Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29136478

by 0des • 5 years ago

257 363 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Does anybody remember the Second Life boom when companies were trying to snap up linden-land and set up shop online? That failed, and I can't help but feel like the 'metaverse' concept being marketed to us is that, but with VR helmets and advertising strapped on.

junon• 5 years ago

Second Life required you were at least 18 at one point. It was meant more for social gatherings and meeting spots and I think (though I'm not 100%) that they shifted toward "virtual" office spaces with a focus on community building and digital trade using real-life currency.

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.

BoorishBears2• 5 years ago

I'm shocked people are taking "Meta" at face value.

To me it's a way to signal to outsiders that Facebook is still cool and hip. That's it.

Now when recruiting they can play the Meta-not-Facebook angle.

Now if they can pad earnings calls with the amazing success the metaverse is seeing (so what if it's losing us money, that's the future!)

It's like an inverse Alphabet. Where Alphabet silently serves as an umbrella for moonshots, Meta is a moonshot that's an umbrella for boring old Facebook

nowherebeen5• 5 years ago

Meta-not-Facebook

I am going to start using this term to satisfy people that argue its not called Facebook anymore.

aerosmile• 5 years ago

Nailed it.

cm2012• 5 years ago

They are spending insanely on r and d on this compared to companies their size. 10b a year.

mherrmann2• 5 years ago

The metaverse, as I understand it, is just Facebook Games but in VR, for kids and bored adults.

I don't think that's true. Search for "Horizon Workrooms" to see an (IMHO) significant product they have in the collaboration tool space.

legostormtroopr• 5 years ago

That’s the most dystopian thing about this - the best, most aspiration use for VR they can show case is… meetings, but in VR.

retrocryptid6• 5 years ago

fwiw, SL launched the "teen grid" in 2005. later they merged it in with the main grid and disallowed youngsters from entering "adult themed regions"

ilaksh3• 5 years ago

You used the lowercase metaverse. THAT metaverse is a broad concept definitely not specific to Facebook. It encompasses things like Second Life and Meta's attempts, but the more pure connotation is something like the world wide web but with virtual spaces and avatars. Not controlled by any particular company.

The strange thing to me is that web browsers do support VR, and they used to even support navigating seamlessly between VR pages without exiting VR mode. But for some reason the seamless navigation was removed. And browsers are almost never even mentioned in these discussions of the Metaverse, even by people who seem concerned that some proprietary platform will take over.

This type of utter failure to understand or recognize the significance of various technologies even by groups like HN, makes me seriously support the idea of AI taking over control of the planet.

ve55• 5 years ago

We have better technology (and thus immersion) now. It's a simple answer, but I think largely sufficient enough to explain why things may be quite different now.

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.

Waterluvian• 5 years ago

It’s a way for Zuckerberg to learn firsthand just how much luck was involved in his success.

juancampa• 5 years ago

It's not like he invented the concept. They are trying to take over the term though

nowherebeen5• 5 years ago

Its a powerplay. If he succeeds, he can solidify himself as a product genius, but in reality its just his money at play. Its easier to use money to take over something than to use money to invent something new.

outside1234• 5 years ago

It will include scanning people’s faces and a thousand other privacy vortexes

01100011• 5 years ago

Do you mean the Facebook metaverse or the general concept?

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.

0des• 5 years ago

The Facebook metaverse

Animats3• 5 years ago

Facebook has already had three tries at the metaverse - the Oculus version, Facebook Spaces, and Facebook Horizon. They're all so bad that Facebook won't give out user counts.

rhizome3• 5 years ago

Whatever anybody thinks "metaverse" means now, what it really means, Facebook is going to change it permanently or go out of business. They have to be able to define away every negative aspect of their new metaphorical identity or they'll be used to undermine every future development of FB.

Meta was created out of a life or death situation (perceived or otherwise), so they have to gain control over their future so that it isn't possible for that to happen again. None of Gibson's words can prevent or counteract this.

889135272• 5 years ago

We're all talking about the Metaverse instead of whatever else is going on with Facebook. So it changed the public narrative. However, the latest earnings report was fine, so rumors of Meta's demise are quite exaggerated. Their other web properties will remain profitable for a long time.

I see many others here calling out FB's pending decline, but I don't see anyone offering a clear thesis for how it happens. It could simply be wishful thinking. Locking down iOS doesn't mean Meta can't do targeted advertising with all previously collected data. Less effective, sure, but not meaningfully so.

musicale• 5 years ago

Pretty much.

The possibly good news is it shows that Facebook doesn't really know how to avert its own decline.

rhizome3• 5 years ago

Google Search and Android are worse than they were before Alphabet.

npunt• 5 years ago

Web 1 had a lot of ideas that failed because they were too early, not because they were inherently bad ideas. Not sure if Metaverse will work exactly like SL did, or if its even the right idea, but it certainly will have a larger audience and lower cost of entry for both users and developers.

sillysaurusx• 5 years ago

This is the correct answer. Lots of old ideas were in fact horrible ideas, until suddenly they weren't. Cannons were awful, right up till Napoleon proved otherwise.

I think people are so skeptical due to a combination of disliking Facebook and the usual "overestimating the impact of years, underestimating the impact of decades."

Wouldn't it be remarkable if 2021 happened to get the web exactly right? Think of it: in 3021, people will be using Twitter just like they do now, with Chrome and plugins and all the rest.

Projecting forward helps dispel your own preconceptions. And then you conclude "Why not build it now?" -- There's often not much standing in the way, except a whole lot of work (along with a fair bit of luck).

It seems like most of us just don't want Facebook to own the next Twitter. Admittedly, that's a scary proposition.

I suppose my advice would be to become comfortable with that sooner than later. Zuck has never gotten big bets wrong. It's possible this will be the first, but I wouldn't want to take the other side of that bet if my money was on the line.

889135272• 5 years ago

It's hard for me to imagine one of the incumbents leading the next generation of innovation, despite the copious amounts of capital to execute it. They view the world through their own Overton window, such that the next leap forward will originate from some perspective independent of their own. Brick-and-mortar stores weren't going to be the ones pushing online sales. A lot of the last few years have been copy/paste product ideas from other smaller social media companies: that's the reality. FB realized not everything has to be a timeline. At best, Meta could be something truly novel, but at its worst, it's just marketing to paper over the lack of innovative Product leadership within FB.

psyc2• 5 years ago

Meta can buy fresh blood. Oculus was acquired. Parts of Oculus were acquired and acquihired. If a smaller company innovates in this space, acquisition by Meta is an obvious business plan. Zuckerberg is a geek almost young enough to be my kid. If I can imagine a thriving metaverse, and I can, I don’t see why he can’t.

laserbeam• 5 years ago

Isn't this just a forced rebranding during s time of pr nightmares that has nothing to do with actually building a successful "metaverse"?

ed2• 5 years ago

Don’t read much into the product side of meta. Metaverse is just a hedge, so that if Apple shows us how to do VR/AR “right,” Facebook will have $10B worth of pieces on the board to be competitive, allowing them to avoid another iOS platform risk. Owning a platform provides leverage elsewhere too. Apple will be Apple, but maybe Facebook can be Android, next time around. (As a side benefit, it also helps “rally the troops,” which is needed given current morale.)

kooshball• 5 years ago

ya obviously it's reasonable that Facebook changed the name of their company for a "hedge"

symlinkk• 5 years ago

Actually it’s totally reasonable. They got bad press and rebranded to seem hip and futuristic. It’s that simple

ed2• 5 years ago

Eh, I don’t know. Nothing of value was renamed — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are unchanged. And “Meta” is a good name for an umbrella organization, even if they drop their VR ambition entirely.

cloudking2• 5 years ago

It's a vision for when VR/AR transitions from being heavy clunky hardware with niche use cases and early adopters, to lightweight powerful hardware with wide use cases and majority adoption. Similar to how mobile phones started out with a small group of adopters, then technologically evolved enabling more use cases, got small enough to fit in our pockets and now everyone has one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle

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.

cybernautique3• 5 years ago

I wouldn't use a non-FOSS platform or experience for non-corporate reasons. My employer wants me to use a particular hardware? Fine, but I'm not using my money for it, I won't like it, and I'll break it every chance I get.

