I'm sure Facebook is really excited to build a space they own and control completely, as well as have the ability to take a cut of all sales in it. Building a digital company town is right up Facebook's alley.
> ...just like you have the W3C that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web, I think there will need to be some of that here, too, for defining how developers and creators can build experiences that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their friends, and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences.
I'm sure Facebook is looking to have a big and profitable presence in the metaverse, but the point is that it's not one big walled garden like Facebook, but more like the Web as a whole.
sure he says that but what they’re doing is the opposite. They’re not releasing standards, they’re not making the equivalent of a cgi-bin server that lets me run my own simulation that someone can transit to from someone else’s simulation, they’re not releasing a high quality client that can target simulations owned by other companies, etc. They say people can make spaces but it’s very Geocities. Sure, people can make stuff inside their playground, but nothing they’re doing makes it easier to set up my own playground on my own infra. Everything they’re doing suggests they think the way to “win” the metaverse is to own all of the spaces. Idiotic. That’s like trying to win the web by having all of the web pages.
but isn't it good that the standards aren't coming from Facebook, but rather will have to come from a more neutral source? I also wouldn't expect a big corp to be the one to create open standards for the rest of the community.
The way I see it, Facebook kicking off the push towards a metaverse is kind of like Bell Labs creating Unix. Sure it took a big corp with a lot of money, but that gives the rest of the community something to emulate and build off of, or decide what parts they do and don't like, and so eventually we'll have the metaverse equivalent of Linux. (edited for clarity of the first paragraph)
They announced support for PWAs using web vr tech. You can guess the kicker: it has to go through the store paying 30% to Meta. That's the new web experience.
Everything we have learnt about companies in the past decade or century makes me doubt this. One recent standard is Google's AMP, which was marketed as a standard to improve the web. It was shown in the recent court filings to be used as a way to impede header bidding and they added 1 second delays to non-AMP ads to give AMP a boost. Like we have clearly defined and enshrined in law the #1 law of all companies - maximize shareholder value. The second shareholder value conflicts with public good, there can only be one winner. Why is anyone surprised?
Comparing themselves to W3C is a nice trick but they are not at all alike. W3C is a non-profit funded by its members. Facebook is a shareholder-controlled corporation.
Metaverse will be bullshit up until avatarism arrives, then it will be boring and normal. But people like this will still be very confused and upset about what is happening. (Maybe I will too.)
The first mainstream passthrough AR device that can stitch out and replace humans will be an eye opener for many people. This will happen next year. Most likely at least Meta and Apple’s will do this. And probably a few others. It will be rough but it won’t be hard to connect the dots.
You join those dots like the arrival of "Avatarism" is something obvious and inevitable, but reading that blog post doesn't give me that idea at all. Instead, it makes me think the author is way, way too deep into a too-long list of very niche technical and sociological obsessions.
A quote:
What is Avatarism?
Avatarism is a movement to recognize and protect the fundamental human right of freedom of form
Yeah, except that right doesn't exist, and no-one thinks it exists. At all.
The idea that an entire civilisation is going to agree to all use VR goggles full time to preserve some non-existent "right" for a very small number of weirdoes to only ever be seen as their cartoon fantasy version is, frankly, laughable.
You didn’t read my article, or you did, and you aren’t understanding anything I wrote.
You do have freedom of form, you are just limited in the forms you can change to. You exercise it every time you get a haircut.
The question is about what changes if there are a variety of contexts where it is fair to assume most or all participants have photonic override. You are missing the point: this isn’t about goggles. Take a longer view, once the goggles become invisible.
The title image refers to an allegory I wrote, which I’m sure you didn’t read, that might help you understand what is probably going to happen as a consequence of technological curves.
Actually in this hypothetical future we would. You could always not get those implants and not participate in all the advantages they bring, and in turn not have other entities get control over your eyeballs, ears etc.
Sure, but you don’t get to choose the consequences. I’m not on Facebook by choice, but I didn’t get to choose to live in the world where this leads to a ton of negative consequences, despite the positives.
