The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-metaverse-is-already-here-its-minecraft-99c89ed8ba2

by Tomte • 5 years ago

567 363 5 years ago

clivethompson.medium.com

achenatx• 5 years ago

its actually roblox

dandotway3• 5 years ago

Does Minecraft go down for several days like Roblox does?

Does Minecraft ban/cancel people like PewDiePie as Roblox did?

Aren't monthly active users (MAU) around 100M for each?

I think Roblox is eventually doomed to slowly fizzle like Second Life, etc. Internet history is littered with the corpses of dead closed systems. Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL? Remember Myspace?

Microsoft might eventually, say, install mandatory AI inside Minecraft that forces all players to behaviorally conform to the social and political views of the most vocal group of Microsoft employees. Then some other immersive 3D world builder with more open rules of participation will send Minecraft to its grave.

curtain2• 5 years ago

FWIW Roblox was created in '04 and launched in '06, Myspace peaked '05-'09.

sweetbitter2• 5 years ago

Mojang would have a problem trying to control Minecraft because it's written in Java, their developers commonly associate with the players who hack the game, and the only control over the gameservers that they have is their authentication servers- which you can disable the use of by editing one flag in your server config files, allowing anyone to play even if they didn't buy the game.

vyrotek2• 5 years ago

Indeed. All my kids went through a huge Minecraft obsession along with their friends but have all now moved on to Roblox. They find the "games" more entertaining to build and play now. It's become the social hang-out just to chat with friends as well. The Roblox VR experience is pretty fun too.

My only problem with Roblox is that it's not on the Switch and they all want better tablets and computers to play it now.

bluedino2• 5 years ago

I thought Roblox was what kids play before they 'graduate' to Minecraft?

oskenso2• 5 years ago

"it's actually neosvr", "it's actually [insert thing here]"

Maybe it's always been here, perhaps it's just another abstraction or simulation of a perceived reality. One could say that MUD systems are metaverses(metaversi?)

What I would like to see are more decentralized simulation systems with extensive accessibility features

aww_dang• 5 years ago

Multiplayer virtual worlds have been with us since the beginning. I think there was a multiplayer high fantasy package for the PDP series of minicomputers?

There's a concerted push to foist this buzzword on us either way.

qvrjuec• 5 years ago

One of my favorite MUDs HellMOO has a lot of references to Snow Crash (the progenitor of the 'metaverse').

api2• 5 years ago

I was wondering recently if it might be possible with today's GPU hardware to create a Minecraft-like world with similar dynamics but with fully simulated physics across the entire world. In Minecraft terms this would be a global simulation "tick" that allowed things like gravity to work, more sophisticated creature behaviors to play out globally, etc.

oskenso2• 5 years ago

The neosvr team is doing just that with the open source bepu physics engine :D

fwip• 5 years ago

Looks like they abandoned that approach in 2019 with bepuphysics2 - https://www.bepuentertainment.com/blog/2019/1/16/-but-gpus-a...

api2• 5 years ago

Interesting, but I was thinking of something simpler than a full on physics engine. Simulate a whole Minecraft-style voxel world like a big 3D cellular automaton with N states where N is the number of block types. Algorithms similar to HashLife may help:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife

bitwize• 5 years ago

It's Croquet. Which was Alan Kay building the metaverse -- as a mere stepping stone to his real goal which always was to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age.

MrFlibbles• 5 years ago

I thought is was already here... Fallout 76...

Karawebnetwork• 5 years ago

There is a lesser-known part of Minecraft already used by educators:

https://education.minecraft.net/en-us/discover/impact

This is the kind of product I hope for with the Metaverse but will probably never see.

kn8a• 5 years ago

Mojang have also cracked down on brands from 2016. "Mojang spokesperson Owen Hill pointed to situations where something like a car company would build or commission an independent developer to build a Minecraft server with specific purpose of advertising a new vehicle." https://venturebeat.com/2016/05/31/microsoft-bans-corporatio...

janitor61• 5 years ago

what is up with those weird recipes in the third section? That's not vanilla

jesuslop• 5 years ago

I thought it was Second Life

nitwit005• 5 years ago

They certainly used the term.

luxuryballs• 5 years ago

this is what I always thought when playing Minecraft, it’s not just digital legos, even pure vanilla is a living breathing world with day/night cycles, farming, etc, I use a plug-in called Multiverse to connect all of our old worlds together with the current world, so we can go back and use resources we dug up 10 years ago, and it supports a really nice live mapping plugin called dynmap, also built a “meta world” that acts as a go-between to quickly jump to specific builds across various worlds using an “iconic” chunk of the actual build converted to “meta world” materials: http://mc.legacycraft.vip:8123/?worldname=meta&mapname=surfa...

maximaximal• 5 years ago

Very nice setup! As a sort of informal successor to dynmap, there's now (or rather since 1.13) also BlueMap [1]. It renders the map in 3D in the browser and you can look sideways at your builds. Truly impressive. https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/bluemap.83557

prox3• 5 years ago

The Metaverse sounds like a protocol for VR/AR worlds, but I don’t think I read there is any consortium working on such an open protocol. Unless such a protocol already exists?

teraflop• 5 years ago

Lack of openness is a feature, not a bug.

prox3• 5 years ago

You mean for the companies working on metaverses?

eganist• 5 years ago

This reminds me of Adobe Atmosphere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Atmosphere), which I greatly miss. It was a highlight of my early 2000s.

one_off_comment4• 5 years ago

I remember that! I loved using an avatar that looked like a bush and then hiding in plain sight.

thinkmassive• 5 years ago

It was called VRML[0] and was superseded by X3D[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D

prox3• 5 years ago

The article mentions a (discontinued) 3d browser, which would be a necessity probably for any type of metaversial web.

clpm4j• 5 years ago

(Aware of the fact that I'm taking time out of my day to read HN)

I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in, and just sitting in the backyard and resting my eyes. And I don't even have children...

PicassoCTs• 5 years ago

Unless.. its super easy to convert what obsesses ones day into 3d and park it in the world. But then its just humanitys meme & memory junkyard.. kind of like a book with sad faces.

cbhl• 5 years ago

The ones that I have met did so because their children were into it. An hour or two a day adds up pretty quickly if you're building

mmmeff• 5 years ago

I think the end vision for the metaverse is to swallow up a lot of those time sinks in a typical lifespan. Working, shopping, socializing, etc. could theoretically be supplanted by a metaverse (for better or worse).

bluedino2• 5 years ago

The amount of 25-35 year old adults that play video games is pretty huge.

pugworthy• 5 years ago

Don’t discount 35-65 (or beyond) either.

BTCOG• 5 years ago

The amount of 6-60 year old video gamers is huge. 25's a strange number to start, and 35 is far too young to cut off.

vmception• 5 years ago

and a lot of people that don't think they are gamers are the most lucrative set of gamers.

they are the freemium and mobile segment. dismissed by both the toxic gaming communities and themselves, but noticed by the companies who will change their whole trillion dollar business name to snag them further.

vineyardmike5• 5 years ago

I read a recent interview from mark zuck about the metaverse and someone asked him a similar question. He had an actually really insightful answer.

1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games. (The actual per-person-per-day numbers are very high compared to the average 2hr/week i watch tv but whatever). Most of TV and Video Games are about ignoring reality for entertainment in a fake world already. thats a few hours people can dedicate.

2) The metaverse can be more than traditional video game type entertainment. WFH has turned the office as a destination into a keyboard/monitor as a destination. You can use VR to have a much more immersive/focused work destination than either office or WFH desk. Thats 8+ hours a day you can spend in metaverse.

(I have tried the Oculus workrooms and if the virtual screen resolution was higher then i'd personally work in it.)

kibwen5• 5 years ago

I'm frustrated that everywhere I look I keep seeing "metaverse" and "VR" used interchangeably. All of the things described above are VR, and none of them are the metaverse.

Watching TV or playing a game in an immersive, distraction-free VR environment sounds great, and will happen, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.

Working in a virtual home office has the potential to be extremely productive, ergonomic, and space-saving, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.

A metaverse involves some kind of shared space and shared experience across a networked medium. Not only is it more than just doing things in VR, a metaverse doesn't even require VR.

Corence• 5 years ago

Yeah, even things like gather.town people have said worked well for things like happy hours for teams working remotely. Having some virtual equivalent of physical space helps people socialize more naturally.

01100011• 5 years ago

TV is relaxing. I can turn my brain off and don't need to do anything. The metaverse is just a fancy videogame that big tech companies need to invent so they can monetize another platform and sell more HW.

Sure, if you pay me to work in the metaverse I'll be happy to hang out there. Otherwise I'm not interested.

ribosometronome• 5 years ago

Conceptually, a VR workroom sounds like it could be extremely nifty. As someone easily distracted, I'd love to be able to sit in space with only a text editor open and do my thing.

