Long term, I think that you have to look at it like this: most desktop computing is very very 2D centric and touch centric. If you want to, e.g., buy a product on Amazon, you're dealing with photos and imagery of a product, and reviews. But if you had a "Metaverse equivalent" you could view a 3D model, see it in action, and physically size compare it to other objects in your house much easier than manually checking dimensions.
Obviously the applications and benefits aren't as clear cut right now. I'm not sure that the windowed operating systems we have today would have been the obvious way that computers would be used if it weren't for constant iteration on keyboard centric UI and experimentation over many years. That same innovation trend hasn't happened with AR/VR, and "the metaverse" that people talk about now will likely be totally different 20 years after it becomes a thing, post-iteration and innovation.
I feel like the concept is pure hype with a trivial amount of userbase interest (at best). They're late to the party. I don't see it as anything except a failure in waiting. Secondlife is still holding up to this day, since its creation in 2003. Try and figure out why SecondLife is still around and you may see why I see no future for this "metaverse". The only way to bring users is to have users and content, and the only way to bring content is to have users, and they don't have the users. I don't know a single person who is looking forward to it. Of all the social chat groups I am in, it's come up in only one, and the overwhelming response was just pure negativity about it sounding dumb, being a waste of money, and a failure in the making.
The metaverse, as I understand it, is just Facebook Games but in VR, for kids and bored adults.
I think the outcome will be the same, though. I can't imagine how anyone at Facebook thought this idea would work.
If you throw enough cash at a problem, it will be "solved".
I remember google wave. Remember that? The noise it made when it came out. What a mess. And then we got slack and discord and we must admit it somewhat solves the same ideas.
So I don't know. We might very well be in VR goggles in 10 years surrounded by 25 virtual screens, 5 notification systems and parallel windows updates while bidding on a new VR background, on a NFT trading platform using some shitty cryptocurrency we've never heard of 2 weeks prior.
Or we could just be on a terminal in vim doing the same shit as today.
I only hope we have choices. Because this new internet they're trying to push is further away from RFCs and open protocols than we've ever been. And that's very sad. Our parents gave us a free internet where everything is possible, and we're doing our very best to destroy that idea to a world of wall gardens and consumerism where the very few will even know how it works.
it's interesting to note that cory and babbage and beez and a raft of other lindens wound up at FB between 2009 and 2011. i went to pitch the idea of continuing the "open metaverse" and try to get FB to fund the VWRAP work, but no dice. 2010-2011 was way too early for virtual worlds or augmented worlds to be on the FB radar.
at linden, at the end, we wanted to build a shared world which could be fed with real or made up geo data and with a common protocol different organizations could use to cause a consistent, shared experience be delivered to end users.
the key here is "different organizations." by the end we were trying to build an open protocol linden could be a key player in, but not own it as a walled garden.
i think the prime difference here is FB wants to own the venue (walled garden) and sell different data layers to different communities.
i would be very surprised if they weren't working on an AR experience where advertisers could buy a data overlay identifying most likely consumers for specific services. so you're minding your business at the mall and someone walks up and says "excuse me ma'am, i notice you bought floral print shirt last week. we're having a sale on slacks that would complement that shirt and your colour pallette."
not to mention strossian "cop space" or a raft of less intrusive layers for different communities.
so... "own the venue" and "sell distinct value-added layers to different parties"
1. VR rebranded (Facebook’s approach)
2. a specific family of games that allow you to buy and own land/territory, mediated by the blockchain (see Bit.Country[1] as one of many examples)
3. a term used widely in crypto/web3 world to refer specifically to the fact that we can finally build networks that people can own (buy/sell but also control directly via programmable governance) and built on without being rent-collected by extractive web2 companies (mitigated platform risk); using web3 platforms which externalize most of the value they create
Hacker News tends to understand the 1st but not the 2nd or 3rd. The 3rd is most interesting and less well-understood: the metaverse is about much more than a new viewing device (VR headsets). It’s about new kinds of economics around ownership and control.
[1]: https://bit.country/
Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication. VR and AR have the necessary capabilities to do so, and deliver social presence on par with face to face. With a fully immersive experience, you can feel like you are standing next to a person talking to them, regardless of their physical location. Body language, eye contact, etc all come through.