So, this idea of avatarism seems to completely ignore the fact that access to avatars (or technologies that allow "photonic override") will be gatekept by profit-maximizing entities like Apple or Facebook. To me it sounds like just another form of conspicuous consumption where the rich will show off their opulence by buying artisanal avatars (on the blockchain, no doubt) and lording them over the plebs. To see this in action today look at any gacha game, where access to the best characters requires spending tons of money. For an entity like Facebook, this probably sounds great - a new revenue stream! But some kind of new "freedom" it ain't, at least not for the majority of the world's population.
None of this stuff exists, so it's impossible to predict how it will go. But the last 20 years has seen a closing and re-centralization of the internet and computing in general. Concepts like right-to-repair, first sale, and ownership itself are under attack on various fronts. I'm pessimistic that these trends will generally reverse. Given this, why wouldn't an avatar shop be a tightly-controlled and monetized affair? Meta (or whoever) can always offer the excuse that they can't open up access because they need to curate the content to prevent sexually explicit, or otherwise offensive avatars.
Photonic override will shepherd in the final computing platform - so its more important than ever we make sure it is free and open, and not laugh it off and ignore it as Facebook walks in and just owns the whole thing.
Both of those are not literal terrorists as terrorism is defined as the use of violence on a civilian population for a socio-political purpose by a non-state actor
That last distinction is how the US itself doesn't get classified as terrorists but can classify Al Qaeda, etc. as terrorists.
But Iran proxies (who are government actors in Iraq at least) and the Taliban are government figures of their respective countries.
I think the way the actual sausage is made is that they don't care who they platform. They'll deplatform anyone if enough people make enough noise and threaten their bottom line, but no one makes enough noise about Taliban terrorists or the Burmese military to threaten them politically.
I don't think they're even trying to consolidate power. They appear to be in the very unenviable position of hosting half the internet's public verbal diarrhea, with no freakin clue how to deal with it. No sympathy here for the devil, but this is basically inevitable whenever anyone tries to grab the brass ring and take over a totally chaotic system.
> "The metaverse is bullshit because it already exists, and it's called the internet
> Being 'inside' a virtual world was never really the important part"
Well, the facebook keynote presents a compelling argument how social interaction with VR can be more meaningful than through a 2D screen in many situations.
However, what IS bullshit, is the display of obviously fake demonstrations with highly experimental and expensive technology.
The reality is, most of the tech, won't be accessible or even productised for a long time, as they didn't even announce any planned dates...
What’re you talking about? You can make a low end VR headset out of a $100 smartphone and a $5 plastic box today
5-10 years after VR starts to really take off, you’ll be able to get a decent standalone VR headset for $200 or less. They’ll probably be cheaper to make than laptops or TVs in the long run because of the smaller displays.
Maybe I'm old, but I don't see what advantage this has over video conferencing unless the focus of the discussion is on things - like documents, schematics, or 3d models - rather than people.
Avatars would feel like creepy cartoons because your brain knows the voice of the person but your eyes see a cartoon image.
> "You can make a low end VR headset out of a $100 smartphone and a $5 plastic box"
Have you ever tried that? Smart phones as VR are extremely disorientating and the latency of the gyro makes it unusable.
I've got an Oculus Quest and it's amazing how well it works using the 4 camera vision-system instead of a gyro.
What they were demonstrating in the meta-verse was facial-tracking attached to VR headsets, which is super expensive experimental technology which is not going to be commercially available for quite some time.
> You can make a low end VR headset out of a $100 smartphone and a $5 plastic box today
That's not low end VR, it's pain and frustration from knowing you just wasted 105 bucks.
It sounds to me like you never tried a setup like this. Because in reality you mainly spend time adjusting the lenses because focus is so bad you can't even tell which setting is better. The pixel grid is so huge that reading any form of text (like menus) is near impossible. The latency is bad and your view constantly drifts over time because the phone sensors don't cut it, so you better sit on a rotating chair.
Oh, and if you've all that covered somehow you'll realize mediocre VR video players and bad rollercoaster demos are pretty much the best phone VR can offer.
haha, easy there killer. I hate Google Cardboard for poisoning the well just as much as everyone in this subthread does
Someone was going on and on about how Facebook is showing off a (likely) $50,000 prototype and I was just explaining that 2021's $50,000 prototype is 2031's $100 at Wal-Mart
What is true is that the amount of time people spend finessing their fictional online persona vs their boring reality is dramatically shifting, particularly for younger generations.