In practice, excluding resolution, wearing a headset for hours on end seems even more straining both for the neck and eyes than the alternative real life workstation.

derac2• 5 years ago

I'm incredulous that having a screen strapped half an inch from your eyes for 8+ hours is desirable. I have an Oculus Rift, my face is sweaty/red in a couple of hours and there is an indent around my eyes. I'm sure newer tech can be much better, especially with airflow and an AR set that lets in natural light. We're not there yet, though.

thrashh• 5 years ago

But the metaverse itself is not content. Instead it’s another medium to consume content.

Therefore the metaverse isn’t a replacement for a video games or TV. You would simply watch TV or play a video game while in the metaverse.

The metaverse in that regard isn’t a new concept, because VR spaces have existed for a long time now. I’ve watched movies in Minecraft more recently, for example. I’ve seen every idea in the metaverse attempted in some game or application already.

The reason these VR spaces have not taken off, however, is because the medium to access these VR spaces have been pretty disappointing.

It’s the reason why the Internet took a long time to take off: using the Internet on a desktop computer sucks. When smartphones took off, so did the Internet.

Facebook has not fixed the medium problem as I see it. I have never gotten motion sickness, but I do not want to put on a VR headset for more than a few hours. I don’t even want to put on a VR headset to be honest. I’ve owned one for two years and it just sits in a drawer. I can’t imagine that many people want to put on a VR headset either if they could just watch TV while sitting on the couch, grabbing real drinks on their real table, and texting their friends.

8note• 5 years ago

Can you actually wear the heavy goggles for that long?

bamboozled• 5 years ago

"Thats 8+ hours a day you can spend in metaverse."

I hope he plans to be spending 8 hours a day in "metaverse" but I'm sure as fuck not going to be.

nradov2• 5 years ago

I hardly ever "watch" TV. But I often have the TV on while I'm doing something else.

With this metaverse stuff you have to wear the stupid goggles. You can't just have it on in the background and glance up if something interesting comes on. This is why 3D TVs failed in the market. The technology worked fine but most regular people didn't want to wear the goggles just to watch a movie.

robbiep• 5 years ago

I think those are reasonable points - one thing from my life as someone who has basically turned my back on gaming due to the ‘real life game’ I’m involved in is that tv is a good escape/unwind when I can’t be arsed exercising/socialising but one of the reasons it is compelling is because the start-up times/stopping cost is basically zero - compared to either a pc or console game where not only do I have startup times to contend with but also the possibility of getting sucked towards the event horizon I can’t get out of and neglecting my level-ups in life

nsxwolf• 5 years ago

I have a Quest 2 and had a Vive before that. The Quest 2 is way more convenient. But I'm still too tired/lazy to put it on most of the time and would rather veg out on the couch.

I can't be the only one who feels this way?

BiteCode_dev3• 5 years ago

Sure, that's also what sport coaches, musician teachers, people teaching cooking on youtube and librarians say.

Also you should get 8 hours of sleep, buy food at the farmers market, spend time with your familly, meditate, get this GTD rolling, and learn a new skill for your carreer.

But honestly, the truth is, as soon as VR is cheap and comfy, I think people will rush to it anyway for one reason: porn. So the metaverse can grow, if like in second life, it allows for porn to develop. But since FB tend to want a family friendly experience, I think we got a betamax vs VHS situation here.

wvenable3• 5 years ago

The problem is that the more you make the virtual world like the real world the less relaxing it is. I don't have the mental energy these days for things that are too immersive.

Some people are just not going to want to spend 8 hours a day interacting with people to go home and interact with other real people in a reality-like medium.

grayfaced• 5 years ago

Assume Joe spends 3 hours of TV a night. How much of that time is uninterrupted focused time? While watching TV, I can cook and eat dinner, do a load of laundry, answer email, casually browse the web, feed and let the dog out and at least minimally engage in small talk with family.

None of that I can do when fully immersed in VR. Which is probably why Facebook cares about it. Ads on TV are time to get up, in VR they can fully measure you engagement. Fully engaged in game and hungry, food delivery is one button press away.

uhtred• 5 years ago

But I work from home because I hate the office, why would I want to visit a virtual one. It sounds terrible!

karaterobot• 5 years ago

It's not a great sign for the metaverse that it's such a nebulous concept for so many people. Even "the cloud" could be boiled down to "other people's computers". The internet was hard for people to understand at first, but it didn't have a unified marketing push behind it. So far, a unified marketing push is all there is to the metaverse, and still nobody knows with the f*ck it's supposed to be.

resonious• 5 years ago

I'll bite back on these 2 points, even though you're just paraphrasing Zuck.

1) I'm definitely willing to believe that most adults spend a lot of time vegging out, even if I/we don't. Does this mean that one goal of the metaverse is to suck cash out of those folks? "People already waste a lot of time. The metaverse is great because it makes money off of that." I could also interpret this one in a lighter way. Perhaps the metaverse is somehow better than regular vegging out; gives you exercise or something.

2) My take here is similar to some sibling comments. This just sounds like a VR application, and I'm not sure where the "metaverse" comes in. Unless by "metaverse" we mean "internet", which already exists and is (thankfully) not run by Facebook. And even then, I don't see where the internet comes in either! I can dev/create offline, can't I?

cjonas• 5 years ago

Ah yes... The company that created the biggest productivity sink ever will solve all of our work from home issues...

denkmoon• 5 years ago

If you thought zoom/teams for 6-8-10hrs a day was bad, try doing it in VR!

krzyk• 5 years ago

1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games.

Isn't that still about <25 and > 60, or those without kids? I hardly can find a calm 30-60 mins per day to just sit and read, sometimes play for 30 mins (2 kids) just before sleep.

Grimm1• 5 years ago

How many people spend a lot of time on social media? Billions, this is just providing a more immersive interaction for that. VR is only a tiny portion of that and I'm expecting AR and haptics and a whole bunch of other tech that enable more diverse sensory experiences to play a part here.

I don't really want "Meta" to own all of that largely because what made the internet successful was having no gatekeeper and a very low barrier to entry. Not that that's true anymore, but having no initial gatekeeper let people do crazy things for 30 years while the current gatekeepers were establishing themselves.

beebmam• 5 years ago

The time I spend in Minecraft is either meditation time or social time.

It's an even better experience when there's a modpack on the server with a near-infinite number of things to do, too.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS5• 5 years ago

near-infinite number of things to do

I've been having a great time going the other way - Skyblock! Start with very little, build up from there.

pdog• 5 years ago

With software improvements, our perception of time will eventually be slowed down in the metaverse to such an extent that one hour in the material world will equate to several days of perceived elapsed time in meta-reality.

derac2• 5 years ago

Do you have any context which would indicate this is possible?

Matrixik• 5 years ago

It's hard for me to believe one hour to several days but one hour (material world) to two hours would, probably, be already achievable. Now I watch most videos on youtube at 2x speed.

headcanon• 5 years ago

Metaverse may not end up being something that you end up glued to for a long period of time exclusively, the interactions will also bleed into other parts of your life. The main example would be that you could buy items for a Metaverse game in an online store on, and you would browse around there on your phone while you're waiting in line for coffee or the bus or whatever, just like we would do online shopping.

Metaverse would also wrap itself around a lot of the things people do already, like watch movies or concerts, coupled with games of any size and type. So as opposed to a stereotypical 6-hour WoW raid lifestyle, you could, for example, watch a virtual concert with friends, then afterwards jump onto a couple rounds of some Fortnite game variant, similar to how we do it today but just within the 'verse. But you could also immerse yourself for longer if you want to.

Honestly Metaverse seems more to me like a digital version of a big shopping mall with a bowling alley, arcade, and movie theater. You can hang out all day there or just drop in to get something from a store, or just get dinner and a movie.

mikewave• 5 years ago

Agreed. There's way too many things to do in reality. I have about 30-60 minutes a day of Me Time, and the last thing I want to do is piss it away in front of a computer when I've already spent 70% of my time doing exactly that.

Go outside, people. Talk to your friends in reality if possible. Experience the place you live in; participate in something physical to improve it materially. There's no end of socialization and minigames in reality, the graphics are better, and it's free.

one_off_comment4• 5 years ago

You're preaching to the choir. This is why I'd always rather read an article or a book than watch a video if I'm trying to learn something. I'll watch TV or a movie if I'm only aiming to be entertained. But for something I want to try to retain or if I'm trying to get business done, text wins for me.

kelnos• 5 years ago

More like 6 hours, if you consider work time, commute time (for folks who'll still have to do that), meal prep, etc.