That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if. The current hardware clearly is not hitting the mark for sudden mass adoption. The hardware will eventually, even if we have to wait until it becomes something like sunglasses or even contact lenses.
From first principles, having computers override what photons you see will have huge effects, but don’t focus so much on the shiny video game world aspects: it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence. This is why Zuck bought Oculus, and why he has pivoted his company around the entire thing. It’s not because of “Ready Player One”, but because he feels that hardware/software will modulate most person to person communication soon, and he wants it to be his stack.
The idea that we will work and play in the metaverse is blocked by the hardware right now. If the hardware is amazing (say, a regular looking pair of glasses) and can actually enable an immersive computing experience, that is more productive and better at connecting people, why wouldn't you use it? Regardless of who builds the platforms and experiences.
I don't know what the next evolution of this is, but if it involves "wearing" something, it needs to have characteristics like being featherweight, as trivial to take on and off as a pair of glasses, 0 friction to operate, and be extremely robust and durable. IIRC, Google Glass, for example, had none of these properties (and it wasn't VR/AR in any sense).
Are we anywhere near this? How far off is hardware that's really mass-market ready?
Only time can tell whether Metaverse has something that Second Life did not. My guess is that it will be considered a joke in 5 short years, but I don't actually know. Overall, I think Silicon Valley is overestimating people's willingness to wear headsets and paddles for extended periods of time. Just because 12 year old boys will do it doesn't mean that everyone else wants to.
If you have to "wear" your Desktop on your head and put on a "sensors" body costume, guess how much people will do it voluntarily. Yep. Small group of people.
You have to provide something "out of this world" to even think for mass adoption. This in my view is just another data-grabbing platform and push to walled garden SaaS. It is logical big tech to push it hard. Microsoft, Apple, you name it.
And this is in my view the controversy with Facebook. FB is mass social network. Successfully integrated in the daily routine of the "normies" trough several apps.
Suddenly they push Meta, which as I mentioned is clearly small use-case. Branching this as a tool for "immersive" experience is vague attempt for justification and clearly PR move for distracting public from the toxic reality of the company which used dopamine hacks and psychology driven dark UX to become "the next advertising" platform.
Until AR/VR is hologram driven, nothing will come out of this Metaverse. Just some corporations capitalizing on "enthusiast" market and suckling more data than usual.
But now, people shop online all the time. The technology caught up to the point where people don't go to physical shops.
VR/AR builds on that to allow for a more realistic display. So that's a natural extension that will come into play.
The same changes in buying behavior affects things like direct car sales and house sales. Spinning a 3D car on a 2D screen is not the same as being able to walk around it and (figuratively) "kick the tyres" yourself.
We're at the late stages of the "early adopters", and the rate of change in technology is exponential so is increasing at an increasing rate.
I don't think it's different. I think if you went back in time and asked 18 year old Zuck what the future of online interaction would be, he'd basically tell you about second life.
The only difference is that now the technology is better and enough people who are not Zuck are talking about it, so Zuck can steer the ship without everyone jumping off.
The interesting long term stuff that will come out of this is computing more integrated into your whole life with AR. This is going to need a more networked, spatially aware, OS like abstraction than we’ve had to date. The scary part of that is FB making the play to own it and presumably all the data that can be harvested by being implicitly jacked into your entire life.
Apple are presumably working on the same thing for the same reasons but want you jacked into their ecosystem instead.
I believe the net result of what we’ll get is several competing walled gardens with interop at the app level as we see with phones these days.
The Web3 side of this is a mix of vultures taking easy money, well meaning people without backing and VC backed companies preaching decentralisation but offering themselves up either as middlemen or the beginning of another platform with the attendant lock-in. It primarily seems to be a way to get out of the rent seeking world of platforms into a rent seeking world for everything.
Meta seems like there was a wall of post-it notes in Zuck's office with a bunch of ideas to stop FB from becoming MySpace and the dart he threw landed on this one.
My gut tells me that Meta is dead in the water but with the billions that FB have in their war chest I wouldn't bet against it completely, however, the fact it requires a headset, a massive source of friction, will restrict the audience.
I dunno... seems like Zuck is living in a fantasy world here.
So I can see it growing. I think AR has a better chance than full VR to be the game changing technology longer term, especially considering things like AR Facetime and equivalent.
I do think there is more hype than substance right now around the metaverse, but I don't have to squint too hard to see a world where this becomes real relatively soon.
