Matrix: Third Room Tech Preview [video]

https://matrix.org/blog/2022/09/27/announcing-third-room-tech-preview-1/

by todsacerdoti • 4 years ago

263 89 4 years ago

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

I love Matrix but it's really weird that they are spending time building a metaverse when there is still a lot to be desired in the plain instant messaging side. The server is still fairly slow even on their paid hosting plans, and stickers have been left in a half complete state for years now.

Spunkie• 4 years ago

It seems to me matrix wants to encompass all forms of communication, vrchat being one of those.

The marketing about it being a "metaverse" seems misplaced even if its technically true or not.

RobertLong8• 4 years ago

As one of the chairs of the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group and a member of the Metaverse Standards Forum, "metaverse" is a term with a ton of baggage and not one we really like to use internally at Matrix. However, it's also the one people know the most right now :( Multi-user interoperable virtual worlds doesn't quite flow off the tongue and immersive-web or wider-web haven't really caught on outside a developer audience. Maybe cyberspace will make a comeback?

Also, more importantly we don't believe in "a metaverse" in the same way we don't say "an internet". There's only one "metaverse". Open and interoperable should be baked into the definition. Matrix can play one part of it.

Arathorn12• 4 years ago

We tried to explain in the main https://thirdroom.io/preview blog that TR is a tiny team of three people who are driven by 3D and probably wouldn’t otherwise be working on Matrix… while the rest of the Matrix core team is way bigger and frantically working away improving the core protocol and reference implementations, which are actually getting way better.

https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... is a recent overview of all the perf and reliability work going on there.

Meanwhile, TR is genuinely groundbreaking (i get 120fps fullscreen on my MBP in Chrome, which blows my mind), quite aside from the fact it doesn’t require any infrastructure beyond a normal Matrix homeserver. So please don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!

nikodunk• 4 years ago

Somehow there's always this negativity when something's free and open-source - please keep doing what you're doing. I'm a happy Element & Matrix user every day, and this additional R&D effort is very cool too.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

I don't think it's much of a metaverse competitor to be honest. I think they're just really happy with their federated message multi-receiver message exchange protocol and are experimenting with software that go beyond your standard messenger.

There's not a lot features and popularity to be gained over more mature messengers. You need killer features to get out into the market. For Signal that's privacy, for Telegram it's UX, for Line/WhatsApp/WeChat it's omnipresence in certain areas, for iMessage it's preinstalled vendor-lock-in, for SMS it's "works everywhere". Even email can be used as a chat app these days (DeltaChat uses it as a protocol for their messenger, I believe) so what's the point of trying to get into the messenger market?

So far, the places I've seen Matrix get popular are mostly among researchers/tech enthusiast spaces and open source products that needed something that was better than IRC but self-hostable enough. That's not a market with a lot of potential.

I see some real advantages to some of these experiments. Stuffing collaborative document editing into a federated protocol like this is quite interesting, for example, especially combined with some ACLs. It's not something that many other protocols are well suited for and it might just prevent Element from fading away into obscurity like XMPP.

simonmic• 4 years ago

Au contraire I think, where researchers/tech enthusiasts/ source products go, the rest will follow, in time.

j3s2• 4 years ago

part of me wishes the matrix folks would give their core software more love instead of embarking on side projects. basic things that have been missing for years include:

   - custom emojis
   -  easy to use moderation tools
   - an admin dashboard
   - databases that don’t grow to 200+GB and require strange manual compression
   - message edits sending notifications

i’m a matrix user & really want the ecosystem to succeed, but helping operate cyberia.club’s matrix system been expensive, to say the least.

the shining light that i see in the distance is basically an open, federated Discord. but the more p2p and metaverse centric matrix gets, the less hope i tend to have for its future. it might be hard to stay away from that now, given their backers[1].

i hope i’m wrong!! trying to stay positive. matrix is still great software, and it has served us well.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/data-infrastructure/element-bolsters...