But I don't think that's really the point. People use those 6 hours in a bunch of different ways. Some of those hours might be replaced by a metaverse experience entirely (as in, "I used to do play video games on my console, but I can get the same experience, but better, playing games in the metaverse"), and other activities might get nudged out because they aren't as (subjectively) enjoyable as the metaverse to some people. And other people will just not do the metaverse thing, because other activities are more fun to them. FB is betting on the user group being very large, and I don't know that I'd disagree with them.

And the same thing will always happen: people will continue to kick themselves for not finishing that book, or getting that extra workout in. That will continue to be the case with or without the metaverse.

Also consider that something like a metaverse could become the standard way for remote knowledge workers to get in a "room" together to collaborate. That alone seems like a large user base.

masona• 5 years ago

You answered your own question - it's a play for the next generation.

My kids bounce between a multitude of shared digital spaces (games, chat, social, videos etc) and they would be right at home at some kind of metaverse that would bridge them all (if that's even possible).

xrobledo84• 5 years ago

Most people don’t read books or exercise.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS5• 5 years ago

That's sad. I love a good book.

jonas21• 5 years ago

The Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts the American Time Use Survey [1], which tracks how people spend their time. This includes a breakdown by age (see table 9).

In every single age group, the average person spends over 4 hours per day on leisure and sports activities, the majority of which is watching TV (and very little of which is exercise or reading).

This is true even for people with children, with the exception of those with a child under 6 years of age. They spend an average of 3.86 hours/day on leisure and sports activities, 1.91 hours/day of which is watching TV.

It seems as though there is plenty of time for the metaverse.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

Now you can read the book in the metaverse!

Kidding. Kinda.

Obligatory Futurama:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6eRqMiAxQ0

Kiro2• 5 years ago

I also kick myself for not finishing things. Namely programming projects, my game backlog and lots of other things that are strictly digital. While you seem to want to get away from the computer I want to spend more time in front of it.

mastazi2• 5 years ago

I'm 43, I don't play regularly because of work/kids/etc. but every now and then I log into one of my favourite servers and spend some time there.

Two years ago I have built a base on 2b2t[1], located millions of blocks away from spawn, it took many hours of travelling through nether highways to get there. Before starting the journey, I had to escape spawn (a very dangerous area since 2b2t is an anarchy server) and I had to find valuable items from scavenging abandoned bases. After I finished my base, I made friends on the server, I have also helped building one of the highways, using a hacked Minecraft client that includes tools to build tunnels automatically[2].

There is also another server that I have visited regularly, MinecraftOnline[3], I built a house there and I made some friends, this one has rules and moderators unlike 2b2t which is an anarchy server. On both servers there is a rich community, a subculture specific to the server, and even specific activities that stem from each server's subculture[4][5]

Based on my experience, I have to agree with the article, Minecraft is an amazing and diverse metaverse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2b2t

[2] Highway Tools demonstration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwkDk_Xn2Y4

[3] https://minecraftonline.com/

[4] https://minecraftonline.com/wiki/Pigchinko_(Game)

[5] Guide to Crystal PvP on 2b2t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOImrm9ldTY

skerit• 5 years ago

2b2t is amazing, you just keep on discovering things everywhere you go. It's just a shame the chat is so toxic. MinecraftOnline isn't much better just because there's no griefing, they really stick to their "100% free speech" rule.

id• 5 years ago

Working remotely? That's 8 hours of digital world / metaverse experience right there. Most people have at least another 2 hours of screen time on top of that. I know I have days that are just screen time essentially.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

29 years old no kids here, have lots of coworkers in the same cohort. During the pandemic in particular a lot of friends started to pick up VRChat, and a majority of people in my age group still regularly play games. I think that's not that untypical honestly, I can see quite a few adults sinking at least a few hours per week into it if it gets interesting enough.

fshbbdssbbgdd• 5 years ago

Seconding this - have used VRChat a lot during the pandemic. Asking me why I’d spend time on the metaverse is like asking why I’d go to a bar. I won’t defend it as the best possible use of my time, but it’s fun to go meet people.

micromacrofoot2• 5 years ago

lol don't worry, zuck wants us to work in the metaverse too

SLWW• 5 years ago

tbf I think that there's something special about games like MC, I still like it even well into my twenties.

I don't play much but I do like spending a few hours on occasion spending time with friends, playing a game we started to when we were teens.

My recommendation to anyone who wants to play something creative, get on a voice call and get with your friends.

gameswithgo• 5 years ago

as an adult with kids i have managed periods to deeply immerse in minecraft with friends and also pubg. it is fun but hard to sustain

herval• 5 years ago

Given how much time everyone I interact with (and myself) spend with our heads buried on phones, mindlessly scrolling, I’d say an extremely large number of people would gladly transition to an augmented reality world, and stare at walls for an equally long amount of time

AndrewKemendo• 5 years ago

This article and most people I have seen so far, get the concept of metaverse wrong. It's much simpler conceptually (though exceptionally hard technically) than people understand.

The metaverse is the result of instrumenting the real world to capture and interact with the data the real world provides. Think "Digital Twin" of the world that refreshes at 100Hz.

It's not a place you go, it becomes the landscape you live in, because everything becomes a data source.

hazza_n_dazza• 5 years ago

you will have time. it will be your workday.

pack up bed. unfold desk. eat breakfast. put on headset. take off headset. eat dinner. pack up desk. set up bed. go to sleep.

steve_adams_86• 5 years ago

I don't mean this as a criticism of anyone. I do find though that there are types of people (likely including you and I) who feel compelled to move and do things such that our down time is extremely valuable. I do have kids which makes it quite a bit more challenging. I feel motivated on an hourly basis to accomplish things, though - it matters to me to make progress on the things I care about.

There are other people who very much don't care. To them, progress might be watching the next episode of a show, or grinding in some game they love.

I'm fine with either type of person, really. It does explain why what seems like an impossible use of time to us is actually very appealing to others. Why would we be in there when there's a book to read, a concept to learn, people we don't see often enough, etc? And yet, why wouldn't they?

I think the metaverse aims to appeal to us as well eventually; imagine interactive classes on X or Y to help you learn faster with tools that are currently impossible? What if we could save time by seeing loved ones more easily in the metaverse, making more time for those things we want to make progress on? I'm not bullish on that, though. It sounds creepy. I want to hug the people I love, hear them laugh in person, make them nice food. I'm not interested in expediting that facet of my life.

Even now, despite growing up with webcams around I still find FaceTime fairly impersonal and uninteresting. I use it only when I really need to.

spoonjim• 5 years ago

Depends what you mean by “metaverse.” I have 3 kids and use my Oculus maybe 3 times a week for 30-45 minutes each time. Lovely escapism. I can go to the beach and the mountains and back in a half hour.

irrational• 5 years ago

Seriously. I don’t have time to do the things I need to do, much less the things I want to do. I haven’t had time for TV, books, movies, etc. in years.

nathias• 5 years ago

We don't have 16h each day if we're working and sleeping, we have 8.

itronitron• 5 years ago

Maybe thinking of it as a separate experience is limiting how people make use of it.

I wonder if anyone has run remote team meetings or virtual classrooms in Minecraft as I imagine it would be a lot less fatiguing than Zoom style teleconferencing. The fact that in MC you can easily see where other players are looking adds a lot to the experience.

moffkalast3• 5 years ago

I think that's partially how the education edition is supposed to be used, but I've never actually seen it happen.

nottorp7• 5 years ago

You make time for the things that interest you.

Also it does sound like you're mixing your run of the mill grindy MMO with Minecraft. Your MC world will still be there if you don't touch it for a week. Even on a server.

Okay, it may depend on the culture of said server, but that's exactly the point of the article.

I play MC on an 18+ server that's building oriented. That means everyone has a job and other interests. We just show up and place our blocks when we feel like it. I just logged in yesterday after a 2 week break. People disappear for months. Nobody sees a problem with it.

gauchojs• 5 years ago

As a parent of a 2 year old, I think I'll play again when he plays!

nottorp7• 5 years ago

Haha guess how I got into MC. I bought it for myself about 2 years after the kid wanted it for herself.

jgilias• 5 years ago

I feel the same. The other day there was a video submit to HN that I didn't watch because I wasn't in a situation where I could watch a video. Basically making pancakes for kids, having an IRL conversation in the background, and checking HN while waiting to turn the pancake.

If HN was on metaverse where I have to get an immersive headset on to use it... Yeah, I wouldn't be using it nearly as often as I do.

As you get older, the best feature of our existing 'metaverse' is its ability to integrate with the 'meat-a-verse' seamlessly. The higher the barrier of moving between the *verses, the harder it is to use the one in which we can't actually keep our meat fit and fed.