[1] https://exponent.fm/episode-196-forecasting-the-metaverse/
Second Life has figured things out. A 3D world in a 2D screen is much easier to build and interact with than a 3D world in VR goggles with your hands tied. High fidelity and Sansar both tried it , and both failed, and were scrapped despite "enormous potential". The Oculus Quest is great, but my main use of it is to view Street View imagery exactly because it doesnt require much control or interaction with other users. I had tried Second life in VR briefly, it was indeed nice to walk butn difficult interactions made you feel like an incapacitated person. Future VR can make some interactions compelling, but they won't reach the expressiveness of clicks and keyboards.
VR is here to stay for a few million users, it's not going to become mainstream even when the FOV and resolution increase. It's an uncomfortable blindfold that creates stress and anxiety (as any blindfold should). This is nothing like smartphones, which are unobtrusive and adopt the age old tried-and-tested form of a book. AR is a cool looking gimmick as well. I will wait for neural implants until we can talk about VR worlds again.
Unless mobile technology has some major revolution with battery life or Facebook/Meta can find a way to use the metaverse without a screen or sucking battery life, I think mobile tech will severely hinder users from using the metaverse.
Now to bring things back to the original quesion, when Second Life was a thing, mobile tech was mostly flip phones and Blackberries so mobile wasn't an option. Users could only use the desktop and were fine with it because it is all we knew at the time. Being a desktop only application was never an issue for the users. The current demand to support multiple platforms when many of those platforms are not capable of supporting the metaverse is what makes the current metaverse different than Second Life.
I can't comment on Facebook. The current discussion surrounding the 'metaverse' often describes something that is more open, almost like the internet. Whether or not this happens in practice remains to be seen. I think the idea is that you may be able to teleport between worlds(servers run by companies or other entities) and carry some amount of your state with you.
I remain cynical. As someone who grew up reading William Gibson and dreaming of 'cyberspace' you'd think I'd be excited but I see this as being just as boring as Second Life and There but with better graphics. The metaverse talk lately reminds me of when CE mfgs decided they needed to push 3DTV on everyone because they were running out of fancy new things to drive TV sales. This is likely just a way to create a new channel for monetizing.
1. It's gotta be useful (Jobs to done/value/utility whatever you want to call it)
2. It's gotta make me feel good/excited, it has to be fun ("emotional value" if you want)
3. It's gotta be socially acceptable ("what do others think of me if I use this thing?")
My take is: It is unclear how and when the current concepts of the metaverse will deliver on these dimensions. I bet there is a version that will deliver on all 3. But, we haven't seen it yet. Once we see it, we'll all laugh and say, "why didn't I invent this?".
PS: The closest thing I have seen is gather.town. It's not quite a metaverse (yet) though.
I can think of two parties that have their own answers:
1) A certain group of people who like computers and grew up reading sci-fi think it would be cool; some even tell themselves it's very important, but for vague reasons that they can't really articulate
2) Centers of capital are interested in it as yet another platform for consumption, attention-capturing, and rent-seeking
I think Zuckerberg is both. But I'm not convinced that society at large has any real motivation to buy into something like this, unless the sheer novelty ends up being powerful enough to rope people in.
Note that a world without a "metaverse" still has a place for VR/AR. Having a complete, interconnected virtual world is not a prerequisite for all the utilities and entertainment that that hardware technology can be used for. And to me it just feels like an incredibly unnecessary layer on top, which serves no real purpose to anyone outside of those first two groups.
The immersiveness that can be attained via modern high-end VR systems is simply not comparable to what we had a decade ago; it enables many more use cases and paradigms that wouldn't have felt usable, interesting, fun, or sometimes even particularly social in the past. To me at least, VR/AR seem like a pretty large medium shift, and I really expect them to stick around and become a large part of society.
The possibly good news is it shows that Facebook doesn't really know how to avert its own decline.
I could imagine making some money on the following: “by 2030, the number of VR users of the metaverse will be less than 1% of the number of users of other social media apps”.
(Unless they pull some definitional stunt like saying “you used AR once on the Facebook app therefore we are counting you as a metaverse user”).
The key for entertainment will be becoming someone else.
Being the QB in the game or maybe seeing things as players in actual games.
Being able to play in a concert as any member of your favorite band, being able to talk to the crowd and they respond.