Arathorn12• 4 years ago

at the risk of repeating my other comment, we are doing a tonne of work to improve core Matrix. Third Room is a totally different and much smaller team (3 people). https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... details some of the ongoing work; and selfserve moderation is coming soon, as are custom emoji (which exists as a Matrix proposal, and many clients already implement it - just not Element yet).

Unsure which of Element’s investors you think would be pushing Matrix towards virtual worlds - both Protocol Labs and Metaplanet are looking on with interest, but I’m afraid the push to build out richer-than-chat comms on Matrix is all me & my cofounder Amandine rather than driven by them!

jimmygrapes• 4 years ago

As an early adopter and daily user of Element on multiple platforms, I want to take this opportunity to tell you personally the biggest UX problems I face (and which are unanimously agreed upon by my server's users):

1. The Markdown display processor simply doesn't mesh with expectations for chat UX. I know there's FOSS considerations, but the end result is that someone expecting it to work like Discord/Slack/Teams sees the chaotic results and says "fuck this amateur nerd shit"

2. To this day, new users are horribly confused about how to join an encrypted room, even when their hand is held through the entire verification process (via Discord)

3. "Cinny is so nice, why isn't that the official one?"

j3s2• 4 years ago

up front: so much respect for you and your team. we use your platform every day, and it's overall great. I love how transparent your org generally is, and how inclusive of the community they are.

I maintain the digitalocean synapse marketplace image, and developed nekobot - a matrix chat bot - so when I speak, I really am coming from a place of love, respect, and genuine concern.

Unsure which of Element’s investors you think would be pushing Matrix towards virtual worlds

protocol labs in particular is heavy on web3, and I think that the development of a metaverse centric system could be pandering to their enthusiasm. even subconsciously, using that project as a lever to say "look at what we have done for web3!" seems compelling from my point of view.

selfserve moderation is coming soon, as are custom emoji

that's fantastic news, I can't wait to see it.

sometimes it's hard to resist cynicism when I see you folks engaging in tons of (what I perceive as) side projects and duplicated effort, while dealing with UX and operational issues that have been open for years.

thanks so much for responding, again :3

mccorrinall• 4 years ago

Try cinny.in

It’s much better than element. It implements stickers, custom emojis and just feels much better than element.

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

When you say implements stickers, does that mean it has a way to create your own sticker packs? Element technically has stickers but you only have the ability to use the quite bad built in stickers unless you host your own server and I assume manually configure it with the stickers you want.

It just puzzles me how stickers were implemented in Matrix years ago but they stopped just before allowing users to create sticker packs which makes them almost useless.

jacooper• 4 years ago

The problem is, like almost all third party matrix clients, its missing a lot of features.

No voice calls, no widgets and other things.

DoItToMe81• 4 years ago

If Cinny had link embeds and the ability to play videos from links, it would be basically perfect.

twicetwice2• 4 years ago

I'd add actually encrypting all events in so-called "end-to-end encrypted rooms" to that list :/

I don't mean to be snarky, it's just frustrating to be told that it's common sense that this wouldn't be the case, when it's come as a huge surprise to everyone I've mentioned it to.

That said, I love Matrix, big supporter of the project and of the team, etc etc. Just, there's a lot of work still to do!

GartzenDeHaes• 4 years ago

ActiveWorlds and Blacksun were almost 30 years ago and were never able to put together a compelling use case. Is there anything new or compelling about this Matrix addon?

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

bottlepalm2• 4 years ago

Those systems definitely had a user base but the execution was just so bad. It was fun at the time and had a lot of potential.

moralestapia• 4 years ago

Active Worlds! Wow!

I spent some time there like 20 years ago, thanks for the memories!

ryukafalz2• 4 years ago

Third Room itself looks very cool, and I hope to try it in VR whenever that's possible. However...

