Oculus CEO envisions billion-person MMO | Hacker News Reader

Oculus CEO envisions billion-person MMO

joystiq.com

21 pointsevo_936 comments

Will he leave his last will and testament in the form of an Easter egg hidden inside the game, protected by a series of 80s pop culture-fueled puzzles?

If so, I'm in.

I've already started memorizing War Games for this very moment.

The Metaverse should be built like the web: distributed, and every server / space / community can be built with different physics / rules / aesthetics. Iribe's lowest-common-denominator vision is uninspiring. A centralized, controlled, monetized space sounds like the mall.

There was an open source 2D avatar chat system called OpenVerse, IIRC (Metaverse was trademarked) that behaved this way; each room was a different server.

I agree that a distributed Web-like Metaverse is more likely to be interesting and more likely to succeed. The problem of a concept like the Metaverse is that certain elements of it work great as part of a science fiction story -- like the presence of "physical constraints" where property exists in some absolute place on a virtual grid, and users have to actually move their avatars along that terrain to get from point A to point B. This is fun for a story where the hero must quickly get to some point but time is of the essence, but as a real-world concept it's absurd. I think part of what makes the Web so successful is the concept of the hyperlink and the URL, being able to jump so quickly from place to place.

I consider imposed physical limitations on a meta-VR space to be like DRM. It's an attempt to slap existing limitations of reality (scarcity, in the case of DRM) onto a medium that no longer needs it. Why should I have to take a virtual train to get from one VR space to another? Why should there be "lots" where people have to pay to get the best "locations" to put their VR space? It reminds me of the old GeoCities sites and the short-lived concept of neighborhoods, which failed to realize that people don't browse the Web by metaphorically walking linearly along a sidewalk, staring at each storefront in turn. We jump, we "teleport," and that's the strength of the Web.

You might be interested in the Janus VR (formerly known as Firebox) project: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~mccrae/projects/firebox/ It's an attempt at a sort of VRML-like markup for defining webpages with VR content. I've played around with it a bit in my Rift, and it's neat to have the discoverability of virtual browsing but without the constraints of physicality: links are just doors you can open into virtual spaces, and you can always pop open an address bar to go somewhere new.

In short: VR lets us transcend limitations in where we can go, but the Web let us transcend limitations in how we interact with the world. Individual VR experiences can be whatever people want, but a meta-VR system must take into account the simple fact that humans can now "teleport."

Here's a nice video that shows what Janus VR is like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jva-855nLvM

OpenSim is like Second Life, but different servers can communicate and you can just "walk" from one server to another. http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

I don't think MMO is really the right characterization. It's probably the closest thing were used to today. It makes less sense as a "segregated game oriented world", and much more sense as a shared virtual space, as in the cyberspace with avatars from science fiction. We have some of those today of course, notably second life, but an always-on persistent virtual world shared with everyone is a very different vision. It may have game-like elements, but to me that's not the interesting part.

"I want a billion people to live partially in a virtual world in the future" seems plausible.

Please call it the Matrix, please call it the Matrix, please call it the Matrix...

Neal Stephenson envisioned it first - and yes, sweet lord I'm excited!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse

If you've seen Gamer, this is eerily similar, but it'll look more like Second Life...and be awful.

The Oasis

I can also envision a 7-billion person MMO that doesn't need special glasses. It's called life.

But you only get one apparent life. Bummer.

And you have to pay for in-game items with in-game currency. Not to mention the incredible long grind at the start.

And no fast-travel.

Life is permadeath, though.

Reminds me a lot of the "holoband"[1] from Caprica.

[1]http://caprica.wikia.com/wiki/Holoband

Iribe also said that Valve is working with them on the (MMO) software, but they have nothing to announce yet.

Valve already has many of the pieces. For example, independent 3D artists can make virtual goods for games like Dota 2. If the goods get approved, players can buy those goods (with real money), and the 3D artist gets a cut of the revenue. See Steam Community Market:

http://steamcommunity.com/market/

I'm enthusiastic with Oculus technology as a games platform (I've tried it), but skeptical about "the metaverse."

The games industry has had a mixed reaction to the Oculus purchase, but people are still cautiously optimistic due to Carmack and other gaming heavyweights being at the company. Looking toward the upcoming E3 and beyond to next years GDC it'll be interesting to see where Oculus' focus is.

This is just a rehashed version of a slightly longer but more in-depth article originally written at The Verge:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/5/5684236/oculus-wants-to-bui...

Any chance the powers-that-be could weigh-in and update the URL to properly direct traffic?

This was the discouraging part about the Facebook acquisition to me: the possibility of cooperation with the people who already have decades of experience creating virtual worlds has gone out the window. It's like the possibility of seeing EA's or Blizzard's games on Steam - that would make my life so much easier as a PC gamer, but will never happen 'cause: money!