It's now common for some to use stylized/beautified cartoon 'avatars' in a professional context. People communicate using contrived and performative message board speak with coworkers. Even the 'influencers' spend a large chunk of their life editing and constructing an unrecognisable version of themselves.
If you meet some of these people in real life it's obvious why they do so - reality is too dull, too expensive in time and effort to find a way of standing out from the crowd. Online you can pretend to be whatever you want to be. I see this trend continuing.
Wow this is most definitely BS. If that's the future Zuckerborg wants to build, I'll pass, just like I passed on facebook, another stupid idea, now riddled with ads.
I think this post suffers from lack of imagination, but it is very right in two things: portability in the metaverse will never really work, and virtual interfaces won't really be pervasive because simply put they're not better.
We've had video calls for decades now, but people still use text messages because not everything needs to be a video call.
Likewise, we'll keep using text chats because not everything needs to be VR.
As the article says, it doesn't make sense to have a virtual world that replicates the real world where there is only one "spacetime" entity, so to speak. The author is right, the metaverse is already here and it's called the internet.
I disagree with the author that I can see a lot of value in improved social interactions and virtual workspaces in VR once the technology gets there. You can already see glimpses of it with today's hardware and software. And, it makes sense the VR/AR will be the medium to contain all other mediums. But, that doesn't mean that we need to live in "metaverse" as defined by Neal Stephenson or how Zuck imagines it.
Yes, you'll be able to create your Facebook (or Meta) avatar, and use it to log into work meetings and social events - but that's not much different than using Facebook Login today. There are already a bunch of siloed social experiences in VR, like Facebook Horizon, VRChat, Altspace and Rec Room.
I don't see FB or any other of these apps moving to open protocols that would allow decentralization and federation, just as todays "2D" social media companies, including all the ones owned by FB, aren't doing it.
If Zuckerberg is serious about a federated metaverse and open protocols, he should start by opening up Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
In the end, the metaverse will be the internet, but mostly experienced through the medium of VR/AR.
The metaverse singular seems an odd concept. There will be all sorts of virtual worlds where you can socialise with other real people through VR avatars as there already are such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, Fortnite and so on. Also I guess Minecraft?
Whether Meta will be able to dominate the scene if the way they do photo sharing I dunno. Their demo video doesn't enthuse me (https://youtu.be/SAL2JZxpoGY).
I guess they may be able to work the network thing - I put my photos in insta/fb because thats where my friends/family are. But will I go on Meta to chat to mum? Probably not. I think text messaging/phone are fine for that.
Depending on your needs, the technology is already there. I already do most of my work in VR with my partner, while he is also in VR from his house about 2 miles away.
We need a few desktop screens up for information, a big whiteboard, and the ability to see each others screens. With Immersed and Horizon Workrooms we get all of that already. Before workrooms was really stable we were using Immersed and keeping Mural (white boarding) up on one of our desktops together.
This is really interesting. I’ve been thinking of getting into a VR setup for productivity and collaboration. Would you mind sharing some details about your hardware/software setup? Any pitfalls or difficulties you’ve run into? Motion sickness?
I use the Quest 2, but there are a lot of important things to note. You have to use the right fonts to get text to be crisp/clear enough. I use the Input font, I've mentioned it a few times here.
The biggest problem with wearing it for hours is comfort. The strap that comes with the Quest 2 is not good enough. You will feel the weight of it on your cheeks the most, it will get sore pretty quickly. You have to upgrade. I use a halo strap from VR Panda, it solves that problem for me.
The notion that people paying for digital assets means that people will pay for NFTs.
It's meaningless, though, since the same (massive) caveats apply as when cryptocoins tried to claim they were a viable and better alternative to traditional financial services: buying and owning digital assets is entirely possible to handle with existing, more efficient technology.
Nobody that sells digital assets has any reason to buy into whatever purported benefits a distributed system provides other than hype: you don't need a distributed system if you already control all the servers and everyone is fine with that. The subset of customers that will be _REALLY MAD_ that they can't use their Fortnite skins should Epic disappear is vanishingly small.