I've grown increasingly disillusioned with ACL-based permissions systems for distributed social applications like this. Matrix is very strongly oriented towards ACLs/user identity, and the result is that applications like this which could operate without access to much of my existing account data nevertheless run effectively as me and can thus do everything I can. That's super dangerous when I'm the admin of a few rooms, because e.g. granting another user admin privileges in a room is irrevocable.

There have been plenty of cases when I've wanted to try out a Matrix-based app, but every time I do that I'm handing over the keys to my account to the app, which may or may not be trustworthy. And the consequences of mistakenly trusting a malicious app are severe.

Arathorn12• 4 years ago

One of the really cool things about Third Room is that it’s the first Matrix client to natively launch with OIDC for auth. This means you will be able to grant it access to specific auth scopes in future if you don’t want to give it access to your main account, and I think solve precisely the problem you’re talking about here.

Check out the OIDC section of https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... for more details

ryukafalz2• 4 years ago

That's better than the current state of things, but I think still not as fine-grained as it should be, at least not without a lot of work and standardization. Among other things:

- This requires that any time you want to be able to selectively grant a subset of your account's authority, it requires standardizing new scopes to do so if there aren't already some that are suitable

- If I'm not mistaken, only the application is able to define which OIDC scopes are requested, and if the application requests more access than you'd like to give it, your options are limited

- If I'm not mistaken, OIDC scopes can only be requested at authentication-time, so there's no way to grant additional access later on at runtime

To be clear, none of this is specific to Matrix; most webapps seem to work this way! I just happen to be of the opinion that most webapps have way more access than they need. :)

RobertLong8• 4 years ago

Hey I'm one of the three devs working on Third Room. Really excited to finally be showing off our hard work!

To clear things up a bit. Our tiny team isn't taking away from the development going on with the rest of the Matrix ecosystem. In fact, we're helping build out a bunch of really important pieces. When I started I helped build out Element Call and our full mesh VoIP stack that's now being built into Element natively. Our team has also been helping with Hydrogen's VoIP implementation and OpenID Connect authentication. As we progress further we'll be able to help in scaling up VoIP performance with our cascading SFU architecture.

We've been working on this project since February and we're pretty excited with the progress so far! We believe Matrix has the opportunity to play a critical role in this emerging space and can do so without distracting from its core mission of enabling open, decentralized messaging for everyone.

RobertLong8• 4 years ago

Also if you want to dive into more of the engineering bits, I've been sharing a bunch of technical info on our renderer and asset pipeline here:

https://twitter.com/arobertlong/status/1574824795216101376

solarkraft2• 4 years ago

Our tiny team isn't taking away from the development going on with the rest of the Matrix ecosystem

So who funds the project?

Arathorn12• 4 years ago

Element funds the project, but the point is that the folks working on TR would not otherwise be working on general Matrix improvements. There are more than enough people working on improving Matrix proper.

Also, Third Room is already enormously helping drive awareness and attention to Matrix which then helps us get more funding to improve Matrix as a whole.

paulcarroty• 4 years ago

Hey, any plans for voip multichat like Discord?

Arathorn12• 4 years ago

Yup, that is what Element Call is (the thing the Third Room built beforehand, and the tech that Third Room uses for spatial audio VoIP and networking). We’ve just finished integrating it with Element Web; it looks like this: https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1566063359996428289. You can play with it if you enable both video rooms and Element Call in Labs in Settings on develop.element.io.

stiltzkin2• 4 years ago

Are all of you against blockchain tech (nfts, tokens)? really cool you can make a decentralized open world but closed minded about uses cases of tokens inside an open world is limiting.

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

While this is really cool and not actively a bad thing like NFTs, I don't see much use for a decentralized metaverse. You can already just self-host a metaverse with your friends on LAN or a custom server, and share with people far away on the ordinary web.

IMO decentralization really shines in critical areas like mesh-nets and (ethics aside) illegal exchanges, where there is no decent central authority and anyone can be an adversary. The internet and existing infrastructure is not 100% decentralized, but it's fair enough for a fun project like the metaverse.