But what do I know (old man yelling at clouds).

simonebrunozzi• 5 years ago

And what about videogames? Some people spend thousands of hours each year playing videogames, and not all of them are high school or college students.

nels• 5 years ago

The concept of the metaverse also involves doing those activities (e.g., work, fitness, entertainment) inside the metaverse. For instance, the home workout videos that people watch on their TVs these days could someday be replaced by an immersive fitness experience on AR glasses.

rocho• 5 years ago

People already spend hours and hours per day on social media, very often just to fill time and avoid boredom. I can absolutely see the metaverse taking up some of that time.

taylodl• 5 years ago

Animal Crossing is my wife's Multiverse.

antifa• 5 years ago

Is there anything GNU or good that's essentially AC for android? By good I mean isn't a slot machine with an AC style minigame. I already know about the current official android AC spinoff.

joshu• 5 years ago

i always thought it was WoW. lots to do, but all gatekept and previously defined/allowed

zemo11• 5 years ago

not really, WoW is a game, and no game can be a metaverse, because one of the most core and intrinsic qualities of what makes something a game is that it is a separate space from reality. Games studies people refer to this as "the magic circle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle_(virtual_worlds)): the boundary separating reality from "game space".

For example, let's say you're playing a game of Checkers. That's separate from real life. You can't buy a captured Checkers pieces on eBay and then in your next game of Checkers, start with more pieces than your opponent. Being able to do those things would cause the game to break down, because the game would no longer be a contest of your wits in Checkers, it would be a contest of your existing wealth. You can't purchase points in a basketball game, you can't purchase mulligans in golf, etc. A lot of people in the blockchain/NFT space seem to be of the position that games don't currently let you purchase things with real money or sell them to other players for real money because they lack the technical capabilities, but that is not and has never been the problem. There's also the "trading an item in one game for an item in another game" but that's equally useless, it's the same thing but with a barter system, and the barter system would eventually just give way to money anyway. The problem is that introducing those mechanics causes the magic circle to break down.

By contrast a metaverse is a metaverse because the things happening in it are not in a separate, isolated space. Both games and metaverses are virtual in nature, but what makes something a metaverse is the lack of a magic circle, while what makes something a game is the presence of a magic circle. The metaverse is a virtual facet of reality; games' whole thing is that they are not reality.

A metaverse can contain a game, but not vice versa. Plus WoW is entirely owned and operated by one entity; a metaverse is pretty definitionally a situation in which any party can create their own space without needing the permission of another party, kinda like anyone can create a website without needing the permission of any party. Well, of course, you need an IP address and if you want people to be able to reach it, a DNS record and if you want SSL some certificates, so that's not a perfect analogy, but the web isn't really decentralized anyway (for these specific reasons).

sushsjsuauahab4• 5 years ago

There will never be a metaverse! The amount of electricity and device manufacturing required for it to exist at scale will likely exhaust our capabilities as a planet and lead to yet more conflict and strife.

wussboy• 5 years ago

And that strife will be in the real world. The thing about “real” is that it always wins over “virtual”.

sushsjsuauahab4• 5 years ago

100%. The virtual world is actually a very fragile thing.

jimmySixDOF2• 5 years ago

My take is almost the complete opposite. In the Metaverse, you can spin up a office building for an unlimited number of users who can access from across the globe. Please compaire that use case, and so many more like it, to the real world alternatives in terms of resource consumption. It's an economy of infinite bits, not limited atoms.

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

Bits are not unlimited; entities in a virtual world consume real resources, which are finite and have cost.

sushsjsuauahab4• 5 years ago

While it is true that concrete and steel cost resources as well, in a resource constrained world, we will use what we already have in place as these things are quite durable.

I don't envision a future of mega skyscrapers and bullet trains, nor do I envision a world of Oculus clad employees driving a virtual forklift.

Rather I view the world continuing to exist as we currently have it: forklift driver is prompted by his UI to go to the next location to physically grab an item.

Shadonototra• 5 years ago

Sorry but these "metaverse" articles are all cringe, boomers trying to regain influence they lost in the real world

benatkin• 5 years ago

That's a funny spelling of "Roblox".

zemo11• 5 years ago

all Roblox games run on servers owned by the Roblox corporation so not really. Minecraft is totally federated, anyone can create their own Minecraft server if they want to. Roblox doesn't release the server software and doesn't let you run your own server, so you can never really own your own space; they own all of the spaces.

mfer• 5 years ago

Who said something needs to be federated for it to be the metaverse? That's nowhere in the definition.

I'd argue that scifi examples (like Ready Player One) show that it can be proprietary.

I'm not saying it's good to be controlled by one org. Just that the number of orgs controlling the infra has nothing to do with being the metaverse or not.

WorldMaker5• 5 years ago

This is a good point, though the edges are graying there too.

I've been seeing a lot of ads lately for an iOS game (an awful looking game, but that's beside the point) whose major claim to fame in their ads is that you can earn Roblox's Robux by playing. They probably aren't using any sort of federated Roblox "metaverse ecommerce platform" today, they are probably just laundering Robux gift certificates. (I'm not entirely sure, it's not a game I have reason to download as awful and creepy as it appears.)

So there are at least some game spaces they don't own. (Whether or not you agree those are worthwhile game spaces.)

sys_64738• 5 years ago

Isn't the Metaverse(tm) really just 2nd Life given a second life?

HWR_14• 5 years ago

2nd Life is still out there. I say s someone who was invited to (and attended) a 2nd Life based event during lockdown. I also was invited to a bunch of similar virtual events on the 100 competitors that seemed to spring up.

qaq• 5 years ago

The Metaverse that will make the most $ is Porn

WorldMaker5• 5 years ago

That is often considered the primary reason VHS beat out the arguably superior tech of Betamax: one was willing to license to porn and the other preferred not to.

Definitely a lesson for any would be "metaverse" to keep in mind.

curtain2• 5 years ago

For me a metaverse would be a collection of objects overlayed on our physical world.

fhinson• 5 years ago

Growing up for me it was Runescape.

zemo11• 5 years ago

Minecraft is great but to my knowledge you can't make a portal in one Minecraft world to another world, you can't take an object from one Minecraft world to another world, and you can't transit from one simulation to another simulation (all Minecraft worlds run the same simulation: the Minecraft simulation). It's not really a metaverse in that it's not one connected uncoordinated space, it's many separate, instanced spaces. But it does at least let you run your own space. Valheim is more metaverse than minecraft is since you can gather resources in one Valheim server and take them to another, but there's no real security on that and there's no public history so it's not really stable; there's no notion of what's "real". Although I do agree with the framing that something being a metaverse has little to do with head-mounted displays.

vizzier• 5 years ago

You are correct in vanilla minecraft as far as I'm aware, but there are a number of plugins/mods that have been supporting this type of functionality for a while.

kibwen5• 5 years ago

The principle being demonstrated here is persistence, and it exists on a spectrum. In a single Minecraft server your inventory is persistent, but across Minecraft servers only your account identity is persistent. In Valheim or Terarria both your account and your inventory is persistent across servers.

Right now the talking heads are trying to sell us a metaverse on the idea that one account could have a persistent inventory between Minecraft and Valheim and Terraria, but anyone who's ever played a game can tell you immediately that this makes no mechanical sense whatsoever (cross-game promotions are common, and welcome (e.g. an Aloy costume in Monster Hunter World for PS4 owners, or Nintendo Amiibo giving you random rewards in various games), but don't involve literally round-tripping your character between games of potentially wildly disparate genres), and anyone who's ever written a piece of software can tell you immediately that this would be an infeasible logistical nightmare to implement.

zemo11• 5 years ago

right I agree with all that, I'm not advocating for the idea of moving the content that an item represents from one simulation to another, but the idea that transferring what that thing symbolizes should be considered separate and isn't as easily dismissable. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29086662

Zababa8• 5 years ago

I feel like taking an object from one simulation to another and having different simulations are oposites. Either you have the same simulations and thus objects share behavior, or the simulations are different and the objects are just 3D things.

zemo11• 5 years ago

taking an object from one simulation to another and having different simulations are oposites

not really, we just have to get into some semiotics here and consider the difference between the signifier and the signified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier). In semiotics, a signifier is a physical artifact; the manifestation of something. A physical stop sign, for example. The signified is the concept embodied by a signifier. All of the stop signs in the world correspond to (roughly) the same concept of stopping, but they are separate instances of that concept. Separate signifiers (instances of "stop sign"), all with the same thing signified (the idea that you should stop).