The idea that I will work and play in the metaverse is forever and eternally blocked by which particular group of assholes is trying to wrangle me. If it's a group that allows me the same access they have, which enable me to wrangle the tech and myself? I'll pay triple the premium, just to stick it to Zuck and other proprietary scum.

perryizgr83• 5 years ago

I wouldn't use a non-FOSS platform or experience

You are in the extreme minority, if smartphone trends are to be treated as any kind of indication. So your actions likely would not matter to Meta/Apple/Google.

cloudking2• 5 years ago

I respect your opinion and completely understand where you are coming from, but I think you should also consider the amount of technical effort, organization and money required to build something like an open platform/protocol for the metaverse + all the advanced hardware required. It would be awesome if a group of strangers from the internet were able to band together and build this, but let's face it, they will have no where near the resources and talent a place like Meta, Google, Apple or Microsoft has. They have the top engineers on the planet, hardware pipelines and the resources to actually make these ideas become reality.. or virtual reality? :)

whatgoodisaroad• 5 years ago

In the most recent episode of the Exponent [1] Ben Thompson and James Allworth make the interesting argument that it's intended to recreate the enterprise-to-consumer transition that PCs made but for VR technology. That is to say that very low price-sensitivity enterprise money will end up funding dramatic technological improvements in VR that can then be more effectively deployed to capture consumers.

[1] https://exponent.fm/episode-196-forecasting-the-metaverse/

HWR_14• 5 years ago

Second Life didn't have the resources of a (approx) trillion-dollar company to pour into a solution by a CEO convinced it's the future. That can fix a lot of problems and force a lot of adoption.

psyc2• 5 years ago

A company that already makes the best selling VR hardware by a healthy margin.

chrisco255• 5 years ago

Second Life was limited in many ways, as far as gameplay goes. Ultimately it failed because it was boring, in my opinion. More modern examples of games that approach this concept are Minecraft or Roblox (public company valued at $45B). Roblox in particular is interesting as it created a platform for others to make game experiences and re-sell them, and it's been very successful. Minecraft, too, has had a lot of staying power and has an active community.

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.

Animats3• 5 years ago

Ultimately it failed because it was boring, in my opinion.

This, in fact, the real problem. Second Life really is a virtual world, not a game. You log in, and you're somewhere in a virtual world the size of Greater London. Now what? The virtual world itself is completely indifferent to you. You can do nothing, if you choose, and nothing will happen. You will not be attacked by monsters. You will not be destroyed by a shrinking vortex. You can go to an area that's not busy and sit or stand for as long as you want to stay logged in. A car might drive by. The sun will rise and set. Not much else will happen.

You can travel around and look at stuff. You can talk to people. There are games to play if you can find them. You can build stuff. You can sell stuff. But you have to find things to do. There are guides and search tools, but you have to use them. It's a "pull" system like the web, not a "push" system like Facebook.

This totally throws a sizable fraction of new users, mostly those who want a pre-structured entertainment experience. It's great for the fraction of the population that likes to build something from nothing. That small fraction.

The second part of "boring" is that Second Life is really sluggish. This is a fixable problem, stemming from legacy code from the era of OpenGL and single-CPU desktops.

Nobody has really looked hard enough at metaverse client theory yet. You have many of the problems of an MMO client, in that you have to present a real-time 3D environment. And you have many of the problems of a web browser, in that the network throws un-optimized stuff at you and you have to deal with it. The big game engines, UE5 and Unity, don't address that latter problem.

All this looks quite fixable, if you target a gamer-level GPU (even one from 5 years ago), a few CPUs, an SSD disk for caching, and over 100mb/s networking. This is what the average Steam user has. We ought to be able to get up to GTA V level visual quality and frame rate. Second Life has content that good.

A third problem with Second Life is that the social features are terrible. The group message system has been losing messages for a year due to a scaling problem. (It was designed so that you could talk to people in your party, not broadcast to your store's customer base.) The voice system, outsourced to Vivox, is flaky. There's two decades of technical debt and not much will or money to fix it.

Mainstream metaverse adoption may be a problem in the era of the $1000 phone and the $200 laptop. What we're seeing right now are new low-end virtual worlds that look like games from 15 years ago. Many run inside a browser. This may be why few people actually spend time in Decentraland. The VR headgear people really don't have much more compute power than a phone. Beat Saber, fine. Breakroom, OK. Big virtual world, not so much.

On line right now:

- Roblox: 1,446,121 users.

- Second Life: 35,008 users.

- VRchat: 29,072 users.

- Decentraland: 604 users.

- Facebook Horizon: they're not saying.

Shank• 5 years ago

Conceptually speaking, the difference with AR/VR is that you can have a truly immersive experience, which really does give you more possibilities than just Second Life, which was always just a 3D game world on a 2D screen. The pitch from Meta and with AR/VR is that with the ability to use 3D space, you can actually turn Second Life-style virtual worlds into something useful with actual tangible benefits. For example, VR/AR sense-of-presence totally outclasses video calls, if the intent is to feel like you're really in a room with someone. VRChat is already one of the most popular VR apps for a reason.

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.

noduerme2• 5 years ago

I'm pretty skeptical it'll ever take off. Having tried to hang around in the Oculus Go spaces early on, it was pretty clear no one really had a great reason for being there. You'd sit around a badly rendered bonfire and hear people talking, sometimes interestingly, but it had about the same level of interest as getting on a CB and talking to strangers.

There are two kinds of people you can meet in VR: Friends and strangers. Friends, you can meet privately. You don't need a public space 'verse for that. And as for jostling around or randomly talking to strangers, well, you can walk outside or go to a bar.

It seems pretty nuts that Facebook would actually put its chips on this proposition. I can only view it as a totally desperate attempt to distract from the train wreck of their core business model.

kristiandupont• 5 years ago

Friends, you can meet privately

if you live close to one another. If you don't, I guess this could be interesting? I don't really see myself using it but I am so old fashioned that I prefer my laptop over my phone so I get that the world doesn't always agree with me.

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

But there is clubhouse (presuming it’s still popular?) which has turned strangers into friends but maybe that’s because of it being pure audio and minimal interface. It’s possible someone will create a similar popular “gameplay” in vr?

arisAlexis• 5 years ago

This sounds like Krugman's fax machine prediction

hakfoo• 5 years ago

To me, the problem is finding situations where immersiveness actually adds value.

I think for a lot of social interactions, it doesn't, or it offers rapidly diminishing value.

This conversation would not be meaningfully better as a virtual/augmented reality 3D live chat.

The Google Hangouts (or whatever it's called this week) meetings with my team at work would not be better either.

I'm not even sure it would beat playing a pen-and-paper RPG with friends over Discord and Roll20.

Now, there's two ways this could end up panning out:

1) The "metaverse" ends up sticking to the scenarios where immersive experiences add value. I'd expect this would be mostly gaming, media consumption, and some specific built-for-the-platform educational products.

2) We figure out new paradigms that make it worthwhile to replace current collaboration or communications tools.

What confuses me on point 2 is that I think we're going to have to basically invent new paradigms for "window management". The thing I'm picturing is doing a PowerPoint presentation in VR. We'd have people jostling for the best view, and whatever "immersive" metaphor for presenting is likely to be clunkier than a classic Zoom call where the slides are just walked through on one big window.

I'm not sure the 3D shopping model will come to meaningful fruition. We have plenty of retailers who can't even get text descriptions right, especially when it comes to huge catalogues. Are they really going to spend bazillions of dollars building accurate models, making sure the sizes track properly, etc?

kibwen2• 5 years ago

Note that Amazon already supports product listings with interactive 360 degree product visualizations. It's only a small step from there to full 3D modeled product renderings. That said, I can't say I would find it especially compelling to peruse a 3D model in VR as opposed to perusing it on a normal screen. Either way it just involves rotating our perspective around the rendering and observing it via the 2D planes of our eyes. I can imagine some small utility if I could accurately measure the dimensions of the product at arbitrary angles in VR, as a sort of freeform replacement for schematic diagrams, but that requires trust that the product listers will actually get the scale correct, and it would not be an overwhelmingly common use case.

swman2• 5 years ago

You don’t need to spend billions. Generating 3d models from stitching images together is possible and with some automation and focused products it will become much easier

drusepth• 5 years ago

What confuses me on point 2 is that I think we're going to have to basically invent new paradigms for "window management". The thing I'm picturing is doing a PowerPoint presentation in VR. We'd have people jostling for the best view, and whatever "immersive" metaphor for presenting is likely to be clunkier than a classic Zoom call where the slides are just walked through on one big window.