Arathorn12• 4 years ago

You can already just self-host a metaverse with your friends on LAN or a custom server, and share with people far away on the ordinary web.

How? I’m not aware of any standards-based self-hosted virtual worlds - let alone interoperable ones like this :)

thetoon2• 4 years ago

I don't know about standards-based, but Vircadia is interesting (and simple to self-host). Mozilla Hubs is easier to use, but much harder to self-host unless you follow their recommandation and use AWS.

cercatrova• 4 years ago

Well, the name certainly fits.

dbingham• 4 years ago

Given that Second Life is still around - just stagnated - what makes so many people think that now is the time the Metaverse is going to work? If this was going to work... wouldn't it be working right now in the existing version of it that is Second Life? What's different?

bottlepalm2• 4 years ago

I feel that second life needed some sort of property tax system to prevent endless stale sprawl and promote a lively city center.

Arathorn12• 4 years ago

Third Room isn’t remotely trying to be decentralised Second Life. It’s trying to be a blank canvas for building interoperable spatial apps - that could be something like Figma, or 3D Figma, or visualising 3D data, or anything. The Tech Preview just does the typical Second Life / Hubs style social hangout experience, but the intention is to be a generic building standards-based building block for secure decentralised spatial collaboration.

paulryanrogers• 4 years ago

Consider the metaverse is already here; from message boards, Minecraft servers, COD matches, and chat networks. It's just not as seamless as stepping through doorways to jump servers / software. Or at least not yet.

RobertLong8• 4 years ago

Given some of the constraints of the immersive web currently, Matrix can provide some critical pieces of that user experience. Third Room worlds are Matrix rooms hosted across homeservers. You log in with your preferred client. You can now traverse worlds seamlessly without losing your virtual identity. This can even extend to WebXR where currently you can't traverse across origins while in the headset.

Seamless interoperability is what the "metaverse" is all about and we want to work with people who want that as well.

hammyhavoc2• 4 years ago

As a former Minecraft server operator, what differentiates a Minecraft server from any other kind of game server in terms of "the metaverse TM"? Is Nextcloud or Plex "the metaverse TM" too just because someone can spin up their own Docker container? Just sounds like "the internet" we've all known for decades.

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

VR Chat is massively popular right now. The idea works, just requires a top quality implementation.

bitL• 4 years ago

SUN Microsystems was doing company meetings in Second Life in the 2000s... Old is new again.

pantalaimon• 4 years ago

I guess Roblox is the most successful metaverse app right now. The game aspect is important, what else are you going to do in the metaverse otherwise?

risyachka• 4 years ago

- now can be a better timing (if true - it won't matter that something similar existed before when the timing was worse)

- SL look and feel differs vastly different from what is expected from metaverse. Fortnite or Roblox looks more close to it.

solarkraft2• 4 years ago

I do like this project a lot, but in a way it's salt in the wound of the Matrix ecosystem (for actual chatting) being dysfunctional and not getting noticeably better. Could Element please also allocate some resources towards fixing the glaring usability show stoppers?

denkmoon• 4 years ago

While this isn't something I am interested in or want, Matrix is the best thing ever and a big thankyou to everyone putting effort into it. I can't even imagine having to use Discord or some other shit corporate data-grab for my private conversations.

beej71• 4 years ago

This is awesome. I probably won't use it, but it's great to see so few resources producing so much free stuff.

karmicthreat• 4 years ago

This and Meta just look like boring Second Life. It might be because they don't have interesting communities. VR Chat is probably the closest thing to having a spark. But the company around VR Chat seems pretty determined to kill itself.

Dig1t• 4 years ago

My problem with second life is that it completely sucks, the interface, everything about it, is super low quality and hard to use. I think that game would have been way more popular if they had invested in making the game's experience less janky.

I would personally be very interested in seeing what a Second Life experience looks like when reinvented for modern computer hardware. I think it will be a pretty compelling experience.

serf• 4 years ago

I would personally be very interested in seeing what a Second Life experience looks like when reinvented for modern computer hardware. I think it will be a pretty compelling experience.