Now in games, we have the notion of the signifier and the signified, too. Let's take an example item from WoW. I'm using this as an example because it's a game I'm familiar with. An item like Staff of Westfall (https://classic.wowhead.com/item=2042/staff-of-westfall) expresses several things. The first thing that it expresses is that it's a weapon so it uses your weapon slot to equip it, and the stat bonus of +5 intellect that gives you additional mana and +11 spirit that gives you mana regeneration. Great, that's nice. Those things can be taken to be the content of the item: its in-simulation properties and effects. But what does the existence of this item signify? The Staff of Westfall can only be obtained by each player exactly once, cannot be traded between players, and can only be obtained by going to The Deadmines, a particular dungeon, and defeating the final boss. Equipping the Staff of Westfall has the effect that it gives you mana and mana regen, but it also communicates something non-mechanical: that the player carrying the Staff of Westfall has gone to the Deadmines and fought and beaten Edwin VanCleef.

Now, can the Staff of Westfall be transferred to another simulation? Yes and no. The signifier, the physical (virtual?) staff can be transferred to another game in some sense. The 3D model can be transferred, the physical appearance of the item can be transferred. But that was always on your computer all along; it's not particularly meaningful. The effects of the item may or may not be transferable; if a game is not the exact simulation that WoW is, what does +5 intellect and +11 spirit mean? The game operator may elect to translate that to some other concept in their game, or they may not. I think this notion of "transfer" is what you're eluding to: the transfer of the signifier. This concept is probably very useless. It's also the concept that people are generally talking about when they talk about the transfer of items between games. I think it has no merit at all.

But there's something else that can be transferred: the thing that ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies: the concept that the person holding that item has slayed Edwin VanCleef (in WoW). Transferring the Staff of Westfall may not mean transferring the physical model or its attributes, but it may mean something more along the lines of transferring the meaning of what the player has accomplished. Admittedly, I'm not sure why this would be useful or what the applications of such a system would be; what I'm getting at instead is the idea that transferring an asset may mean many things, and that transferring an asset from one simulation to another is not necessarily the opposite.

beepbooptheory• 5 years ago

Maybe, that is just what it should be. Maybe this is the way these things will actually work. The internet itself works, in big part, because it sides with federation over persistence.

entangledqubit• 5 years ago

Transferring objects from one world to another may not be desirable for a few reasons. This could lead to coupling of world economies where something that is meant to be - intentionally - scarce in one world now finds itself with an overabundance.

zemo11• 5 years ago

there's only one metaverse, and there's only one economy in the metaverse. I'm not advocating that you should be moving game objects between games, that's a distinct concept (and probably not a very useful one). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29086415

sergiotapia• 5 years ago

They mispelled Rec-room.

Play Rec-room in VR and tell me this isn't the future of gaming and online interactions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys_OgK2YB4E

sweetbitter2• 5 years ago

Yeah. The totally lawless environments that can be present in Minecraft servers are awesome- the best example of which being 2b2t, a vanilla gameserver running the same map since 2010 that is essentially the 4chan of Minecraft (it even originated there). Despite allowing users to hack to their hearts' content and having no rules, the creativity and sheer amount of media produced by such an environment is stunning.

Here is a comic series that was made based on the server, and a neat video animation someone created: http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEg5UPKPY70

1ibsq• 5 years ago

2b2t is a fascinating place. I always thought, this is the way Minecraft is meant to be played.

The comic series is legendary, but I don't think people can make something out of the animation video without context.

nottorp7• 5 years ago

And that is why the "metaverse" will succeed if it's decentralized.

I wouldn't touch a MC server that has no grief prevention. But you can have your 4chan and I can have my builder server and we're both happy. Because there's no central authority telling us how to run our pieces of "metaverse".

hoseja• 5 years ago

And it turns out it's been pwned for a couple years by people inserting a vulnerability into a dependency by masterful social engineering where the vuln was introduces as an obvious fix to another less exploitable bug.

moffkalast3• 5 years ago

I've never seen people social engineer codebase maintainers into patching them an exploit into it, that was absolutely brilliant.

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

Some people spent decades in Ultima Online and WOW. Ask them how that went.

jmcgough• 5 years ago

I've been blown away by the explosion of "urlfest" concerts teenagers have been running on Minecraft during shutdown. A ton of really good music because everyone was stuck inside and needed something to do (digicore / hyperpop blew up last year).

Zababa8• 5 years ago

I've been saying for quite some time that the next big thing (for me) would be some kind of hybrid between a virtual coworking space, VRChat and Minecraft. I feel like being in a 3D space is a completly different experience from being on a Discord server for example. I'd love to go build a house with friends, then code a bit with them inside, and then invite a few people in.

philjohn• 5 years ago

When I started having meetings in Workrooms I was shocked by how much less fatiguing it was than a standard VC, even with the Quest hanging off my face.

I also regularly sim race (1-2 hour races on iRacing) in VR and that's a much better experience as it's 3D than just starting at a screen - VR feels like it's reached that critical mass moment where it's not going to fade away as a fad.

xboxnolifes• 5 years ago

To be completely honest, I don't really know what people mean when they talk about a "metaverse".

But if I had to define it one way or the other, I feel like I already have, and interact with, a sort of metaverse. I play various video games with various people, talking and interacting with friends for these games on Discord, interacting with the larger community of these games on Discord/Reddit, engaging with influencer communities on Twitch/Youtube, and follow game news on Reddit/Twitter/Youtube/Forums.

In the same vein, I've learned a tremendous amount about computer science, software engineering, job hunting, smaller hobbies, and plenty of other various things through the same set of things that make up my gaming metaverse (Forums/Discord/Youtube/Reddit/HackerNews/etc). It doesn't overlap with the same people I interact with for gaming, but I wouldn't expect the people to overlap much. The platforms are still the same.

And it doesn't really stop there, these are just the two big things I can think of.

So I guess I'm asking, what is the "Metaverse" trying to do? Take what we currently already have, but make it more cohesive? The only other thing I can think of would be a full-dive VR world experience, but I'm fairly sure we aren't even close to that.

AlwaysRock2• 5 years ago

I think the idea is there is a hub where all of those things are connected and live to some extend. Like if your web browser was basically a mmo experience and when you went to do any of the things you mentioned some type of avatar that represents you would be present doing those things rather than just cookies and network traffic from your computer.

My understanding is its just a way to do all the things you do currently but in a more "connected" way.

colordrops5• 5 years ago

Why is no one building open standards or protocols anymore? Way back when, there was VRML, which would be a layer on top of the web, and you could jump from site to site but in 3D space instead of underlined links. Yes, VRML failed, but we've had over 20 years and a massive amount of progress since then. Is there any reason the metaverse couldn't be distributed and sit on top of current web standards?

GhettoComputers3• 5 years ago

Adoption is the issue, not the lack of open standards.

snarf21• 5 years ago

He wants an even more addictive version of the "Ready Player One" Oasis but minus the contest to give it away, he wants to ascend.

gremloni2• 5 years ago

The gold standard would be the matrix but one that you’re aware you’re in and can leave at any time.

72deluxe• 5 years ago

I am pretty sure that the gold standard would be real life. It doesn't require energy or batteries to just exist in real life, unlike the army of devices that will be required to support all this new tech and network infrastructure.

Very odd that on one hand there is a push towards saving the Earth and the carbon crisis, and on the other hand excitement towards technology that lets everyone stick their head in the sand.

AlwaysRock2• 5 years ago

Roblox and Minecraft are great examples of what Metaverses could be. I think that is largely the appeal for many players.

astlouis44• 5 years ago

No, it is not. Neither is Roblox or Fortnite, or VRchat. A single game or world is NOT the metaverse, what is so hard to understand about that for journalists and companies?

The metaverse is the immersive internet, as a successor to our current one that is more 2D oriented around photos/videos/text today. It's a paradigm shift in how we interact, but most importantly there will be many of these virtual worlds/spaces interconnected together to form an actual network that nobody outright owns. To get to this future, we need protocols/standards to allow virtual worlds to talk to one another and agree that users can hop back in forth between them seamlessly, across all platforms.

More specifically, the way we use the web today to navigate from webpage to another is how we we traverse the metaverse. The core problem that needs to get solved right now is interoperability, to enable the "web of 3D".

Look to WebGPU, WebAssembly, and WebXR as cornerstone technologies here. Our startup is building the "3D/VR web" in this way, and our current focus is getting proper HTML5 exporting from the native game engines, currently Unreal Engine. We're also building out a suite of tooling to empower developers and creators along with our hosting/discovery platform that includes advanced texture compression + asynchronous asset fetching to enable 3D/VR websites that load as quickly as a regular 2D page. If you're a developer and are interested in our work, you can join our Discord here:

https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

one_off_comment4• 5 years ago

If the web was created today, it would not be a set of open protocols, markup languages, etc. It would be a product. That's the world we live in, so that's why journalists and companies chase that vision.