As someone who has given a couple presentations in VR (and spent ~400 hours coding/working in VR), there's a lot to be done here. Some very basic examples of value-adds are:

- You (or your audience) can manipulate the presentation "viewport" to any size and/or replicate it wherever each viewer prefers in their own space (e.g. you can sit down on your couch and watch the presentation on a big screen, or have it as a "second monitor" next to something else, or treat it Hololens-pinned style and have the screen follow you around in your vision while you're working on something with your hands). IME, it's much nicer than effectively giving yourself a limited vertical screen monitor when you split screen a meeting/presentation on Zoom.

- Streaming a replicated presentation video (like a powerpoint) to each individual person instead of streaming a singular one over a Zoom call lets viewers refer back to / rewind to previous slides without disturbing others' views.

- Having a large view of a presentation yourself means you can also take notes directly on that presentation in real time, circle/underline text, draw arrows between concepts, whatever you need to help yourself remember what the speaker said later. I helped beta an app (that unfortunately shut down) for taking notes in the margins of videos in VR which would probably be a perfect use-case for things like presentations/classes. You could play back or scrub through the video later to see your notes in time.

- Obvious, but any presentation about a 3D _thing_ will benefit from being displayed in a 3D space. I'd much rather see a new Tesla in front of me than look at a 2D image of it, or see the scale of a new roller coaster, statue, building plan, etc. In "physical presense" situations like this, there's also a value-add over the real thing because you don't have to "jostle for the best view" -- you can just phase through (or not even see) other viewers and always have a front-row seat (and teleport around if you want more angles). For smaller objects, being able to manipulate the scale of the object (especially without also affecting the scale other people are seeing it at) is a nice QoL, too.

- For meetings and things with audience participation, it's way more intuitive in a 3D space to split up into groups (and e.g. only be able to see/hear people near you) by just... walking over to a group and joining in. I can't imagine doing something like small group icebreakers in a company's Zoom presentation.

There's probably a lot of new paradigms and workflows to emerge when the VR space is a little more mature, as well. I've been out of it for a few months now (moved and haven't re-set-up base stations) and I tried to limit my value-adds to just presentations, but I'm excited to see where it goes in the productivity realm.

ENGNR• 5 years ago

You say that chat is not better in VR than on a 2D screen

I’m just curious, have you ever actually used it? Caught up and had a beer with an old buddy. There’s a reason chat is currently the killer app for VR

rapjr9• 5 years ago

Lately I've been thinking of VR/AR as simply a 3D UI for computers. We are already built to handle a 3D world, it is natural and intuitive to us. So VR/AR could be the next popular UI for computers, something anyone can use. Not saying it will happen, it has already not happened several times, but it could and the naturalness of it could be why. It would take a lot of work to make it as easy to navigate and use as the real world is, without also bringing along all the problems with navigating the real world.

niknoble2• 5 years ago

I would argue that the metaverse is not competing with Google Hangouts or Discord. In fact, you will still be able to use these things inside the metaverse and will still get value out of them.

The metaverse is not competing against the 2D internet by trying to make it immersive, but rather against the physical world by trying to make it more useful. From that perspective, VR offers value everywhere the laws of physics are inconvenient, which is just about everywhere.

Take the example of walking to a college class on a rainy day. In the physical world, you have to carry an umbrella, and the walk takes 15 minutes. In the metaverse, you can tell the rain not to make you wet, or you can teleport to class without ever going outside.

dudul• 5 years ago

I understand that you point is that it would be such a new paradigm that it's hard to imagine applications. That being said, it is funny that the only 2 use cases you mentioned are 1) a way to see people in person less frequently and 2) a way to buy more stuff.

mikevm2• 5 years ago

Only goofy asocial types think that you can actually replace actual human interactions with virtual reality. Would you rather actually meet your friends, or have your virtual avatars meet up in some fake VR world?

Animats3• 5 years ago

That's an important point. Matthew Ball, the venture capitalist, made the insightful comment a few months back that COVID-19 changed that. It is now possible to use a virtual world without being considered a loser.

mikevm2• 5 years ago

By the way, I'm a goofy introvert myself, so I hope people don't see that as an insult or anything :).

COVID-19 might've made remote work mainstream, but I don't think it will fundamentally change the way we interact with other people in our social life. I think given the choice, most people would rather go out to pubs, restaurants, parties, etc... to experience other people face to face rather than be stuck in a virtual world. The virtual world was a last resort. Even during lockdowns people had underground parties (I've even been in a few!).

I personally grew up spending much of my high school years in IRC chatrooms, having virtual friendships with anonymous people. But I'm an introvert, and most other kids did not share my experience so I'm a bit skeptical on the mass appeal of these virtual worlds.

satyrnein3• 5 years ago

Used to be goofy asocial types on Usenet/IRC/etc, now the whole world communicates via Facebook/Twitter/etc. So it's hard to say!

wan23• 5 years ago

I'm sure someone said something similar when they first heard of the telephone.

keyle• 5 years ago

If you strap enough rockets to a pig, it will fly.

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.

manquer9• 5 years ago

Google wave was largely about real time collaboration.

Most of those ideas live on Google docs , SharePoint and notion and other tools. Am not sure how discord or slack solves the same ideas.

it was a hard problem to solve especially back then CRDTs were not baked in to any out of box large scale db, however it wasn't premature .

To me it always looked like an experimental product from which mature product took the good parts, no different from Gmail incorporating ideas from Inbox

high_5• 5 years ago

Google Wave was my first association when I've heard about FB goin full meta(verse). The whole thing is just so "meta" it just shows how they're trying to solve all the problems of humanity by being blindsided by the opportunity of remote work/life because of COVID. Metaverse is just too abstract as Google Wave was.

herbst9• 5 years ago

Remember when Google worked on a second Life killer? I think it was called lifely or so.

native_samples• 5 years ago

Lively. One of the many Google products they killed that nobody mourns or remembers.

Wave, Lively and Second Life have some useful lessons in them that it may be worth recalling. Second Life is/was of course the most ambitious attempt to build a metaverse, by far. It never broke out of its niche in the way Minecraft did partly due to insurmountable frame rate and resource usage problems that Linden Lab assumed at the start they'd inevitably overcome, but which they never really did. It's also the reason SL couldn't have been used in VR. Lively was to some extent an attempt to solve this problem with Second Life. However it simply created a different, worse set of problems. Lively also suffered from being seen as the pet product of one of the (at the time) extremely rare female product managers at Google, so she was basically given a team and budget to do what she wanted because hey! Isn't that great! Go women! But the project didn't actually have any executive support and the cutesy design was seen as wildly out of step with Google's brand at the time. So when it failed to set the world on fire immediately it was quickly shelved and the PM moved on.

SL's biggest problem is that it's very difficult to render user-generated content performantly, in ways that look good. Minecraft solves this problem by sacrificing the 'looks good' aspect, partly because it had no pretence of being a metaverse, but SL explicitly wanted to do the Snow Crash thing and thus allowed you to place more or less arbitrary scripted 3D meshes inside the world. Unfortunately the structure of the world, and how users wanted to use it, were the opposite of how you do performant 3D graphics:

1. SL is set outdoors. Thus draw distances are huge and many, many objects can be captured by the camera simultaneously. This places huge load on the CPU and GPU. At the time, the standard was for 3D games to be set indoors, largely to limit draw distance.

2. Many constructions in SL are buildings that contain translucent windows. This is much more intensive to render (requires overdraw).

3. Many constructions in SL are very odd shapes which make it difficult to rapidly determine if they intersect things. Part of why "land" in SL was so expensive was the need to run physics simulations and collision detection against objects that were not designed to make it cheap.

4. Because every object was fully dynamic and the user could change the world at any time, all optimizations based on batch processing of static data e.g. lightmap baking, were unavailable to SL, trashing their performance still further.

5. Because land was all adjacent in one uniform world, at the edges renderer performance was effectively a tragedy of the commons. Even in the rare cases that an SL content creator learned about the limits of the SL 3D engine and worked within them, their hard work could be undone by someone in land next to them constructing a giant tower filled with translucent windows.