SL is fairly modern. It's happy to grow into just about any system you throw at it, but it loves bandwidth the best.

the jankiness is not really a hardware thing. SL chose certain concepts that will likely never be as performant as something like a traditional video game.

But, as someone who years and years ago migrated from There (TM) to Second Life, the things achieved with those concessions were amazing.

Let's take the example of a virtual t-shirt. A content creator on 'There' had to first send in a mockup of the t-shirt to the staff which gave a go-ahead to produce a model, the model then gets approved, the content creator then waits for a weekly update push (which contains the in-world assets), and then gets approval for the financial side of things like pricing and in-game sales locations.

This process often took months.

in Second Life -- due to the underlying streaming tech -- you make the tshirt, put it on, everyone in the world sees it.

The benefits to content creation of real-time modeling and easy revision was game-changing, literally. This was facilitated by the fact that Linden Labs decided to embrace the streaming concept.

This 1:1 real-time stuff opens Linden Labs up for lots of abuses -- pornography or things that took advantage of the system by tracking assets or third party stuff, whatever -- but the freedom that it gave the players and content creators was remarkable.

(also weird trivia, my SL avatar is old enough to be legal adult now. How time flies. I don't really play anymore, but I log in once in awhile to chat with some randoms.)

FeepingCreature4• 4 years ago

If Third Room can get custom avatars, content and VR up within the next two months, it has a chance of stealing the VRChat userbase. If not, some other project will do it and this will go the way of the Second Life: an eternal "hey, isn't this cool?"

The value proposition of 3D chatrooms and metaverse in general only makes sense in a VR context. I hope they focus on that.

kettlecorn• 4 years ago

Why the next 2 months?

RobertLong8• 4 years ago

Yeah, curious why the next two months? We're definitely going to be implementing the VRM avatar format fairly soon, but not VR just yet. There are plenty of unsolved problems on desktop where there's a much larger user base. And we also still have mobile design and optimization to work on. I've worked on AltspaceVR and Mozilla Hubs and as much as I love VR, especially WebXR, it's still a relatively small market. We will support WebXR, but it's not our top priority right now.

sdrinf• 4 years ago

Hi vrchat thread! Yes, getting a next-best alternative to vrc would be awesome.

I am... somewhat sceptical as to why they feel they can just "VR/AR: We need to flip the bit to enable WebVR / OpenXR support", _especially_ with custom avatars. VRC has been 1, native, 2, using an engine very optimized for 3d pipeline rendering (unity) and yet it still has _major_ performance issues, on account of different avatars using different shaders, and high (80k++) polycount. I'm open to be proven wrong, but feel very strongly both that 1, the whole "metaverse" concept only makes sense in vr context, with physical intimacy being the core killer feature; and 2, in order to do that, you need an engine highly optimized for this purpose (to avoid vr fatigue / vr sickness), and 3, chrome is, as far as I can tell, not the delivery platform for that.

Specifically, in order to provide vr experience that people don't get sick in, you need an extremely high-grade, low-latency rendering pipeline, including fine things like pose prediction, timewarping, and other ways to generate hypothetical frames _before the user actually moved there_. I'd be intensively curious if chrome would provide that.

Otherwise, what you have here, will remain essentially a small sandbox for 5 minutes gameplay. Good luck!

meheleventyone2• 4 years ago

All the timewarp and other pose prediction bits of the renderering for VR are done in the headset drivers and firmware. You do need to hit higher frame rate targets but there is plenty on the way in browsers to help there.

Crespyl• 4 years ago

VRChat is in an interesting place right now, and the performance and moderation elements are real issues for sure.

I'd love to see a kind of local consensus/approval paired with distributed moderation to tackle the question of whether a user-agent should load/render any given asset.