NFTs don't even have the edge case that they're useful for transactions for illegal goods. It's grifters boosting bullshit trying to make a profit through and through.
It gives you a benefit in the real world vs a benefit in a virtual world. It's not that different especially for people who spend more time in virtual worlds than the real one.
The connection is that both are instances of people paying real money for imaginary goods. I don't know how I feel about that, but intuitively it doesn't seem a smart thing to do.
But that's been a thing in videos for at least 30 years -- expansion packs shipped on disc for a long time -- and a common thing in almost the modern form since 2006 (Elder Scrolls Oblivion adds cosmetic-only horse armor to game for $2, online purchase only).
If you think NFTs add to that the ability to resell as a hedge against initial purchase price, then Valve added a player driven market to TF2 in 2012, the same year Blizzard added the real money auction house.
If you think NFTs add the ability to use content across games, Metal Gear Solid had features involving reading other game save files in 1998, Nintendo Amiibo launched in 2014, and Steam also allows for this via player inventories.
If you think NFTs add the ability to cash out for real money, that's been possible via external third party sites in TF2 since 2013, and analogously for real money gold sales in World of Warcraft since about 2004.
There are ways in which all of the examples above are not totally perfect and/or are more technically clunky than the vision of what this looks like in 5-10 years, but qualitatively more or less every feature of NFTs already exists in various forms over the last 20 years, in some cases all in the same product.
If the Segway was invented and the inventor cited Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov as influences, but had never heard of or wasn't willing to talk about scooters, vespas, skateboards, or cars, that'd be a huge red flag, even if you think that Segways add a bit of value.
So I think the parent's question is still pretty well taken -- what's the connection between the thing everyone's been willing to do for 20 years and the thing that's alleged to be new and different?
> VR is very attractive for teenagers and preteens
Headsets are horribly bad. The day I can get my VR onto my glasses, that's the day that VR will be for everybody. My headset, and many people I known headsets, is in a box. I love VR, I love the games, but I find it too cumbersome for day to day use compared with my screen.
> NFT
Yes. This is already extremely popular, but you do not need NFTs. Your old and proved in-game assets make millions a day. NFT allows for a distributed proof that most people does not care for. It's going to require a lot of marketing and government regulations and trial sentences to make it enforceable and safe.
Got an oculus quest 2 this week. Better than last time I tried one, but still not great. Often going out of focus, and I have problems with fog.
I tried all the things, from VR experiences to porn. Kind of neat, but I still very much prefer the real world. I guess I will play through resident evil 4 and half life alyx, and then the thing will collect dust in a corner again.
One thing that felt quite dystopian was the giant house you can get as your home environment. I can see people living in a tiny apartment with no access to beautiful nature using this to escape from the real world, as soon as the quality gets a bit better.
Regarding NFTs: I don't get it, but I also don't dismiss it completely as a scam. There is of course a large FOMO / get rich quick component, but also an underlying desire for digital ownership and agency.
My wife had that problem with fog and we found an adapter on Amazon that had vents around the padding and it fixed it.
I don't know what the focus thing is about, though, unless the headset is shifting around on your head, and the fix for that is a new strap. The stock strap is pretty meh.
On the Wii, the killer experience for most people wasn't Mario Bros, but was Wii Sports. On the Quest, there's a lot of games that let you use your body well, such as Walkabout Minigolf or Beat Saber. Alyx is good, but not as compelling as the sports games, IMO. It also plays on the computer and requires a wire or a good router and has occasional problems because of that link. Games that play directly on the headset are generally less frustrating.
Yes, the ideas are not new. but they are not bullshit. as someone who also has kids that spend money on virtual goods like it’s going out of fashion, i can attest that the impact on my bank account is very real.
The NFT craze (and cryptocurrencies in general) is largely fuelled by an inflationary global currency ($) and dare i say it, a lot of money laundering too. But that does not make the sector illegitimate.
in fact some of the platforms that have risen out of web3 already (ssb/patchwork) for example are indeed just better versions of dystopian counterculture that have gone before.
i’d say the author here is just keen to shout at the TV as the big corporate news breaks.