There's obviously no way to be sure, but the only reason the web was created how it was is because it was a bunch of academics, nerds, and hobbyists who saw a need and filled it. There was no perceived money in it from the private sector's point of view. Now that there's no question that there's money to be made, it's like blood in the water. And the capitalist sharks can smell it.

An open standard that's given away for free isn't attractive to the people who have the means to create it.

psyc• 5 years ago

And it was a trade off. I think most of us are well acquainted with the advertised advantages of open standards and web application architecture as we know it. But it came at the expense of both user experience and developer experience on par with traditional desktop applications. E.g. arbitrary languages (esp. compiled languages), fast graphics, great UI toolkits. We get some approximation of such things at a glacial pace, or it’s always just over the horizon. Everybody is leery of adopting a comprehensive framework only backed by a single corporation (is this what held Java back?) but standards bodies take 20 years to deliver a bright idea like compiling your favorite language to byte code that can execute in the browser.

bsanr2• 5 years ago

what is so hard to understand about that for journalists and companies?

They've gotten used to redefining existing words to better fit a desired narrative, a habit picked up from your given tech company marketing department. It's funny that you mention XR, which was itself coined in part to get around Microsoft's co-opting of "mixed reality" (which itself evolved to encompass all forms of n-reality after initially being coined to replace "augmented reality", I believe by Magic Leap). It's a mess.

Guest190238922• 5 years ago

The 2D internet works though because it's an efficient means of communication and data transfer. When I search the weather, check directions, send a message, book a flight, buy a shirt, or view the daily news, I can get that done fast on the existing internet. I don't want to load a 3D world to read an article. I don't need to walk around as a 3D avatar to ask a friend what time they're arriving. It's inefficient. It's not the future of the internet. It's a gimmick or form of entertainment.

That being said, I did think it was the future of the internet 15-20 years ago when I was taking CAD files of products and turning them into interactive 3D Flash websites. Then I realized my mistake. People don't want fancy graphics or animations when browsing the internet. They want data. They want it fast, and they want it organized and presented to them in the most efficient way.

For that reason, I don't believe the future of the internet is the metaverse. The future will be something along the lines of neuralink, where information is instantly sent and received from the brain. Instead of spending 20 minutes reading a Wikipedia article, the information will be instantly sent to your brain. Instead of pulling out your phone and checking directions to a restaurant, you'll know where to go just by thinking that very question. The internet will basically be an extension of your brain. What the internet knows, you'll know. That's the future.

_nalply• 5 years ago

I underestimated Minecraft. I knew it is important, so I tried it out two years ago but dismissed it when I got killed by a zombie. I thought, fuck it, I don't need anxiety when it gets night in the game.

But then a friend of my son played Minecraft.

I installed Minecraft on a Chromebook then I watched the children figuring out Minecraft. I figured out lot of things, too.

When I discovered that they created a railway and put monsters onto the trolleys, first I had a hearty laugh then I got intrigued again. I discovered that Minecraft Education Edition has a coding environment similar to Scratch from MIT. I showed them how to create a giant ice cube and dig narrow aisles inside it. Next they created a giant cube of TNT and set it off.

Anyway, I think what will happen: you can't centrally create a world. You need people. So when I read the article I found myself just nodding.

People will find ways how to define and use the metaverse, not that company.

GLGirty• 5 years ago

The internet will basically be an extension of your brain. What the internet knows, you'll know.

I'll know that the stone masons crashed planes into the world trade center to destroy the studio where they faked the moon landing?

thelettere• 5 years ago

This is literally the worst take I've ever read on hn. What's your background in neuropsychology? On what basis besides Elon Musk PR do you have to make this prognostication?

It's never going to happen because that's not the way the human beings work. Which anyone with any knowledge of the brain (i.e. not tech bros) will readily tell you.

phailhaus• 5 years ago

It's pretty wild that Meta has gone all-in on this "metaverse" concept when VR as a platform has completely stagnated to date. VR still hasn't found its killer app, why is Meta so convinced that it's going to look like Second Life?

sprkwd• 5 years ago

Do they know something we don’t?

fullshark• 5 years ago

Maybe they know that VR and Second Life may have stagnated but are going nowhere and as tech improves, the "Metaverse" is inevitable? The fact that Second Life is still a thing in 2021 is actually impressive.

nightpool• 5 years ago

Minecraft is actually a great example here—the client and server ecosystem is extremely, extremely diverse, with lots of different choices for users. Almost everyone who uses Minecraft on desktop is running some mod, if only Optifine, and the server landscape is even more diverse, with dozens of competing reimplementations, all communicating over a shared protocol. I think Minecraft is a great example in the current landscape of a naturally evolved diverse, unowned network of interactive virtual spaces. If Mojang disappeared tomorrow, the only thing the community would need to solve is authentication (and for our use-case, something like mTLS would work super well)

FooHentai• 5 years ago

Agree with everything you said, but to me one key piece of the minecraft ecosystem rules it out as a meta verse contender - every one of those permutations you mentioned drops players into their own isolated environment which does not interact with any others. At best you can pop a few hundred people into a server specially configured for that, or use a discord/irc shim to bridge chat across a few instances.

I get the sense something more integrated at the user experience level is being suggested here as ‘metaverse’. I guess part of my read on that is cynical - if true it suggests a winner takes operator all at the centre with some kind of app/content ecosystem alongside. Perhaps I’m reading the roblox comparisons too literally.

BiteCode_dev3• 5 years ago

That's the metaverse we wish for, yet it's not the metaverse FB wants to build. It is the metaverse only in name, but it's just another proprietary sillowed plateform built to milk users.

A metaverse should have an HTTP-like protocol, with the goal to interconnect, to give power to the client, while allowing an ecosystem to build, because it would be defined as an open standard.

We need a 2021 Tim Berners Lee, not a Mark Zuckerberg.

nightowl_games3• 5 years ago

Agreed. This is the linuxy open source metaverse that nerds like us will promote on forums like this.

The general public will use the walled garden capitalistic metaverse because it will be better.

gremloni2• 5 years ago

Plus if it doesn’t look good and have porn it’s no good.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS5• 5 years ago

I don't know about porn, but Minecraft has shaders and the very pretty RTX version.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

I think you at least get the vision, however I believe the current web standards is what is preventing forward progress. What you describe could be achieved much easier by moving sandboxing into the OS and using containers. I'd much rather see a modern markup format for describing content and data than what we have today. Not 1000x bloated frameworks to do simple things. I believe it we are ever going to make the metaverse a reality we have to really reenvision our current technology not on what we have today by trying to incorporate next gen solutions into a failing model but create something new and expandable that is easy to get started.

EastOfTruth• 5 years ago

It is a current form of the metaverse... and I think that you underestimate how it could evolve... but I sure hope that WebAssembly never takes over.

chupchap• 5 years ago

More specifically, the way we use the web today to navigate from webpage to another is how we we traverse the metaverse. The core problem that needs to get solved right now is interoperability, to enable the "web of 3D".

May be I lack vision, but I'm not able to understand why we need this. What I have realised during lockdown is that I don't want to or can be fully immersed in one thing. I'm always multi-tasking different things on a computer and in a real world around me. Metaverse seems to be opposite of that. So while it was an interesting demo, it felt very unintuitive to me at this point.

InvisibleUp• 5 years ago

The thing is, this was tried already with VRML in the 90s. And that totally flopped, because as it turns out, people would rather not deal with the clunkiness of excess skeuomorphism when they can instead just type in a text box or click on a button. Perhaps actual VR headsets could ease the pain of that, but it would have to be incredibly good for it to be a preferable alternative to just directly producing/consuming the relevant data via text messages, video chats, etc.

On that note, I feel that Microsoft has a better approach here of just "Teams but in VR", a nice simple scope compared to trying to reinvent the entire internet.

pknerd• 5 years ago

I have not played Minecraft, my son does but I think that Metaversa is more closer to the Matrix movie instead of Minecraft.

polycaster• 5 years ago

Since I watched the highlights reel mentioned in the article [1] I wonder if there exists sort of a doctrine in recent PR video production to always include a super annoying aspect of choreography to keep people from thinking too long about the actual message.

Here Zuck and friends are trying neurotically to keep their fingertips at 1cm distance at any time. Waving their hands as if they were mockups.

In recent Apple event recordings Tim, Craig and the gang cannot get their feet together like anatomically unchallenged humans would do when standing casually. Always more than shoulder's width apart. I've observed something similar once after a mountain biking contest, got to do something with the saddle.

It's obviously not pleasing to the eye (or is it me?). But I cannot see a compelling reason and I refuse to take this as a coincidence. Why???