Playing your favorite actor in your favorite movie.
Meet up with friends at a concert of sporting event, current ones or ones in the past.
I expect they will recreate epic sporting events from the past.
Someone creates your hometown or your college campus what it looked like in the past that you can explore in VR.
You can have someone create your house you grew up in or maybe you can even recreate the tree house you played in and invite your friends to meet there.
Virtual dance clubs for both exercise and meeting new people.
Virtual sports bars to cheer on your team, maybe even sports bars for specific games where fans from both teams can interact.
True virtual shopping, see and try out products in VR.
Oh and the adult industry always tends to be the leader in new technology pushing everyone in a specific direction.
I don't want Fbook to create it but I think the metaverse could be great.
Of course, not only is the technology to facilitate a metaverse is better, but I think society has also evolved a lot since then. Remote work/life is now much more of a mainstream/accepted thing than it used to be. Internet is now a mainstream full-blown appendage via our smartphones.
I'm much more optimistic a metaverse (in a Platonic ideal sense) could catch on this time around, BUT I'm much less sure that what will be hawked to us is the "right thing" (whatever that means).
I do think this article posted on HN last week is definitely onto something that Meta and other attempts may not be thinking about. https://debugger.medium.com/the-metaverse-is-already-here-it...
The problem with the whole metaverse concept is that the implementation runs counter to the actual infrastructure underlying it. The Internet works so well because it's very permissive/open with data transfer. It's funny how that we now try to wrangle that back in when we should be making the other layers of the network (session, application, and presentation) as permissive as the lower level transport and link layers. But it seems we want to reinvent the centralized systems of old like mainframes and computer information services but without the old trappings as if people aren't fully aware of how that all worked out (badly for consumers).
You may think second life was a failure because it never caught on mainstream, but in many ways second life was a huge success. Many many people spent an insane amount of time in second life. Major companies, political parties, art museums, and other “real life” institutions setup shop in second life. You could get a job there building stuff, selling land or being a journalist publishing in second life. I read somewhere that a second life real estate agent became a usd millionaire from buying selling virtual land.
Some people just got totally sucked in. I met a woman who told me she would spend so many hours on it that she didn’t take proper care of her kids. She seemed like someone who was having a hard time in real life, and she found a great escape on SL. It was so easy to make friends, and the exploration of the world was endless.
Immersion was definitely a key to its success. It was good enough to make the player feel stuff. Sit around a fire on a beach at sunset would be soothing. Walking around a Western town would kind of stress you out. It worked.
It’s not for everyone for sure. But what’s scary is that the metaverse is going to pray on the weak, on people with insecurities, on the lonely and the elderly. People who can’t walk in real life are going to fly over cities with birds and meet similarly lonely people. What’s going to happen when they unplug?
Healthy individuals already experience some withdrawal from VR, saying things like “real life is dull compared to what I can do in VR”.
Now, of all companies, the one doing it has a history of optimizing for “time spent in the app”. Disregarding all kind of predatory behavior in the name of profit.
My prediction is that the metaverse is going to turn into “brainwashing as a service”.
The only hope is that VR headsets are too expensive to become widespread.
This is going to be difficult to fight. When you have a “join meeting in metaverse” button in whats app, who’s going to not click it?
We got a couple more decades at least for AR to happen.
But it's probably 20 years and a few 'Magic Leaps' away from reality, 'pun intended'.
It may happen gradually as techines buy the big googles, they then get smaller like Ski Googles, more people get on board, then they'll just be glasses and we'll look at VR headsets like horse and carriage.
I suspect we will really start to face social problems as people in that era will not be exposed to humans that lived before the internet and were 'normal' and the hyper connectivity we did not evolve for will throw us all for uge loops.
Like AR, basically getting rid of phones and a lot of computers and integrating digital into our real world, rather than just having avatars moving around in a space.
I'm talking about, putting on a set of AR glasses to watch TV, instead of having an actual TV, this way you can watch movies, your GPS not being google maps on your phone but in your glasses that point you in which direction to go.
The Metaverse is basically what Google Glass was trying to be, but will include a lot of other tech as well.
in the same way afghanistan was the graveyard of empires, virtual worlds are where corporate product development teams go to die. (and a couple open source teams as well)
The metaverse tech (I.e. immersive VR) can create the illusion of being in the same room as another person.