Lively attempted to solve these problems by limiting art to a team of professional 3D artists. However this gave the world an entirely predictable, sterile corporate feel that appealed to nobody. Same problem as why Lego Worlds failed to compete with Minecraft. Additionally the Lively team had to spend a lot of engineering effort dealing with Google's infrastructure decisions, which at the time were optimized for apps that could use eventual consistency. See my comment from a few days ago on this topic [1].

The relevance to Wave is mostly that Wave was sort of the 2D content version of Second Life. It went all-in on very hard computer science problems, and did so in a web browser, on the assumption that they'd just figure out how to make it performant later. But they never did. Moreover the flexibility of the tool meant it was often confusing to figure out and quickly developed a perception that it was half baked, buggy and required a mastery of the tool to use. For something explicitly about collaboration rather than content creation, that was fatal. Finally it also suffered the same problem as Lively in that the project was basically a gift to the co-founders of Maps for their success and the Australia office as a whole. The team played corporate politics very badly, adopting a culture of internal secrecy within Google that was not only alien and controversial but which also meant they pissed off other teams (whom they were competing with), and failed to build support amongst the senior executive level. When they failed to take off quickly enough they lost executive support and the project was quickly killed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29086825

mattdesl• 5 years ago

Probably worth noting: many of the recent “metaverse/web3” (not Metaverse) developments, for example ERC721, are also RFCs and open protocols. Yet unlike typical web RFCs we’ve seen in the last decade, they are generally not only decided upon and ultimately driven by a small handful of browser monopolies.

TimJRobinson5• 5 years ago

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.

We do have choices. There's a LOT of innovation happening on Ethereum right now with Decentraland, VR gaming, NFT's (so you actually own your own items) etc. The open, free Metaverse is coming.

mgraczyk• 5 years ago

I'm a former Facebook employee, and also worked on VR at Google ~2015.

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.

concinds• 5 years ago

I just see it as a business opportunity. Half an hour better spend in nature than with goggles, but surely you can make good money from it early on.

tdeck• 5 years ago

It's popped up again because they made a movie out of Ready Player One, so now lots of people are talking about the VR immersive world concept after watching that movie.

brundolf4• 5 years ago

My question with the metaverse concept is always, "Why? What's the point?"

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.

Xplune13• 5 years ago

You wrote the exact same thing I wanted to write. I still haven't got a satisfactory answer to that question though.

captn3m0• 5 years ago

I have a similar take on how VR lets you show ads much beyond a rectangular screen, so plausibly commands higher ad revenue if monetised. FB needs to grow the pie bigger: the user growth is flatlining.

otabdeveloper4• 5 years ago

Facebook's ad product is shit. They exist because they're a monopoly. Their ad product is shit because they don't understand their clients (advertisers) at all and would rather sink R-n-D into keeping the monopoly thing going instead of figuring out market fit for their product. (In that regard Facebook is exactly like Google.)

t. Worked more than 16 years in ad tech.

crubier• 5 years ago

I agree. At this point Zucks metaverse sounds just like another XBox Home Screen, in VR. A place were you want to spend as little time as possible, on your way to use the real apps.

monkzero• 5 years ago

Books told stories for ages, but movies enhanced the experience and created a new breed of people who pre movies over books. Similarly we use phones for all our purposes, xr will enhance it

brundolf4• 5 years ago

The difference is that your phone is a utility, not a piece of art. So XR would have to be more practical than the current interface, which, maybe advanced AR will be. But even then, that's just an AR GUI, not a "metaverse".

And then on the non-utilitarian side, XR entertainment/storytelling is already a thing. You don't need a metaverse for that.

eismcc• 5 years ago

Maybe like Ready Player One, people will use Meta if the outside / real word sucks enough. Here you can be anything you want to be…

pessimizer• 5 years ago

Only if what you want to be is two floating eyes and two floating hands in a videogame.

ridruejo• 5 years ago

It's an evolution of how you can communicate: pictures/written form -> 2D movies -> 3D movies -> AR/VR.

polote• 5 years ago

The only thing that counts when you create a B2C product is how much time each user will spend time on your product per day.

There is no goal to achieve for the user. Zuck is a very smart guy and knows that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, Youtube ... are activities for people. And those activities will keep being popular only a handful of years. If you don't want the Meta Inc, company's revenue to collapse you have to innovate and be part of the next hot thing.

Nobody knows what is going to be the next hot thing, Zuck just want it to be the metaverse. So the metaverse doesn't need to have a point, it just needs to be successful

freewilly1040• 5 years ago

The value to Mark Zuckerberg is obvious, the question is what’s the value to users? Why is it fun? Why is it interesting?

brundolf4• 5 years ago

There is no goal to achieve for the user

I mean... there won't be users at all if there's nothing in it for the user.

abvdasker• 5 years ago

Second Life allowed for a lot of the NSFW content and interactions that people tend to enjoy both in entertainment and in real life (this is also true of VRChat to some extent). Metaverse will be a sanitized, sterile project for children. Fundamentally the people like Zuckerberg responsible for its execution do not understand what people want, which is why Metaverse has no chance of success.

qdot763672• 5 years ago

Guard rails never work completely, even in kids worlds (i.e. the "babboing 4 furni" trend in habbo hotel).

NSFW content will always find a way.

Always.

PeterisP• 5 years ago

What is "babboing 4 furni"? Search seems to find only this very comment for these terms.

ilaksh3• 5 years ago

I have owned land in Second Life continuously for probably ten years or more. Haven't been on recently but very familiar with what you are talking about. NSFW is a big part of it but by no means the only part.

Meta has a very dominant position in VR headsets. All they have to do is add add a "teleport friend" button to message notifications inside of Oculus Quest 2 when you are in the default home environment, allow some movement in the space, and they will have by far the most popular version of the Metaverse. If they want to start doing brand deals, place some store portals near the door.

You really think that won't start taking away a ton of business from VR Chat and the rest? They will win by default. They completely control the experience. From the moment you turn the headset on, you are already IN their Metaverse. It's just a shit Metaverse with no features. But regardless of what Zuck understands, there are too many highly paid geniuses around him absorbing some of his billions to not take advantage of the situation.

herbst9• 5 years ago

I honestly don't know a single person with a oculus. Many with the PlayStation or the HTC one.

I also barely know people that use Facebook. And many that are not willing to create a FB account for whatever reason.

It's just anectotal. But I don't see how this walled garden will find any widespread use around here. Just as I know no one who uses Apples walled garden chats, simply because apple never reached a critical mass and people don't like to be locked out of their friends.

long_time_gone2• 5 years ago

Fundamentally the people like Zuckerberg responsible for its execution do not understand what people want

I agree with the broader point, but Facebook owns three of the most popular apps in the world. They have at least some idea of what people want.

tremon2• 5 years ago

Do they really? Only one of those they created, the others they bought after they'd already become the most popular apps. You don't have to have any ideas to just measure what's already popular and buy it.

unethical_ban• 5 years ago

I wonder if they've found a "local peak" of knowing how to get people addicted to news feeds and updates for advertising purposes. Are they really trying to figure out what people want, or just what they can monetize that is similar to what they already do?

EdwardDiego• 5 years ago

There used to be a lot of money to be made in designing scriptable Second Life dragon dicks.

parkaboy• 5 years ago

For the most part, I think it's mostly (but not all!) the same, where the hype and excitement is from a new generation of VCs and founders who didn't experience the VRML/second-life era.

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...

jollybean• 5 years ago

When the tech is as easy as putting on a pair of glasses and not that much more, and it's solid, fast, reliable, cheap - then we will have that revolution.

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.

theptip• 5 years ago

The Metaverse is a Second Life that everybody wants to hang out in, not just some subset of gamers.

(Steel-manning the concept of course).

retrocryptid6• 5 years ago

towards the end of SL's heyday, we were trying to make an open metaverse with OGPX, MMOX and VWRAP. alas, the company ran out of money before we could complete the work (and IBM kind of stiffed us on some IP issues.)

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"

ladyattis2• 5 years ago

It seems like FB is making similar mistakes then if they want to keep it as a 'own the venue' model. I think they can afford this mistake considering but in the end, it will greatly slow down the adoption of their platform.

FounderBurr• 5 years ago

And yet SL still exists and generates tons of essentially free revenue. How much worse of an idea is it than the 99.999% of flaccid techno spun garbage seen here that never turns a dime of profit?

retrocryptid6• 5 years ago

second life. lively. there.com/forterra. OpenCroquet/Cobalt. that thing diamond multimedia did in 2011-2012. entropia. eve online.