I really like the idea of a virtual world that runs in parallel to our own: millions of camera-containing devices out there, all hooked up to the internet, continually building and refining a virtual facsimile of the real world. Then you could hold up your phone on a street and see, augmented reality style, the virtual people who inhabit it in parallel to you. Kind of a cool concept.

There was a similar idea in the book, Daemon. Seems more feasible now with CV/ubiquitous sensors.

http://www.amazon.com/Daemon-Daniel-Suarez/dp/0451228731

Ready, player one?

this book is amazing. everyone who is interested in where this could go should read it.

edit: http://readyplayerone.com/

The core idea of the book (the OASIS) is great, and a lot of fun to think about. The actual story gets absurdly bogged down in 80s pop culture references. Even for people who enjoy all that stuff, it seems like a bit much.

I'd still recommend the book too, as a fun read. I just hope there's a sequel that's completely detached from the 80s.

At the risk of sounding overly negative, I think RPO gets a lot of praise that it really doesn't deserve. The concept of the OASIS is neat, and the segments dealing with the nature of VR in society (education in VR, logging in to escape the reality of life in the "stacks", the lengths to which the main character goes when dedicating his life and daily habits entirely toward the Quest). But it's all wrapped up in a bunch of shallow 80's references that made me feel like the author was insecure about the strength of his own ideas and needed a bunch of Family-Guy-esque name-dropping so the nerd demographic reading it could say "Oh, I know that reference!" When I read a book taking place in the future, I sort of hope that there's something there about the future to explore rather than getting the sense that all culture and media just stopped in the end of the 20th century and the only thing that happened since was VR getting developed. Strikes me as reader/author wish fulfillment. The protagonists weren't likable, the villainous evil corporate anti-open-source drones were stunningly one-dimensional, the two Japanese brother characters felt like walking MY SAMURAI HONOR stereotypes, and the romance with Art3mis felt like getting the princess at the end of a game as a prize (which would be a neat parallel with the video game references were it not played straight). If I was younger when reading it I would have been more forgiving, but it all felt like a "kids rule, grown-ups drool" sort of plot.

It seems like, despite the protagonist's fears about IOI turning the OASIS into a soul-less amusement park, that's kind of what the OASIS already was in the story. There wasn't much talk about players generating new worlds and new experiences -- most of the time characters were enjoying the pre-packaged "Lord of the Rings", "Star Trek", or "Dungeons and Dragons" VR worlds, reliving existing ideas again and again. The gunter protagonists weren't off creating fantastic new landscapes or generating culture, they were poring through the ruins of the old trying to find some arcane clue -- and I didn't get the sense that they would be doing that if they didn't have the Hunt to focus on. These are interesting things to think about -- and definitely a worrisome part of dystopian visions of VR that turn the ultimate communication/creation tool into a trough full of pre-packaged feed for consumers -- but I don't think that RPO's author was attempting to focus on that. Rather, the sterile emptiness I felt from the OASIS seemed more a result of the author just not describing much that wasn't necessarily "just so" for the plot.

There are a lot of neat VR ideas in it that I hope get more exposure, but it's despite the nature of the book rather than because of it.

I don't disagree with your assessment of the book and its ideas. The book is not very deep on any level, technical or emotional.

For me, it doesn't have to be. It's a light, fun read that I can scramble through and smile about when I need an escape from my own reality.

That's not to say there aren't some solid ideas that should be explored in greater depth. I just don't think this particular story is the right place to dig deep.

Someone in this thread suggested that they might enjoy a sequel. I partially agree ... I think that the technology ideas, the dystopian future, and the OASIS itself lend themselves greatly to deeper exploration as a setting. I just don't really think most of the characters are worth exploring any deeper. The story is good, maybe even great (I like it a lot, but I'm weird), but it feels complete. Let's move on and play a little with the RPO fictional world itself.

I think the movie Lawnmower Man 2 had something like this.

Yeah, we tried that with Second Life.

Most successful products were already tried in the past. Conditions change, and execution is more important than the idea itself.

Unfortunately there were no obvious errors in the execution of SL.

Could swing off in another direction, although everyone who wants a virtual online world always aims directly toward SL.

A virtual online world seems to have no useful purpose other than acting as "moth to flame"

Maybe not obvious errors, but we have learned things since SL. Minecraft hit a sweet spot of getting ordinary people to actually build stuff, it that aspect Minecraft is a better preview of the metaverse.

In retrospect the learning curve for SL's content creation was too hard or intimidating. (and Minecraft has obvious limitations.)

It's appalling how well reality conforms to near-future scifi, sometimes.

"You can do whatever you put your mind to"

Its no coincidence that most of the people building out the tech future were raised with fictional tech future of cyberpunk and cyberpunk-esque fantasies in their youth and have been steadily building those fantasies into reality - consciously or not...

When the fuck did bad sci-fi books become people's technology roadmaps?

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