moreover, it'll be interactive. Some people will even fall in love with their artificial companion(s). As this becomes more normalized, these adult AI companions may even find themselves injected into otherwise family friendly narratives. What you do with them at home is your own business.
Before you say it's implausible, I know for a fact that 3d-guided diffusion works and that it'll soon spook the entire Hollywood industry to the core.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32711614
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35523656
[3] effectively I have. I quit my $400k/yr job to go full time on this and poured over half a million of my personal funds (so far) into building my company
No, I told you it wouldn't devastate an industry built on hosting videos. It hasn't and those video hosting sites already host videos that are animated, because they don't care how their stuff is generated if people want to watch it.
Go back and re-read what you linked with a little more focus this time.
poured over half a million of my personal funds (so far) into building my company
And how many people are paying for your 'generative game loops' (whatever that means)?
I'm morbidly curious: how do you plan to recoup your costs? I assume porn is so trivial to get for free that it must be a relatively low profit industry...
I always think of the oft-quoted meme about porn being the canary in the coal mine for the adoption of new tech: film, VHS, usenet, web, P2P, Twitter/Tumblr/Reddit, streaming, VR, AI... I think the trend has held pretty well historically.
NovelAI, Civit, etc. are making a lot of money on it, and they're leading indicators of more expansive "SFW" use cases that will follow.
I’ve considered quitting my job and pursuing it full-time. Being an early adopter here seems like a sure fire way to succeed. I’m curious what your journey has been. I’m launching my product next week. Have a single customer signed on with a plan to scale it out, should the results come back positive.
every 10 year old in N. America is on those and/or minecraft. no way the metaverse has that kind of reach anytime soon.
Epic released Unreal Engine for Fortnite about one month ago.
Meta have some interesting stuff in their pipe.
I think that especially Roblox will shift how the younger generation view games, with more emphasis on social. It is their MMOs.
In the hardware space openBCI has partnered with Valve and they’re working on an BCI integrated immersive headset called Galea. It runs about $25k+ atm. They’ve begun shipping to researchers and developers and I’ve heard they’re aiming for a consumer line but don’t know of a planned release date.