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)

lazzlazzlazz• 5 years ago

There are three “branches” of the metaverse concept today:

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/

yesenadam• 5 years ago

And if I want to understand the 3rd, what are some good things to read? Thanks.

TimJRobinson5• 5 years ago

https://tim.blog/2021/10/28/chris-dixon-naval-ravikant/ is a really good discussion of what's coming with web3.

methusala8• 5 years ago

Can you share any sources to understand the 3rd point mentioned above?

herbst9• 5 years ago

This so much! I earned money in second Life. Back then I exchanged it all to bitcoin and lost it gambling, but the fact that SL was rewarding my real efforts in real world money was amazing. Investments I did in current projects (ex. Sandbox) also doing well.

Facebook is going to have nothing of that. Money will flow into one direction only and it essentially never be more than an VR entertainment hub.

I honestly feel insulted in some way that zuck claims the word metaverse for something that will fail horribly anyway.

dvh• 5 years ago

So basically all Facebook need to do is allow people to earn money from day one.

bitwize• 5 years ago

SL was actually closer to Stephenson's metaverse than whatever adtech nonsense Zuck is pushing is likely to be.

retrocryptid6• 5 years ago

maybe FB figured out a way to do a virtual world on the cheap and this is there way to force google and apple to jump in play catch up. a bit of misdirection... while aapl and xyz are distracted by shiny objects, FB is working on their REAL product.

meh. it's a fun conspiracy theory.

alex_young• 5 years ago

Remember when they were going to fix the entire financial system with a new crypto currency centralized amongst a few nodes? That was only a couple of years ago. Seems unlikely that this grand idea is any more likely to actually happen.

herbst9• 5 years ago

Or when they wanted to bring 'free walled garden intranets' over the whole world and the related countries like India pushed them away.

MrRiddle• 5 years ago

I am completely guessing here, but I assume average device used to visit Facebook is an $150 Android phone. Metaverse would require multiple times more expensive equipment. Until the whole world gets a lot more prosperous, average user simply won’t be able to use the product. The product that relies on number of users.

higeorge132• 5 years ago

I came to write exactly this. The app ecosystem grew due to the insane numbers of users having a >50$ smartphone everywhere in the world; and this is what made fb and the rest of companies what they are at the moment. The price barrier to enter the vr/ar world would be considerably higher and almost unreachable in the 3rd or developing world, which is fb’s main audience.

satyrnein3• 5 years ago

3rd or developing world, which is fb’s main audience.

Maybe by volume, but where do they make their money?

kaffeeringe• 5 years ago

The biggest difference is, that it ties together existing, living communities like fortnite, facebook and so on. It ist supposed to connect allthe communities you use instead of just creating a new one. So as long as people use any service that is part of the metaverse, the metaverse diesn't really need a hype of its' own. The metaverse is supposed to become the operating system of the internet owned by Mark Zuckerberg.

jrootabega• 5 years ago

It's not different. The first couple attempts to pioneer something will always fail just due to being new and unfamiliar. When it's computers you also have the nerd/weirdo stigma, which was still around in the early 2000s. Not to mention the sexually charged content of second life. If the average person back then was connecting to second life for polite, socially acceptable content, it would have taken off. Later, giant megacorps, who always recognized the potential in the tech, figure out when their masses will be ready for it. It's almost more about getting the people ready for the tech rather than getting the tech ready for the people.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Would you prefer that Facebook throws its money somewhere else? I 'd rather it be VR goggles than more spying tech.

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.

Stevvo• 5 years ago

Zuckerberg's Metaverse: Lessons from Second Life

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59180273

newacc9• 5 years ago

Remember Myst? People went crazy for that game, they wanted to explore a pretty island. I imagine the metaverse as a metropolis with winding Dickensian streets that you could get lost in -- each with all sorts of interesting shops and experiences: jazz bar, nft art gallery, movie theater, live music venue, even coding lounges. The walk should be rewarding with beautiful architecture, graffiti, leaves blowing in the wind, political posters, adverts (basically street life). I think it could work, but not in cartoon form - it would be as beautiful as Paris and in hi-rez.

jordanpg• 5 years ago

I've very little exposure to this tech but my instinct tells me that it is no more than a curiosity for tech folks so long as you are required to wear a large, uncomfortable, expensive thing on your head.

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?

uhtred• 5 years ago

Do you miss listening to your colleagues obnoxious opinions all day? Metaverse will fix that with the metaoffice virtual work space!

shoto_io• 5 years ago

I think metaverse concepts/companies can only bet successful if they fulfill there key criteria that all products need to have:

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.

ahevia• 5 years ago

Your 3rd point is really important and often overlooked. Explains why Facebook/Meta is going through such lengths to begin to fix its image.

_Understated_• 5 years ago

I've often wondered if Mark Zuckerberg has anyone in his inner corporate circle that is willing to say "no" to him.

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.

mabbo• 5 years ago

Huh, that's a neat idea. What if Zuck is this generation's George Lucas?

For context, after the success of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, it's said that Lucas surrounded himself with yes-men who agreed with whatever he said. Anyone who wasn't one of those didn't last long in his inner circle.

The end result was "Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace". There's an hour-long review video by "Mr Plinkett"[0] that dives into the all the major issues of the film, along with some honestly-not-great humour (imho) but at the end it really explains what the problem was: Lucas had absolute control, and everyone did what he said. And if the original Star Wars had been that way it would have been a disaster.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgWcNsdmoyE&t=3677s (The whole video is good, but linking directly to the important bit I mentioned).

prova_modena• 5 years ago

There is also an official documentary about the making of episode 1 that is viewable on YouTube.[0] Even though this was produced as promotional material for the film's DVD release, Lucas' total control and hubristic self regard are barely concealed subtexts. There is a great scene where Spielberg is visiting Lucas on set and they are just repeating to each other "It'll be great!" or some such platitude with forced enthusiasm. Even Lucas seemed to know he was out of his depth.

[0] https://youtu.be/da8s9m4zEpo

pharmakom• 5 years ago

Whatever happened to chat bots?

meheleventyone2• 5 years ago

The metaverse is noise.

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.

Def_Os• 5 years ago

Although slightly depressing, this seems to me the most likely outcome too.

jl6• 5 years ago

Are there any interesting Long Bets being made about the future success or failure of the metaverse?

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”).

kall2• 5 years ago

No source for this but I remember FB counted DAUs as anyone who touched an FB integration, like an embedded like button (remember those?). So they will definitely do that.

ravenstine3• 5 years ago

I would not take marketing around things like VR and AR very seriously because nobody knows whether any of them will catch on, and their track record isn't very good. Oculus, for the most part, is a niche. A lot of people have an Oculus but it's primarily for games, and it hasn't reached the level where everyone's gotta have one.

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.

jostmey• 5 years ago

Palm pilots didn’t become pervasive. So you could have applied that argument to iPhones. It is a matter of if the technology is ready. When it is, it will take off

ravenstine3• 5 years ago

That's definitely a factor, but these technologies need to solve real problems for people. Modern phones have a clear advantage over not having one because they are so general purpose. They've effectively out-tricorder'd the tricorders from Star Trek in their usefulness. VR not only pales in comparison to the holodeck, but it isn't clear whether they have any real utility beyond being a toy. Is VR more efficient at relaying information than a standard phone or laptop? That's yet to be seen. Is VR better for socializing than real life or even Discord? Maybe for some people, sure, especially for the immobile or those who can't leave home, but the answer isn't clear for a wide general audience. Does VR help people do their jobs? There are already VR surgical operations, but is Zuckerborg the one who's gonna make it even better?

My best guess is that until we can beam visions directly into our eyes and brains, VR will end up in a similar domain as 3D printers (remember all those articles touting how we would have "santa claus machines" in every home by now?). For the average person, 3D printers don't solve anything despite how many people would consider a 3D printer to be a "cool" thing. Most people won't deny the cool-factor of VR, but that doesn't mean they will use it for any reason. After all, personal computing didn't really take off until it started to solve more problems for the average person other than word processing and playing Oregon Trail. (yes I'm oversimplifying, don't jump down my throat, I was using computers before we had the web)

Again, I don't really know, and nobody really does. Maybe people will want to join the Metaverse. Hopefully Zuckerborg doesn't set back the adoption of VR by virtue of association with Facebook.

coffeefirst• 5 years ago

Sure, but it was always clear what the palm pilot was for, even if the early versions were scrappy they had use cases that made sense.

nkingsy2• 5 years ago

I feel like most people got it as soon as they saw the iPhone in action.