The next iteration of the phone, radio, tv, internet, which each shrunk the world in turn.
The problem with Roblox, is that it's geared for kids primarily, it's centralized and it also has I believe a 30% fee. You have the same issues as you have with the mobile app stores: an excessive take rate and risk of being deplatformed at any time (like the early Facebook and Twitter apps). You don't really have ownership. But it does underscore the idea that if you create the right environment for shared gaming experiences and creativity it can be very interesting and entertaining.
The crypto metaverse is attempting to use digital property rights represented as NFTs to facilitate permissionless value creation and exchange. Just as real world property rights give owners the stability and framework with which to build long-term investments, understanding they can take risks and potentially reap rewards for those risks, the hope is that digital property rights will do the same.
The NFT space is very interesting and the gaming sector in crypto is evolving pretty rapidly. Some interesting attempts I see at creating these experiences are Sandbox (https://www.sandbox.game/en/), Decentraland (https://decentraland.org/), and Treeverse (https://www.treeverse.net/).
I think it's still super early days for this stuff. It's likely that a lot of the current attempts will fail, but I believe this concept is going through its 90s dot com phase, and we'll get a few gems out of this movement that stand the test of time.
(Steel-manning the concept of course).
meh. it's a fun conspiracy theory.
Slap almost ready VR/AR tech on top of that but we'll see how that plays out
You logged on and found that basically nothing was happening.
Covid did increase teleconferencing software usage (Meet, Zoom etc) - but I think that work-related (i.e. forcible) usages can only go so far. Online education solutions were lacking this time around, but I think next time there might be better options that end up "sticking".
Imagine a holistic lockdown going on for years at a stretch, and your only possible respite is to explore some virtual worlds, or meet others in an MMO style setting.
Something I would personally enjoy is wikipedia converted to a VR "Library of Alexandria" - which you can browse at will, or take guided tours, or attend lectures by subject matter experts, or just chat in general with others who are browsing the same topics as you. Just need to write an engine that converts the wiki graph into some rooms....
EDIT: this is not bad: https://wikiverse.io/
There is a genuinely interesting conversation to be had about the metaverse. I think lots of conversations around identity are interesting: what is durable, what is opt-in/opt-out, how do we mediate a la carte personal identity with community standards etc. That's a hugely important conversation the outcomes of which we are feeling right now. This is _much more_ important than what fucking 3D fox avatar you walk around with.
I think there are even interesting conversations to be had around AR, and smart glasses etc. But that have to be predicated on the fact that the technology just _isn't there_. Even if you had amazing smart glasses that weren't massive shitty headsets (that even if some people can tolerate, are worthless for work or on the bus), you'd still have the problem that the UIs are useless. Until we have way, way better AI assistants, you just can't have AR/VR UIs. Because you _need_ high bandwidth text interfaces. In the absence of keyboards that means voice, except the idea of using crappy voice recognition at work, or walking around, is deeply painful. So we'll need really good subvocalisation tech, and that doesn't exist. We'll need really good AI agents (and I genuinely believe the biggest concern of the metaverse is going to be how machines interface with it, not humans), but they don't exist. But that's fine, cos the headsets are crap so none of this is a pressing concern and I am _utterly baffled_ why this conversation is important in 2021. It's all years off.
So I do think this will all one day be relevant, but not now. But even when it is, I think the _absolute least interesting_ bit of it is embodied 3D spaces. Basically nobody has ever wanted that, they don't want it now, they will never want it. It's just a crappy way to do business. It's a fun way to play games, but you know what, 3D on a 2D screen is still fine.
The longer this conversation continues, the more money gets sunk into it, the crazier I feel. Nobody wants to go to work in Minecraft. Nobody wants to go to the pub in Roblox. They're just games that kids enjoy. You cannot build a trillion dollar investment hypothesis off the back of games kids enjoy.
I dunno, this all sounds a bit grumpy, I'm sorry, but part of that is that I genuinely do think there is interesting stuff to discuss here. Maybe 3D worlds are dead on arrival. But making internet spaces ubiquitous and ambient? Interesting. How can I as a human, with privacy needs but a lust for reputation, inhabit these spaces? Interesting. We're just concentrating on the stupidest possible parts of the mataverse right now and there's going to be a spectacular metaverse Winter if we don't dial down the hype.
Who’s their target market?