Any client wanting to introduce a new avatar/shader/other asset to a session should go through a "proposal" stage first where the other peers can briefly inspect the metadata (polycount, moderation signatures, maybe even lightweight code analysis for scripted objects, etc) before signaling whether they intend to render it or not.

This gives participants (or rather, their user-agents) a chance to vote on whether or not an asset fits within their collective performance budgets, or if they trust a script to run without degrading the experience.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that we need a new kind of "browser" entirely; where the modern browser is focused on the traditional client-server document/application delivery and runtime, a "true" metaverse client should focus on p2p real time (or at least synchronous) shared experiences in an extensible compute environment. Not just 3d/VR either, it should be possible to connect to a session that's just a basic text or video chat room, then scale it into a 3d session.

There's also the matter of content hosting and distribution, I'd love to see native integration of IPFS or something like Bittorrent's DHT for p2p content-addressed file sharing. Popular scripts/application components and assets can be shared across the entire network, and peers can share their own personal content (avatars, applications) directly in active sessions.

If you'll indulge me a bit:

Matrix provides an extensible platform with identity and a shared, consistent, timeline of events. (You can also maybe get this with something web3, imagine a per-session blockchain somewhere between SSB and ETH)

With a consensus timeline, you have a shared history, and thus a shared reality.

On that timeline you can use extensible protocols to introduce assets, scripts/apps, and post events/messages.

Scripts all run inside a deterministic, message oriented compute environment, and the state of this environment gets checksummed and updates in lockstep for all peers. A new peer joining a session can either load a full state dump or just replay the event log to catch up.

For ephemeral/real-time data, like player look/point directions or video/voicechat, streams URIs can be posted to the log in a standard format.

A typical 3d interaction would start with two or more users connecting to each other, post messages announcing their preferred avatars, messages introducing an application package that supports 3D positioning and collision resolution, then loading an environment. Popular suites of code and assets can be bundled up and distributed with the browser and on the DHT.

Each user can have a set of public keys that represent moderators they trust, and require that each new asset be signed, or else allow "self-signed" content from other users at various trust levels, or just be open to everything.

I really feel like all the right ideas are floating around to build a truly p2p, personally liberating, extensible engine for synchronous shared experiences. Putting it all together is the hard part.

datalopers• 4 years ago

Second Life is still doing $50-70M a year. The company (Linden Lab) has 300 employees. I'd love to be considered an irrelevant failure and still banking $50M+ a year.

FeepingCreature4• 4 years ago

Interesting. Do you know how? When I tried it a few years back, it was a complete mess.

71a54xd• 4 years ago

Why would anyone want to interact or reside in such a freaking hell hole of "reality"?

I'm genuinely at a complete loss.

agentultra• 4 years ago

Another one! It’s neat that people are still messing with this idea. I can’t count the number of them I’ve seen over the years. Glad to see it’s not based on blockchain/crypto/NFTs/etc.

There used to be one where you could see what was on the other side of the portal. That one was neat.

I might’ve been thinking of Croquet OS [0] or something like it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_OS

jeena• 4 years ago

Hm, I tried to check it out (I run my own synapse server) but when I log in I get the error: "Invalid glTF file: Missing asset section." and have no idea how to fix it ^^.

RobertLong8• 4 years ago

Try updating your Synapse to 1.62 or higher. We added a header to files downloaded from the media repository so they can work on sites using SharedArrayBuffer. Unrelated, but you'll also want to make sure you have a TURN server set up and your media repo upload limit is set to something reasonably high like 100MB.

TheCycoONE• 4 years ago

I played around with this a little with a friend thus afternoon. A couple impressions:

1. The voice chat / positional audio works very well. I was impressed.

2. The world is too vast for the current user base. It felt like a ghost town and before my friend joined I wondered if it was broken. There was a 60 on the screen, but there was no one in the rooms. Based on the chat history a lot of people had that experience.

3. Is this federated yet? I couldn't find an option to log in with my own homeserver account. If there was such an option is there a way to make it less scary - every matrix integrated game / tech demo I've seen that uses my account wants me to enter my password in their site and that feels wrong.