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g

throwawaywindev• 5 years ago

They teach that stuff in business school.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFLjudWTuGQ

nottorp7• 5 years ago

That's why you shouldn't watch - or even listen to - someone who's trying to sell you something. You're too likely to be influenced by their acting skills.

Just read the transcript or the summaries in written news.

VikingCoder4• 5 years ago

I want a single contiguous Minecraft world that everyone can use.

Each account could get a range of blocks allocated to them, after Credit Card validation, to prove you're a real person.

You could pay to own some more blocks.

The blocks you get are just a land grab.

You can trade blocks you own for blocks someone else owns, and there could be a monetary transaction to go with it.

You can build what you want to on your blocks.

How does all of this pay for itself? We set up Pay To Download blocks. If you want to fly around my creation, you can, and it just costs a little bit to do it.

For the blocks I control, my Server lets me make permanent changes to those blocks. I can let other people on my Server, and I can give them permission to help me make changes to those blocks. We can make a shared Access Control List, and pool our blocks together, and edit them together.

If you visit my area, you're using some Server to do it, and you can be on the same Server as your group of friends. And y'all can make a Copy-On-Write set of modifications to my blocks. And those blocks will stay, as long as your Server caches them. But no one else sees your changes.

Maybe add some minor annual fee to blocks, so that if someone abandons their blocks, that they fall back to the public domain.

If you want to get fancy, you allow block owners to set up royalties for visiting, and clients can set some rate limiters for how much they'll pay, and etc.

I get that Minecraft itself has licensing terms that prevent us from doing this, and especially if money changes hands. I get that people build things that infringe copyright, and the only reason it's tolerated is because money isn't changing hands. I get that if someone hosts this, they'll have to deal with DMCA copyright teardown notices, and etc. And I get that it's not like the true Metaverse where you randomly bump into people you don't know, and can make permanent changes to the world together.

But I just think it's bizarre that someone will make a really cool Minecraft map, and I can't explore it, even if I have money and I'm willing to pay a bit.

If this whole system came with the ability to click a URL to immediately appear in some blocks? I mean, I just think that would be so cool.

Okay, I saved my idea, and hopefully someone will implement something like it.

4ggr04• 5 years ago

You could pay to own some more blocks.

Let's bring wealth-gaps to the metaverse, what could go wrong ;)

PeterisP4• 5 years ago

It's not like wealth-gaps will be left outside of any realistic metaverse (especially one made by FB, but not only that). If people treat it seriously, then it becomes linked with all the real world factors, and wealth is obviously one of those.

VikingCoder4• 5 years ago

I was also advocating that people be able to make money by creating content that people visit.

Perhaps schools can hand out blocks for citizenship, and for things like the Duke of Edinburgh Award, for time volunteering at an animal shelter or senior center.

If you have ideas for how to "solve" the wealth gap, I'm all ears. Until then, I'm kind of stuck in that as a framework for how to solve problems.

i_like_apis• 5 years ago

We will see several evolutions of the metaverse and there probably will continue to be more than one.

recursive2• 5 years ago

Mojang thus far hasn’t built microtransactions

He must have a different Minecraft. Minecraft on xbox has a shop for skins and plugins and all kind of stuff right on the very first menu you see. It even has some kind of daily deal. It has its own funny money currency system. (Google "minecoins")

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS5• 5 years ago

I think the author is talking about "in-world" microtransactions. The Xbox (really, Bedrock edition) marketplace exists outside of your world. You have to leave the world to go there, even though you can use items purchased there in-world.

cesarb3• 5 years ago

He must have a different Minecraft. Minecraft on xbox [...]

Given how much he talks about custom servers and mods, yes he has a different Minecraft: he's talking about the Java edition, not the Bedrock edition which is the one which runs on the Xbox.

recursive2• 5 years ago

And yet Mojang did build it.

m3kw9• 5 years ago

Like Web3.0 we are gonna get every shade of meaning of Metaverse shoved down our throats for the foreseeable future.

dane-pgp• 5 years ago

But what if Web 3.0 is the Metaverse?

ksaj2• 5 years ago

Last year they were trying to hype XR (eXtended Reality). I guess that didn't fly and now they're trying to see if Metaverse will interest the target market.

Kids will love it for sure. It is indeed Minecraft, but with different/better graphics.

polypodiopsi• 5 years ago

The metaverse.. Made to make prople forget that they cant afford that resource getting scarce: space.

Escaping from the narrowness of a shitty appartment into the constriction of a vrheadset... Appealing.

justapassenger• 5 years ago

Dropbox is already here - it's rsync.

a9h74j• 5 years ago

Dumb question: Is 'metaverse' (as Meta wants to use it) in some sense born generic in Trademark/IP terms?

mrkramer• 5 years ago

So at the end of the day any virtual world is metaverse? Video games' worlds like the ones of Minecraft, Roblox, World of Warcraft etc.

randomsearch6• 5 years ago

“What is so hard for people to understand” says HN commenter: “the metaverse clearly means [my definition of the metaverse] why can’t people see this?!!”

Well, Zuckerberg didn’t give a clear definition, the term itself is made up, and it doesn’t currently exist (otherwise, what would we be building?).

So no you don’t know what it means or how it will turn out, and neither does Zuckerberg. He might have a vision of what he’d like it to be and how he’s going to make money out of it, but he’s very probably very wrong.

It’s obvious a deeply immersive experience will eventually arrive but it seems far from obvious how it will be used, much like predicting the rise of Tik Tok in 1990 based on email and usenet.

The best way to predict the future is to make it. Hackers built much of the early internet, so let’s go build the early metaverse and at least make something insanely experimental and magical and beautiful before the next Zuckerberg comes alone and devalues it.

micromacrofoot2• 5 years ago

It’s obvious a deeply immersive experience will eventually arrive

This is like "self driving car" obvious. It seems like we're close, but we're really really not.

randomsearch6• 5 years ago

I think that’s a very good analogy, not least because our incremental steps to self driving cars and similar to our incremental steps towards immersion - we already have some components (parking assist, social media) but there’s still a large gap.

mohanmcgeek• 5 years ago

Facebook over the years had several opportunities to buy game studios and become a gaming company themselves.

This metaverse is a VR video game and Facebook has demonstrated zero abilities to make a video game.

I would bet on Minecraft and Fortnite creators to be a better position to create this "metaverse" because they've done this before.

nightowl_games3• 5 years ago

Fortnite, yes, almost definitely. Epic is a true leader in videogame technology.

Minecraft, no. Minecraft has failed to truly innovate since Microsoft acquired it, imo. I think the evidence of this is apparent in the existence of both Minecraft Bedrock and Java editions.

The metaverse is about creating the one true videogame. The final videogame. The holodeck where gamers themselves can make new games at a rapid speed.

The Unity Asset Store is actually a treasure trove of value for Unity in this regard. I could see Facebook buying Unity for a massive sum or licensing the engine and asset store somehow to make a play towards this vision of the metaverse.

That is, unless Epic just makes it first.

nottorp7• 5 years ago

“What is so hard for people to understand” says HN commenter: “the metaverse clearly means [my definition of the metaverse] why can’t people see this?!!”

The point of the article is that the metaverse is here and it's decentralized enough that the other 7 billion people that don't care about the opinion of one specific HN commenter are doing their own thing.

t0mbstone• 5 years ago

meta (adjective)

pertaining to or noting a story, conversation, character, etc., that consciously references or comments upon its own subject or features, often in the form of parody

-------------

It's obvious to me that the real reason they called it "Meta" is because the entire goal is to collect information about YOU, the user. It's an entire platform and suite of products designed to extract as much "meta" information about its users as possible, and then monetize that information.

Ono-Sendai• 5 years ago

Something with only voxels (blocks) can never be a great metaverse in my opinion. You need more general geometry - such as triangles. Have you ever tried to model a sphere or a smoothly curved surface in voxels?

Allowing arbitrary triangle meshes is technically harder to implement for various reasons (more data, harder physics, harder for artists to create).

But I think it's worth it. I allow arbitrary user geometry in my metaverse - https://substrata.info/

wellthisisgreat• 5 years ago

How about there is no Metaverse and never will be?

There is Internet that’s good enough.

chiefalchemist• 5 years ago

True but of minor importance. The idea of a social network wasn't invented by FB, and it worked out well - so far - for it and its shareholders.

The metaverse doesn't have to be Zuck's. He only needs to time the wave, with a pinch of wave self-creation obviously.

kristopolous• 5 years ago

Facebook is a cloner. They were first a Myspace clone. Then they invented the feed, "like" and "share" when Twitter came around with their feed, heart and retweet and "disappearing" stories when Snapchat started and then "reels" when tiktok picked up.