Billionaires will be the ones who may end up benefiting least from a true move to a dystopian, decentralised internet as Web3 is hinting at.
Any tips how to get the kids to appreciate the real world more? It's not like I am not trying, but I also don't want to deprive them of computer games.
I basically grew up gaming and hacking on computers (starting with an Atari 800), and I liked it.
Do things with them - not “go out side I want to use the computer” but actual activities involving you working hard - and not just the things you like. Kids playing Minecraft? Go visit an actual mine. Kids like racing games? Go to a racetrack or a monster truck rally. Rent a bobcat if you have land to use it on.
And "outside" could actually mean in the living room or garage, building things, too. I learned a lot of things just watching my dad repair houses and handing him tools. He just needed to get it done to get on to having fun, and didn't think to include me in the actual work most of the time unless he thought it'd speed things up, but I still learned quite a lot from it.
It could also mean art or music.
And finally... It could still be on the computer, making digital art, video games, writing novels, etc, instead of just playing games and chatting. Learning to create the experiences is hard, but the reward for having created them is pretty compelling and the skill carries across different softwares pretty easily, setting them up with those skills for life.
I try to do all of these as much as possible. Hiking, mountainbiking, go-cart, or even airsoft. They like all of that, but the allure of things like minecraft or fortnite is still very strong.
But maybe that is normal. After all it took myself decades to figure out life so much that now I enjoy real life. Was just hoping there might be a shortcut.
Of course they're addicted to screens, like all kids these days.
It's just that they want a quick and easy fix, and certainly not to wear one around their heads.
Addictive screen technology has no "wow" factor for people that had them from birth. Screens are about as exciting and cool as daytime television was in the pre-Internet era. (And similarly, we somehow can't stop wasting hours a day on them still.)
I'm 45 and already spend more than half of my day in VR. My morning workout is done in VR, then I move on to guided meditation session, before finally starting work in Immersed.
I use a quest 2, with prescription inserts from Reloptix. Add the Input font (input . djr . com) for my system and application fonts (for apps that support it, like IDEs). And it's good enough for me at this point.
the good news is that the metaverse and the tech industry's very
expensive obsession with trying to make it a reality will be a
schadenfreude generator the likes of which we've never seen before
The tech landscape is littered with failed attempts, but we have here two very technically successful companies, Epic and Facebook, both trying to re-imagine the internet as something different.
I'm not sure I'd write them off as a bunch of idiots quite yet.
A bunch of idiots with a lot of money maybe...
But look: Something is happening.
You can close your eyes and pretend it's not. Apps are going to go away and the web continue to be The Way people access information online, and sucky little progressive web applications that hardly anyone is using or making money off are going to become awesome and NFTs will die. I mean, heck, it's only a matter of time until all those people who invested in bitcoin lose it alllllllllll right?
You can sit there and laugh as how stupid they all are.
...maybe? If you want to.
That's probably not a wise thing to do though.
I think there are enough things going on, with enough competent folk doing them, and enough money behind them, that you're looking at the start of a change.
Who knows how it'll go, but I think it might surprise people who are sitting around laughing.
One thing that you can always bet on: Things change.
Exactly. Things are changing and it is not a bad thing if corporates try to be a change. Probably they fail, but even trying is better than doing nothing.
I can think of endless scenarios of how this plays out, and that is not one of them.
Corporations rule us today and will only continue to grow larger and more powerful. There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms. See the futile fight for privacy some of us still care about as an example.
We, the technologists, are complicit or directly benefit financially from this change. Governments are slowly catching up, pretending to control the monster they've let loose on their citizens, but are really in symbiosis with corporations, so nothing will change there.
This Metaverse thing is not something to laugh about or dismiss. It will happen one way or the other. And all of it makes me want to pick up gardening and go live in a mountain shed away from it all.
We've all read the sci-fi books or seen the movies to know how this plays out, yet are actively working towards that future. I have no words to describe it but mass insanity.
I'm trying really hard to think about the positive aspects of this, but I'm coming up short. Will the future be more convenient? Sure. Will this help some people live out a better life in the real world? Probably. But the vast majority will be mindlessly plugged into this thing, isolated from meatspace, at the direct benefit of the corporations that produced the experience.