A similar “you’ll know it when you see it” applies here I think.

For iPhone it was “everyone has a phone, and now that phone can give them turn by turn directions anywhere. Everyone will want this.”

For vr, there’s no incumbent device to disrupt. Glasses are the obvious choice, but they’re not in the same category.

I don’t think there’s room for more than one digital device that people carry everywhere, which means vr will need to disrupt the phone again.

Carrying that to logical conclusions, apple seems like the best bet to pull this off.

Facebook making this move seems very strange. Building tools for a gold rush that isn’t possible yet or even in sight. I’d imagine it’s more about recruiting than anything.

topkai22• 5 years ago

I've for years argued that the iPhone didn't succeed because of the technology (or at least technology in solutions had been sufficient for a while). It succeeded because it was an iPod a phone- a logical progression of something people were familar with and loved.*

VR suffers from a number of technological problems still (eye strain, etc) but a major issue is how much a departure it feels like from other things we do.

* Apple also utilized the proved wild popularity of iPods to wield tremendous power over its carriers and partners to keep them from interfering with the experience. Other smart phones of the were sold with carrier firmware mods that kept you doing things like transfering photos unless you paid the carrier a dollar per photo.

WhiteNoiz3• 5 years ago

I agree. VR is allows for great game experiences, but today's devices are still cumbersome and we won't see a VR device get mass adoption until we have something that is: - Not much bigger or heavier than a pair of glasses - Lets me work all day on virtual screens to replace my monitor. It would be great if it also connected to my phone to give me more screen real estate there, showed my notifications etc. - has pass through video so I'm not totally unaware of my environment and other people.

Outside of VR, AR glasses need to be all of the above, plus offer something that works better in glasses than on a phone - like indoor wayfinding, using the cameras to allow people to search by image for things they are looking at, virtual assistants that are proactive and context/location aware, or just being able to do things quickly and privately without pointing a phone at something. Or it could just be that the immersive/spatial experience is just better than looking at a small phone window.

Facebook / Meta is working on all these things, so I think the Metaverse talk kinda distracts from some of the more concrete and useful applications and paints an unrealistic picture for how much time people will want to spend in VR worlds.

There are so many challenges and so much interoperability required to make this happen and be useful - I think it will be some time before it becomes a reality. But, the original iPhone was pretty limited initially, and I can remember lots of people saying "Why would I use a smartphone when I can just browse the web and send emails on my computer more easily?". I think it's likely that VR/AR will follow a similar trajectory with it becoming much more powerful and easier to use as time goes on.

tjpnz• 5 years ago

Overall, I think Silicon Valley is overestimating people's willingness to wear headsets and paddles for extended periods of time.

I think the issue is that a significant portion of the population will have issues consuming the content and not ending up with eye strain or getting sick. It was one of the factors which killed off the resurgence of 3D in the 2010s and VR headsets suffer from many of the same problems.

Bumping up the frame rate didn't fix it, nor did all the other tricks cinematographers and cinemas employed to make stereo screenings less jarring.

ravenstine3• 5 years ago

To be fair, after motion pictures was initially invented, audiences are legitimately frightened by things that were happening on-screen. Yet here we are today with over 100 years of cinematic history and nearly everyone watching some form of entertainment at home.

I have a feeling that future generations will simply know how to mentally process VR in a way that fully grown adults can't easily adapt to.

mojuba• 5 years ago

The two main problems with VR not feeling quite right is the virtual world not reacting to focus and aperture changes in our eyes. The brain gets confused, and that creates this sense of confusion and that something is wrong.

These can be solved some day though by following the eye's aperture and focus and adjusting the "world" with minimal latency.

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

VR goggles make me wanna barf. I get crazy vertigo. So at least some %age of people will actively avoid anything requiring them.

geerlingguy• 5 years ago

I'll start thinking more seriously about it when I know anyone who's not hardcore into gaming, or a deep technologist, who owns one.

I can count on one hand the number of people I know with something like an Oculus.

Two of those people don't use it because they couldn't feel comfortable using it, but they like seeing other people try it out the first time, as a novelty.

snarf21• 5 years ago

Yeah, I think the main use case for VR will be just be porn with connected devices. I do think there is some ability to do a VR-ish remote tele-presence use case. Think Google Street View data capture for walking the Great Wall of China. So real life data used to power a VR world you can explore as you wish.

Ekaros• 5 years ago

There are reasonable industrial and commercial uses for VR. Product design, architecture, interior design. Where VR is actually a superior way to virtualize the product. Still, most of the work will happen on as it does now.

I don't see any reason why I would want to have VR meeting. I can see point with in person and white board, but VR? Not really...

bingohbangoh• 5 years ago

Oculus devices have this strange effect. The first time I got one, it was a total "wow." Then I put it on the shelf after a week and never touched it again.

Talking around, I don't think I'm the only one.

nh43de• 5 years ago

Same here. When I first experienced HD VR, I knew it had the power to be extremely addictive. However, the plug and play experience isn't there. Yet. Still waiting for the killer app.

mupuff1234• 5 years ago

I kinda view TikTok, Instagram, etc as part of a metaverse already - it's all basically fake online personas in one way or another.

TheOtherHobbes• 5 years ago

Underrated point - social media turns everyone into their own exaggerated avatar.

rswail2• 5 years ago

I have a friend that just got an Oculus, she is early 40s, found out about it via online zoom yoga classes and now uses it for exercise, as well as gaming, especially gaming with friends and even actually meeting because it is more comfortable than just the 2D nature of zoom.

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.

Gravyness• 5 years ago

Because Mark has a lot of marketting money.

rswail2• 5 years ago

I remember in the earlier web days, boo.com tried to get fashion on the web, before people had high bandwidth and the attempt failed (and for lots of other mismanagement as well).

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.

elliekelly• 5 years ago

There’s definitely a “ripeness” factor to monetizing new technology. There were tons of grocery and delivery start ups during the dot com era, too. They never got traction because they were too early.

Ono-Sendai• 5 years ago

Hardware, internet connections, and software is better now.

gfodor36• 5 years ago

It’s simple really, and most commenters don’t “get” what is going on with all this.

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.

przeor2• 5 years ago

Based on your comment, the biggest difference then ( second life ) and now is tokenisation and non fingible stuff monetization at scale, you can check it here https://experty.io/web-3-0-vs-metaverse-similarities-and-dif... to read more

msoad• 5 years ago

The hardware is so behind this kind of application that Facebook’s pitch sounds like selling billboard ads on future Mars highways!

meheleventyone2• 5 years ago

It’s surprisingly not that far behind. We’re already close to having commercial headsets with full-body tracking, eye tracking and facial tracking.

Even without those technologies current VR is quite different in terms of social presence to interacting on a flat screen. A lot of body language comes through even just tracking the head and hands.

I think we’re quite a bit away from having mass adoption of VR though. But that’s more form factor and comfort.

gfodor36• 5 years ago

No, there is a study that was done on PC rift hardware that showed it was already competitive with f2f on most measures of social presence except for facial expressions (which makes sense, given the lack of facial tracking.)

The bottleneck for adoption is probably mostly about UX, comfort, norms, marketing, etc. Not raw capabilities.

charlesju6• 5 years ago

I agree this is one facet, but other is we now have a trustless ownership protocol (ie. cryto + NFTs) that will lay the foundation for people "caring" about the stuff and status you have in the metaverse.

delecti• 5 years ago

The virtual stuff you "own" in virtual environments are going to be siloed in individual companies' ecosystems. Just like GTA Online is never going to give me any sort of benefit from the fancy sword I have in World of Warcraft, neither is Facebook/Meta going give me any benefit from the couch I have in whatever system Microsoft or Valve puts out. NFTs are never going to materialize into that sort of cross-ecosystem unified ownership because no large company benefits from honoring assets obtained in another company's ecosystem.

roywiggins6• 5 years ago

What stops me from minting an NFT that says I own anything I want? If platforms are only honoring NFTs minted by other platforms then they might as well just share that information in a database.

tomc19856• 5 years ago

Yes let's crystalize greed and avarice into our brave new virtual meta world thing

How about a virtual world of no ownership? Why must we give the wealthy yet another venue to lord their status over us?