At first Twitter didn't support images and the Facebook feed didn't either. Then Twitter did and the Facebook feed did. Whoop dee doo

There's nothing mysterious about this. Just see what's popular and imagine it blue, boxy, and boring. Congratulations, that's Facebook's next feature.

Even the strategy itself is just a copy of the Bill Gates playbook from the 80s and 90s.

They should have renamed themselves "Derivative" instead

short12• 5 years ago

Cool, I have now just lost the little interest I had in the metaverse because Minecraft is really stupid

mark-r2• 5 years ago

The only reason Minecraft doesn't have microtransactions is because they haven't gotten around to it yet. I recently interviewed for a position on the team that's going to make it happen.

charcircuit5• 5 years ago

Bedrock edition already has microtransactions. Unlike what many JE players think you can still download resource packs, skins, maps, etc off the intend instead of the marketplace.

charcircuit5• 5 years ago

I think Minecraft is a really good influence for people wishing to build a metaverse but Minecraft is too limited and Mojang has too much control over it.

dukeofdoom• 5 years ago

Kind of a cringe video. Zuckerberg doing a convincing impression of Data from Star Trek. It's like that episode where Data tries to understand human emotions, and only succeeds in vaguely faking a smile. Except this time he wants to build a virtual world for humans. But he doesn't understand it's limited by his android brain's concept of what humans are.

adminscoffee• 5 years ago

i am not interested in any of these companies bringing us the metaverse. let's do a public utility version of it then

randomsearch6• 5 years ago

A little OT but related and want to bounce this off HN.

I think we’ve reached a turning point in history and society, aided by lockdowns, where young people spend more time interacting online than IRL. This has major consequences for society and tech.

Young people present themselves to the world primarily through their online persona. The physical world is secondary. To reiterate, what happens online, what is shown and seen online, is more important to them than the same in physical space.

You could probably write a book about the consequences of this (maybe someone has?) but two particularly salient points: (1) if you’re not an onliner then it’s hard for you to understand how the future will look, and (2) your desires are just going to be fundamentally different from other people.

I know from talking to CEOs that those entering the workforce now are most comfortable interacting through Slack and WhatsApp. Physical interactions are sometimes difficult, because people have less experience of it - usually it takes them longer to bond, and more formal social situations are challenging because they’ve not had much practice and to learn the rules governing behaviour in certain physical spaces.

It’s easy for oldies to mock Zuckerberg with his embarrassing meta presentation, and indeed I think his influence is waning (because he’s also out of touch) but for sure the future is going to be driven by people who are living online. Avatars may seem like a 90s throwback but that’s just because of how we conceive of them; the truth is _we already have avatars, they’re just messy and distributed and mostly text based_.

Personally I don’t like this conclusion. I think the physical world is superior in many ways, for example physical activity and exercise are fundamental to wellbeing, and I can’t see that being properly and healthily replicated in the virtual world for a very long time. I think there are more noble and worthwhile goals to be pursued in the physical world. But just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it ain’t true.

I’ve half a mind to join ‘em, half a mind to go build a log cabin.

meheleventyone4• 5 years ago

It’s not either or. These are complementary things. I’ve been extremely online since the mid-90s for example. There’s nothing sinister or world changing here. Online isn’t a separate universe it’s just a part of IRL.

ZephyrBlu2• 5 years ago

I think you're proving his point beautifully. You've been online since the mid-90s, so you're ~40 or older?

I don't mean to be derogatory, but you sound exactly like an "oldie" who is out of touch as described by the GP.

Zoomers are absolutely spending more time online and less time IRL than previous generations.

I'm only 23 and the difference between my childhood and my younger siblings is massive. They generally prefer to socialize by playing online games with their friends rather than hanging out with them in person, and they do so for hours at a time. I used to go to friends houses to play games. That doesn't seem to happen anymore.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

I agree. There is a more general point that we underestimate that human persons are to a very large extent informational creatures. It's not just young people, look how everyone and their grandma embraced technology once it became easy to use. The world is increasingly informational, people become increasingly rootless and travel and the economy is turning to a vending machine where ubiquitous services deliver most of the things a person needs anywhere in the world. In this world, digital personas and digital property are more permanent than physical possessions. So i expect more of the economy to move to digital assets over time. Zuck is probably realizing that there the opportunity offered from pseudonymous avatars is bigger than the current one which depends on very public, "real names" communications. I think he is right, but i think he is wrong about how much of it he can control.

sabujp• 5 years ago

If you feel handicapped now without your cell phone, just imagine what's going to happen when you lose/break your AR headset you wear everywhere (hopefully except when sleep) or when the bionic implant Elon plugged into your brain stops working. Pay up peasant.

samsaga2• 5 years ago

Metaverse it's only a marketing label. It has been here forever.

axismundi• 5 years ago

No, it's not. Minecraft is just a single game. If you could teleport between Second Life and Minecraft, then we could start talking about multiverse.

bullen2• 5 years ago

The most important fact about Java Minecraft that most people are missing is that long after Notch left the company they started distributing deobfuscation maps for it:

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\versions\1.17.1\1.17.1.json

Look for: client_mappings & server_mappings

https://launcher.mojang.com/v1/objects/e4d540e0cba05a6097e88...

https://launcher.mojang.com/v1/objects/f6cae1c5c1255f68ba483...

The tricky part is they don't provide deobfuscation tools, so everyone makes their own and it's a mess.

But Minecraft is for all practical purposes open-source since 2018!

Legally you cannot distribute the deobfuscated binaries, so most people map the code.

I would probably use the 1.17.1 as the last "open" minecraft and start a fork that you compile and work with after deobfuscation and then re-obfuscate at each release.

Dunno what the legal team at Microsoft would think about that!

Hasnep• 5 years ago

I wouldn't say "for all practical purposes" because one of the practical parts of open source software is the open source licence. It's more like a "source available" project, and only once you've bought it which seems fair enough to me. I'm sure it makes modding much easier which I'm grateful for.

google234123• 5 years ago

Dunno what the legal team at Microsoft would think about that!

I’m sure they would think something like “No good deed goes unpunished.”

bullen2• 5 years ago

So apparently I'm not allowed to redistribute the re-obfuscated jar but instead I need to map my changes to be compatible with the official jar. That puts a quick end to my interest in this project... But I still deobfuscated 1.14.4 and 1.17.1 and compared the file additions/removals here: http://move.rupy.se/file/diff.txt

VLM2• 5 years ago

The problem with businessmen trying to make a metaverse is its got uncreative people trying to make tools for creative people, and trying to engineer unscalable and impractical cargo cult solutions.

The uncreative part is best seen in how businessmen think you should buy books online by simply emulating, 3d game style, the experience of going to a shopping mall in 1980 and walking the aisles and waiting in line at Waldenbooks. The actual way books are sold online is instead of a very user unfriendly POS terminal based on a 5150 terminal connected to an AS/400, its a pretty and easy to use UI web based point of sale terminal. Essentially Amazon tricked us into doing free labor for them, being our own cashier/salespeople. Gotta admit that's more creative than "put the mall in GTA3 (Edited: more like GTA Vice City, and that was an awesome game LOL) as a map and pretend to visit the mall in 1980" like the businessmen thought online shopping would resemble.

The cargo cult is the businessmen never think thru how to scale and make things work. The main reason it took until 1900 for heavier than air flight was too many of 'those guys' in charge trying to make airplanes by emulating birds. Just make a 747 by packing ground beef around glued together chicken bones and I'm sure it'll eventually fly real well, says the businessmen. Obviously one makes railroad engines by building steam powered fully articulated four legged mining donkeys. Obviously teen socializing using technology will be putting a "Mall Rats" movie map as a level in Doom. (edited: Jetson era portrayal of robot factories, lol.)

Meanwhile I lived thru the 90s 00s where the legacy media, which is finally near dead, decided everything internet and VR was actually bad special effects as an analogy for a LSD trip. Why bother with actually "doing VR" if you could replace all the hardware in a video game console with a acid tab dispenser. I mean, they're not wrong in a sense, but only Hollywood people would have expected/demanded that everyone wants to be high all the time.

HeavyStorm• 5 years ago

Or it's second life. Or gta. Or any number of games out there that allow for user to create content.

corndoge• 5 years ago

No, it's VRChat

akacia2• 5 years ago

People have too much of dopamine rush from the ordinary social media to get engaged in such complex projects. Second Life was an expection created in times where there was no social media and people were looking for alternative ways to pass time and were willing to invest their time in learning how to use Second Life (it is a quite complex creation tool and game client at the same time).

akacia2• 5 years ago

What Second Life is missing is the decentralization and newer graphic/scripting engine. Creator of Second Life already tried to create VR metaverse with those issues solved and it didn't catch on.

hypertele-Xii• 5 years ago

No, it isn't.

The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

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