There won't be a big war between man and machine. The Matrix will be built by humans, machines will help us do it, and we'll all want a taste of that juicy steak we saw in that ad.
> There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms.
I don't think history supports this prediction. We've been through several cycles of of this over the past few hundred years already -- the rise of powerful corporatocracy, followed by the people ultimately getting sick of that and knocking corporate power back.
I see no reason to expect that pattern won't continue to repeat as we move into the future.
I find it hard to see much of a serious case for NFTs, but I mostly agree with what you're saying. Even if it is a "schadenfreude generator," Amazon's attempts at having third-party sales on their site with "zshops" were a laughing stock until they weren't.
We’re seeing only the first iteration of NFTs. Gaming can be interesting. Like if WoW had some unique Legendaries in NFT form I think that would be interesting and lucrative. I’m not sure if the incentive is there for existing games because you’re giving away control of the economy. But for upstarts they can use this as a way to get players to try their game instead since you could maybe sell some of the items for real money one day
What on earth does the NFT part add here? WoW can add unique, auctionable items at any time using their existing tech. It's already a centralised platform, so decentrilisation doesn't add much...
That's really my question with almost everything related to crypto, "what is decentralization actually adding here?" It's cool, I guess, but it's wasteful.
The only argument I've heard is the ability to transfer items between games, but that leads me to more questions than answers.
Why would an asset designed for one game make sense or look good or feel at home in a completely different one?
Why would companies make one of them and sell it for a million bucks instead of trying to convince more players to buy it in a shop for two bucks?
Is the mechanic of a weapon gonna adjust to the new game when you import it or stay the same? If it stays the same, it's gonna be exploit galore. If it changes, well then, what's the point? Gonna be the same AK-47 as everyone else's, but this tiny sticker on it that nobody's gonna pay attention to is unique!
Even if we pretend this is somehow a promising field, why even use NFTs and make each one a couple of pixels different instead of making a common one, selling it for like $50, buyers get a file in whichever format is agreed upon, and import them in the settings.
Games already allow transfers in some cases - and usually in the exact opposite of decentralized - for example Nintendo and their Amibo or Pokémon with loading previous generation saves.
A number of NFT promoters have made the argument that other video games could support the WoW NFT and then that content would be portable across those games!!!
Okay, but none do, and none will, and any other video game that did code in a substantially similar functionality would simply sell the same content in their own game, there's no benefit to the company to spend the time and money to make the content and not get compensated for it especially given radically different content architectures, visual styles, levels of detail, physics, object-player interactivity, etc. You can tell this is true, because they could already make it interoperable now and they don't -- like it's entirely possible that Marvel could sell "buy the Spider-Man game and get Spider-Man costumes in every other game he's a crossover character, across all platforms" and they... absolutely don't do this!
But also this vision is predicated on there being a small number of canonical NFT brands, when in reality you can open up Grand Theft Auto Online and there are literally tens of thousands of items made for the game. So if there's 10,000 items made for GTA Online and 50,000 items made for the Sims Series, then interoperability means that Square Enix needs to add 60,000 items to Final Fantasy to support subsidizing the NFT marketplace for the other two games? Or else you sit around trying to import your Mercedes Hood Ornament NFT from Forza into Mortal Kombat 13 and it tells you "hey, we don't support that one! Or that one! Or that one! Or that one!"
And you can tell this is true because Nintendo already has a system for this called Amiibo where you buy little figurines with fungible codes that putatively can work in any game that supports them. And 99% of games on Switch don't support any, the ones that support any only support 1 or 2, and only one game supports more than 10 or so, and it's a crossover fighting game called Smash Bros.
You might say, okay, but Amiibo are finnicky, they take up space, NFTs improve on Amiibo by not having you actually need a physical object. Okay, but the vast majority of the value is in the physical object. You can tell this is true because Nintendo has the capability of reprinting the relatively expensive physical figurines as marginally nearly zero cost trading cards and... they don't, because there's no real demand.