Havoc• 5 years ago

Pretty clear explanation. Thanks for posting

tomp• 5 years ago

Just because "remote social presence / coworking" is the future, doesn't mean that Facebook is on track to capitalize on it.

For example, I'd much prefer a "mirror-sized realtime video" (i.e. a "window into the other office") kind of experience, where I don't actually need to wear a helmet.

And there aren't even that many technological obstacles to that; just good TVs, with good software, and fast enough internet connection. Add a bit of eye/head tracking (to approximate 3D from different viewpoints) and it'll be very real-like.

somewhereoutth2• 5 years ago

Until we can see each other's faces in VR, this won't work for social presence. Shrinking everything down to contact lenses (even sunglasses get in the way of social contact) is likely to be beyond us for quite some while if ever. I'd rather not put something in my eye anyway.

Further, VR does not work well for switching - you can't be in VR and scribble notes at the same time. AR might be an improvement, but not by much.

Video conferencing does not suffer from any of these problems, and works pretty well for collaboration. 'Zoom fatigue' is definitely a thing though - it's unclear whether VR fatigue would be better or worse.

VR/AR will see limited adoption for certain specialised use cases only.

mettamage• 5 years ago

You don't need to shrink down, you might be able to scan faces in vr glasses and put them in the vr world

footlose_3815• 5 years ago

We all just need our own Council of Thirteen (From the Venture Bros)

https://i.cdn.turner.com/adultswim/big/image-upload/thumbnai...

charlesju6• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1442201621266534402

Please read this, and then read up on why everyone is talking about web 3.0.

This isn't a phase of the metaverse that is going to be different because of screen and control technology, it's an ownership and control shift.

gfodor36• 5 years ago

What you’re posting here is “common knowledge”, but it is actually in conflict with social presence research. VR beats video conferencing even without any facial tracking, and the abject failure of video conferencing in the pandemic to replace most of the feeling of face to face communication should be enough to convince people there is merit to the studies that have been done showing it scores poorly.

In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment. So there is no deficit there. I think you haven’t tried these things before so you are just speculating.

AlwaysRock• 5 years ago

All of these points could start with the word, "Currently, ". Don't you think having one of the world largest companies throwing massive amounts of time and money into these issues could solve a few of these?

roveo• 5 years ago

There are algos that reconstruct photorealistic 3D facial expressions from headset cameras in realtime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3XcQtoja_Y

LdSGSgvupDV• 5 years ago

Further, VR does not work well for switching - you can't be in VR and scribble notes at the same time.

In VRChat, you could write something in the air by hands, or even play the piano. The problem might be the user experience is not as good as real world hand writing/typing, and there is no physical feedback when writing/typing. That might make people feel weird.

shafyy2• 5 years ago

I agree that social presence is the most underrated aspect of VR, especially from people who have never tried it. Of course, it's not there yet, but if you experience it today you can see glimpses of how it will be in the future.

However, that has nothing to do with the "metaverse". Metaverse is just a fancy word Facebook is trying to establish to somehow rebrand their walled-off social media platforms.

gfodor36• 5 years ago

I agree Facebook is kinda taking their eye off the prize by focusing on the metaverse concepts. But they’re not dumb, they understand what I wrote above, so there might be a reason this is being done towards that end.

tehbeard2• 5 years ago

... social presence is the most underrated aspect of VR ... Of course, it's not there yet, ...

All this "body language" talk neglects that vr tracks at most your head and hands. Not how people are stood, or even facial expressions. "Body language" indeed. Too day nothing of the whirly Hurley motion sickness from it.

Maybe one day, but I put it in the same bucket as fusion.

twobitshifter• 5 years ago

If that’s the plan, Google is well ahead of Facebook for recreating presence with their starline demo. That gives you body language eye contact etc without the big headset and paddles - and you’re still able to interact with your real world environment.

gfodor36• 5 years ago

I agree I’ve been working in and out of VR for the last 8 years or so and it was the first thing I saw that made me question the assumption that VR was the only possible solution to this problem.

dbbk2• 5 years ago

Yes! I can't wait for this to go mainstream. Seems like the perfect solution. I love their description of it as a "magic window".

psychlops• 5 years ago

I have a feeling that part of social presence will require absolute privacy among participants. Once we see permanently recorded leaks of these social conversations, there will be a halt of adoption.

gfodor36• 5 years ago

Yep this is part of the goals of one of the projects I worked on, Mozilla Hubs: ensuring that there is always a self hosted privacy preserving open source option for this basic use case of VR avatar based communication.

dathinab3• 5 years ago

fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication

Do they fail? I don't thinks so, when I e.g. play D&D like games over voice only chat + a shared map it totally convoys the "felling of being together" (just one of many examples).

On the other side when in-person sitting in a conference room where a person takes 30min to convey some (for me) mostly irrelevant facts which could have been summarized in a single slide there isn't really any "feeling together" and weather I'm sitting there or at home or use a headset on a train station makes literally no difference.

What makes people "feel together" is interaction and being focused together on a specific think. This doesn't need VR or AR at all.

Also what people totally forget is that moving company meetings and similar into VR has a number of problems:

- everyone needs to have a VR headset with them and a reasonable good internet connection

- everyone needs to be able to use a VR headset, but even with the best headset there are tons of people out there which get motion sickness from it (or from many things which convey 3D weather it's in VR or in a PC game) this people are much less rare then many thing.

- the platform needs to convey the feeling, as I mentioned above "just putting it in VR" doesn't mean it works. Also more important the "virtual venue" you meet has no reason to be anything like the real world, like at all. So there is no reason to replicate all the limitations from the real world. But Facebook seems to be exactly trying to do this.

Facebook positioned themself well by owning one of the most affordable VR headsets.

But the meta-verse thing isn't looking too good IMHO.

What companies want isn't a virtual world, but a virtual meeting room.

What people want is being whatever they want to be in VR, and potentially have different identities for different social cycles (mainly work, friends, family). So not quite what Facebook is building, to some degree even the opposite thing.

gfodor36• 5 years ago

You quoted half of my definition. Google it.

littlestymaar2• 5 years ago

I see this conflation happening all the time from metaverse enthusiasts, but the metaverse != VR.

Would a high quality VR version of Zoom/Teams be awesome? Of course it would, it would be freaking amazing! But the “metaverse” ain't that, it's supposed to be a virtual universe (hence the name), where everything happens, including games, watching movies, etc. A gigantic MMORPG, containing every possible kind of online interaction and games. And this part is complete bullshit.

Which user story seems the most likely:

- the user open the app, select their contact or group, puts the VR headset on, join the chat room.

- the user puts the VR headset on, login in in “virtual flat”, go out, jump in his virtual (flying, as a DLC) car, and go to a virtual bar where your friends are waiting.

Only the second one is worth the “metaverse” name (the first one being just a “virtual chat over the internet”®), and even if it could be really fun in the beginning, and could even have a decent success as an MMO, it won't be the mainsteam way of communication.

gfodor36• 5 years ago

Frankly there are like 50 working definitions for “metaverse” at this point so it’s not really worth the energy of trying to unpack it as a way to ground an argument.

umvi• 5 years ago

I'll believe it when I see it. I think most people will find the cost of strapping on headsets to be greater than benefits of the social presence it provides

gfodor36• 5 years ago

For a given headset there is an activation cost and presumed benefit that gets someone to use it. The activation costs will continue to trend downward as passthrough AR gets deployed and size/weight goes down, among other things, and the presumed benefits will go up as cultural norms start to interface with this technology and more and more applications come online.

indymike• 5 years ago

Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence

When we have Star Trek's transporters, we can achieve "social presence". Until then, you can have "this is cool". There is a real problem with VR: it requires way more focus and attention that being live, in person. Where VR does shine is shared experiences you can't have in real life. Those shared experiences are really cool, but are not such that people want to have them whenever they want to interact with grandma or Bob in accounting.

it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence.