RobertLong8• 4 years ago

1. Thanks! I think we can play with the falloff a bit, but yeah I think so too.

2. Agreed, we erred on the side of caution for this release and made a bunch of public rooms since our per-room cap isn't super high while were still doing P2P WebRTC networking. We may dial this back to just one public room per environment.

3. It is! That first box where you select your homeserver can be typed in and you can put your own homeserver in there. Third Room is the first Matrix client using OpenID Connect which will avoid the whole issue entering your password on someone else's site, but we're still not quite at the point where just anyone can add it to their own homeserver. Hopefully very soon!

hda2• 4 years ago

We profoundly believe that the metaverse should be free - both free as in beer, and free as in speech.

Good.

For me the real test for VR stuff, and why I haven't bothered with current VR offerings at all, is how much freedom you really have. Most platforms I heard of so far impose weird, often ideologically/culturally-driven, restrictions on your actions and content that it just isn't worth my time. Even open source software, like Stable Diffusion, can suffer from this (yes, you can edit the code to remove filters, but most people can't and won't).

Normal people, even some seniors I talked with, are starting to notice the excessive influence and control big tech is exerting on our interactions with each other. If Third Room plays this right, and I hope they do, I believe they have a genuine shot at being the Firefox to Meta's IE before it ever becomes a thing.

Good luck to everyone involved.

POPOSYS• 4 years ago

Does this or will this provide real-time data of the real world, like OpenStreetMap, weather data etc.? Could be helpful then for tackling climate issues.

aestetix2• 4 years ago

I've watched countless videos about the "metaverse" and I don't get it. It looks to me like something that could be a cute five minute party trick, not something that will revolutionize anything.

I'm happy to be proven wrong. Is there any solid use case for this kind of tech that goes beyond "this is cool!"?

And for the record, I have read Snow Crash, so I'm quite aware of the idea behind this. I just don't think the theory matches reality.

godelski• 4 years ago

I don't get it much either, but I do see it as a small step (out of many many more) towards the development of a holodeck. I can at least appreciate that aspect although I don't ever see myself dawning a headset and getting into a virtual world (holodeck is another story though). But also I don't have to get it. If others do, then that's what matters.

yoz• 4 years ago

I worked at Linden Lab (Second Life) for 5 years, and still think that SL is one of the most fascinating things on the internet. But very little of what makes it fascinating is easily communicable as a simple explanation of "what the metaverse is for". (Also, hi! Not sure if you remember me but we hung out occasionally some years back. Noisebridge, Burning Man, etc.)

Firstly, let's drop the term "metaverse" in favour of a basic definition: user-created, shared, persistent 3D worlds. Kind of like our world, the real one. What's our actual real world for?

It sounds like a ridiculous question, so let's get something out of the way: I'm not pretending that Second Life and its ilk have even 0.001% of the richness of real life. What makes them worthy of this question is that they're closer to the flexibility and expression of real life than other shared experiences we can have with the same technology.

Keep that question in mind and I'll talk about something more concrete.

For use cases, let's kick enterprise "work" usage out of the conversation. The vast majority of 3D world applications are either pure games or game-like enough to still be thought of as games, even when a big chunk of the usage is more social. (For example, all the people on shared Minecraft servers just hanging out, being silly, spending time with friends, building together, and not trying to win at anything.)

In my experience, we don't give that social usage nearly enough credit, but it's much harder to see and measure because it has no consistent shape. You could call it "people using a flexible toolset to enjoy new ways of interacting". If that phrasing sounds far more serious and deliberate than what most of us see, how about: "people messing around and having fun." Either way, it's valuable enough that hundreds of thousands of people do it and love it.

So, user-created 3D worlds are a way of dropping all the game-imposed mechanics and constraints, and giving the users far more control over the environments and tools they can use together to mess around and have fun. Or create amazing and terrible art. Or share fashion and furniture and architecture and things that make it sound like The Sims until you remember that fashion is a massive industry in itself and being able to participate in it, even just "virtually", is still intensely desirable for a large number of people.