We already have technology that may be "good enough". The issue with VR is that it requires so much cognitive effort to work... so you really are dealing with something that is cool. Cool to the level that it seems magical, but not cool enough to beat the ease we can communicate via other channels. Playing a flight sim with VR? actually great. Trying to have a conversation with my kids via VR? Not so great.

gfodor36• 5 years ago

No, you don’t need transporters to archive social presence, this is a specific measure that is quantifiable to a large degree via standardized surveys and measurements. Doesn’t require transporters, just the ability to deliver the feeling of unmediated communication. VR gets closer than any other tool I know of on this specific measure, though the recent google work on their magic light field window may also be able to compete with face to face.

Note this has nothing to do with photo realism, seeing the physical form of people, or cool immersive environments. It’s the feeling of unmediated communication.

I suspect you haven’t actually tried hanging out with your kids in VR on a reasonable setup when they are physically far away from you. I’d suggest trying it to get a more concrete view on what is probably going to happen with regards to physical co-locality and it’s value prop.

mbesto2• 5 years ago

It’s simple really, and most commenters don’t “get” what is going on with all this.
That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if.

Sure, but the "when" is trying to be forced down our throats. The media is perplexed by it in the same way they are about autonomous vehicles. We know its the future but tech oligarchs are trying to slam something down our throat with marketing/pr BS because they're scared shitless they'll lose their position on top of the throne. Most revolutionary tech has come from underdogs (Apple's iPod and iPhone come to mind, Zoom for video conferencing) and not from already established firms saying "this is the future, take this now".

throwawayswede• 5 years ago

I’m curious if there been any mention of AR/VR in sci-fi or popular culture in general in a positive light? Almost all I can think of is dystopian and does not invoke the positive imagery that Fb seems to be playing at.

Who’s their target market?

przeor2• 5 years ago

relevant Web3 vs Metaverse article: https://experty.io/web-3-0-vs-metaverse-similarities-and-dif...

nbzso• 5 years ago

From accessibility POV - AR/VR is not an easy and comfortable enough to be mass adopted.

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.

ToddWBurgess• 5 years ago

As a mobile dev (and former Second Life player), I am skeptical about the metaverse due to limitations of current mobile hardware. Using the metaverse is going to require the screen to always be on and will consume the CPU which leads to a huge battery suck. We already saw this play out with Pokemon Go leading to lots of players to carry around external battery packs.

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.

yokoprime• 5 years ago

The metaverse needs a killer app - something that makes it appealing for a large user-base besides gamers, academics and tech bros. At the moment the metaverse is simply a concept with some very interesting tech demos, but without any broadly appealing use cases.

rudian• 5 years ago

Reality is that this is just Zuck yapping his mouth. Nobody cares nor will care about this, video calls will continue as they've always done, Second Life will stay niche, there's no AR until my phone makes me hallucinate.

We got a couple more decades at least for AR to happen.

L_226• 5 years ago

Personally I think the "metaverse" will not be a thing until climate change makes going outside impossible or at least extremely uncomfortable for a large percentage of the global population.

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/

egypturnash• 5 years ago

This time it’s being pitched by a company who’s expanded about as far as they can across the existing internet, with the goal of replacing it with a new 3d world where everything happens, and where they get a cut of every transaction.

wy352• 5 years ago

The comments here are much, much more pessimistic than I expected. Yes, AR/VR is still a novelty, and it has been for a while. However, anything innovative started off as being dismissed as toys [0]. VR tech has improved immensely from its inception, but there is a gap -- people need a reason to use it beyond its initial wow factor. The "metaverse" is the proposed solution for the gap.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

comeonseriously• 5 years ago

All this is, is Zuck trying to flood the news with something other than the bad news about Facebook right now.

fareesh• 5 years ago

Serious people don't need to feel like they are in the same room as others to get work done

rjakobsson• 5 years ago

XR is the unavoidable future, whether we want it or not. It is mind blowing to be able to dance with life-sized 3D models. Imagine when we cannot tell the difference between what’s in the headset and what isn’t. Not too far away.

martin-adams• 5 years ago

I personally believe that the gap to a life-like virtual experience will be closed with the use of neural networks generating the experience. I also believe that's a long way off.

Reminds me a bit of 'photorealistic cg'. The gap between close and indistinguishable has an exponential curve of effort required. I remember when Final Fantasy the Spirits Within was released in 2001[1], and it was said to be extremely photorealistic. It was good for it's time, but you wouldn't think it was anywhere close to believable by today's standard. That was 20 years ago and still I don't think I've seen a full CG movie that I thought was real.

So my take is that, without the help of AI filling in the exponential curve in ways we've not yet seen, it's longer than we think.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaI7ZPA9I1c

swman2• 5 years ago

No idea but buy FB to find out

demeyer1• 5 years ago

I don't think you are off entirely here. The 3D creator community is growing very quickly with new tools, lowering the barrier of entry to 3D design, emerging consistently. That provides the content. Hardware, to your point, is getting better, cheaper and more accessible to more content consumers. The last component, as I have been thinking about it, is then the network that brings users together. As other posters have already mentioned - the user experience is an improvement vs the original Second Life.. which may be enough, over time, to become a new inflection point.

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.

thom• 5 years ago

People just don't want these embodied experiences outside of extremely narrow and controlled circumstances (e.g. games). 3D is just fundamentally not an efficient way of conveying information. Almost all useful information in the world (especially at work) is [hyper]text. Sometimes it's speech, which is just slow, inefficient text. I am absolutely baffled by this movement. Surely nobody actually wants any of this 3D stuff?

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.

fulafel3• 5 years ago

Metaverse was coined and the concept introduced in Snow Crash in the beginning of the 90s.

DigitallyFidget• 5 years ago

I think this "metaverse" concept is going to turn into yet another VRChat clone and flop. Sansar is a great example, made by Linden Lab. The problem I see is that it fails to have a demand for it to exist. There will not be an emergent userbase that will flock to it. There's already alternatives. VRChat, NeosVR, Sansar, and others I'm not even aware of. Anyone with VR already knows of VRChat, or isn't the type to care or be interested. So my question is this: How is it going to be an effective VRChat killer? How is it going to make people switch from a massively established community and virtual world that's known and enjoyed by so many people? How is it going to compete as a (probably) VR-Only against a platform (VRChat) that allows both pancake (flat monitor) and VR modes?

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.

DethNinja• 5 years ago

I think this mostly a hedge-fund/VC driven insanity, similar to insane amount of money placed on ML.

Somebody sold the idea of Metaverse to someone really rich and now they are going to pour all the money to this stuff.

There is no consumer demand for Metaverse and there won’t be any demand for quite a while until they craft comfortable AR/VR eyeglasses that don’t weight a ton.

That being said I’m sure all those billions spend will produce valuable stuff like GPT-3 of today but is it really cost effective way of advancing the tech?

ChildOfChaos• 5 years ago

I think that is only one part of the metaverse, which will likely floop or at least struggle, the real metaverse is still further away and that is when things will be more interesting.

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.

nsonha• 5 years ago

the fact that mobile computing/IoT/social network/super apps/e-commerce are already mainstream.

Slap almost ready VR/AR tech on top of that but we'll see how that plays out

b20000• 5 years ago

there is no difference same bullshit different package

kall2• 5 years ago

It‘s like Second Life or VRChat, but this time, your employer will be forcing you to use it, so it will gain wide adoption.

mvkel• 5 years ago

Innovation comes when the world shrinks.

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.

shetill• 5 years ago

Feel like they're solving problem that doesn't exist. Who in their right mind would bother with VR facebook when it's something that mostly grandparents use to occasionally see family pics. Honestly if facebook disappeared tomorrow I wouldn't even notice.

ladyattis2• 5 years ago

From what I can see there's little value in the Metaverse concept because of the fact it is a rehash of Second Life but with the scale and funding of Meta (formally Facebook). Absent the cash flow and infrastructure no one would really care beyond VR enthusiasts.

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).

Seanambers• 5 years ago

Second life was as much media hype as anything else.

You logged on and found that basically nothing was happening.

d--b• 5 years ago

I agree, it is not so different from second life, and this is what makes it scary.

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?

ByersReason• 5 years ago

Architectural. A sea change from thinking about client-server web and game like applications where you are explicitly synchronizing state - to AR and VR objects/functions "running persistently" in the metaverse/cloud, and "updated" from control logic - ie application is responsible for the "semantics" of what happens, while the metaverse handles presence, shared interactions, and rendering.

RalfWausE• 5 years ago

Gopher VR: Here we come again...

saluki• 5 years ago

I think it will mainly be entertainment and nostalgia.

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.

Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

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