3D worlds are Platforms, not Applications. There are tons of applications already but if you want a neatly encapsulated Killer App, I don't know that you'll find one. At least, I don't know that you'll find one that suits you. This is a big part of what makes this so difficult.

The ideal of a killer app is one that you see a five minute demo and you're sold on the entire platform. "Ah, now I can do this thing that was nearly impossible before!" VisiCalc was that killer app for personal computers, but a key component of its success was having a large, clearly-defined target market: financial planners.

The target market for 3D worlds is far harder to define. It's about social desires and needs. However, in my years at LL, there was a persistent quality I found that became more and more noticeable over time, and which most people trying to sell "the metaverse" don't talk about because it's taboo. And no, it's not sex.

There is a huge chunk of the Second Life userbase who, for reasons mostly out of their control, have little social life outside of SL. Maybe it's due to location, or physical disability, or social anxiety, or a bunch of other factors. (It's usually a combination.) I don't know if this applies to the majority of SL residents, but it's close.

Whatever the reason, SL gives them more control over how they present to others, both in appearance and in that magical extra 10-20 seconds you get for typing instead of talking. This increase in control is enough that they are able to have active social lives with people who they care about, and who want to spend time with them.

That's a killer app right there. It's not the killer app for everyone, not by a long way. Everyone gets something different out of it, and there are huge numbers of people for whom 3D worlds just aren't ever going to appeal. (Just like spreadsheets.) But there's far more actively-enjoyed value here already than you might otherwise see. You just have to find the right platform, activities and people to enjoy it with.

aestetix2• 4 years ago

Good to hear from you again!

Finally an argument that makes some sense. One example I can think of, would be using this technology to allow someone who is disabled or has social anxiety to attend a meeting at their local city hall and even potentially ask a question to their city council.

I find the cartooney nature of the metaverse as presented by Facebook to be amateurish and annoying, but if this tech can be used to enable people who could not otherwise to be more involved in things that affect their lives, that significantly changes my opinion on it.

borbulon• 4 years ago

Thank you for this. I've always been quite bearish on the idea of the Metaverse - it seems quite silly that one would think that it's somehow "the future of the internet." It's good to see some real-world use cases presented.

That being said, I still don't think it's going to "change the world" in the way that The Artist Formerly Known As Facebook seems to be putting all their chips in on. It will definitely have its uses, but as for being something that everyone will want to get in on, I'm still not sold.

stiltzkin2• 4 years ago

Instead on only watching videos you can read about it, Matthew Ball is a good start

https://www.matthewball.vc/metaversebook

kleiba• 4 years ago

I wouldn't surprise if this succeeds. I find it completely pointless and would never be tempted to devote any time of my life to it, which in the past has proven to be an accurate predictor for successful tech (e.g., twitter or VR).

Good luck!

singularity2001• 4 years ago

Pretty rough demo:

https://thirdroom.io/preview says "recaptcha failed" even with ad block disabled.

All this signup, google, accept terms, … procedure leaves a bad taste for an "open web" like client.

The entry room is cold and lonely. first impression matters. Trying to go to portal failed:

Error joining world: POST https://matrix.thirdroom.io/_matrix/client/r0/join/%23uk-cit...?: Failed to fetch

thetoon2• 4 years ago

I think there something Matrix side which hasn't handled the HN-induced load too well. Even on a locally-hosted instance of thirdroom (quite easy to do, by the way, congrats on that), I've got a bunch of matrix-client.matrix.org requests that timeout.

teekert• 4 years ago

This is really cool! We really need a freedom loving metaverse alternative, thank you for building this!

mempko• 4 years ago

This looks a lot like Croquet (https://www.croquet.io/) but maybe not as powerful? Can't tell.

Matrix: Third Room Tech Preview [video]

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