But then you say, no, the key thing to NFTs is their non-fungibility. Okay, but that's a horrid fit for games. Now instead of modelling Mario once, I need to model Mario a hundred thousand times. If the differences are small between each model, then I get the benefits of procedural generation so it's less work, but the market collapses because the token is as-if fungible and that means the supply is as-if unbounded. And as Nintendo, wouldn't I rather sell each Mario costume for $1 to every player that wants it rather than selling one Mario costume for $100 to someone and then establish an elaborate crypto-driven derivative market where I get a chunk of each secondary sale?
It seems like the most obvious way you can make NFTs actually be something different is when you overtly lean into the bizarre gambling, ultra-rare one offs, and big money market speculation stuff, and at that point you no longer have a game at all, which is probably pretty bad if you're a game manufacturer. But game manufacturers have tried this too, with limited edition sales (Nintendo sold a game last year that they discontinued after 6 months to preserve scarcity, both digital and physical; Nintendo has also done ultra-rare and non-fungible collectible Pokemon leveraging real world events), numbered editions (Atlus with Devil Summoner 2 on the PS2 in 2006 or so). Even one-off multi-thousand dollar stuff has been done in the gaming industry, with special issue collectible hardware (Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have all done this).
Like the issues raised in the currently top upvoted thread, almost everything about NFT in vid...
Counter-Strike GO skins are non-fungible. In that they have different float value of wear parameter and in some cases texture placement.
In the end that really doesn't matter, each version for same weapon is listed under few categories. And for players it mostly doesn't matter which one they pick. So even in the case we have good example what non-fungibility is, it really does not matter much.
>A number of NFT promoters have made the argument that other video games could support the WoW NFT and then that content would be portable across those games!!!
As the article points out this is a dumb idea that doesn't make any sense. You could port an ownership token from one game to the next, but the receiving game has to implement some semantics for that item that are completely divorced from the originating game anyway.
Yeah and once you have built all this cross-platform integration and standardisation between the game companies involved….
They’ll find it’s easier to just use a centralised database they collectively run or contract out or whatever. The whole idea of putting the “ownership records” on a public blockchain doesn’t help the system work at all and adds a ton of complexity (not to mention environmental concerns).
Agreed with all of that but just thought I’d point out the non-fungibility is of the token itself not the actual content it points to. So you’d be able to sell non-fungible tokens for access to the same content. Companies still wouldn’t because doing that inserts a lot of complexity you don’t need rather than using a normal storefront model.
> But also this vision is predicated on there being a small number of canonical NFT brands, when in reality you can open up Grand Theft Auto Online and there are literally tens of thousands of items made for the game. So if there's 10,000 items made for GTA Online and 50,000 items made for the Sims Series, then interoperability means that Square Enix needs to add 60,000 items to Final Fantasy to support subsidizing the NFT marketplace for the other two games? Or else you sit around trying to import your Mercedes Hood Ornament NFT from Forza into Mortal Kombat 13 and it tells you "hey, we don't support that one! Or that one! Or that one! Or that one!"
Another possibility is mapping everything to a limited set of items. So like, I can bring over any of my golf clubs from PGA Tour 2K12 to Grand Theft Auto, but they all just map to a generic "golf club" I can beat people up with. But this isn't very compelling after the first couple times someone tries it.
Tim Sweeney has been talking up a technically reasonable vision of the Metaverse for several years now. But Epic hasn't shipped much. You can load new game maps into Fortnite. That's about it. Unreal Engine 5 doesn't have much in the way of support for a world where users can change almost everything. It's still based on a model where you do massive optimization during build time.
Yea, the major problem with this take by the OP author is it assumes that a cynical attitude and some questionable analogies means there is nothing new left to invent in how we use the internet.
This seems extremely dubious to me and also shows a severe lack of humility. There are many very smart people at these companies and Mark Zuckerberg has consistently shown himself to be a canny and innovative founder (even if you dislike him for whatever reason).
It may end up being BS but dismissing it out of hand seems extremely foolish.
> There are many very smart people at these companies and Mark Zuckerberg has consistently shown himself to be a canny and innovative founder (even if you dislike him for whatever reason).
There is good reason to be skeptical given the long list of failures and Zuck hasn't shown why his take would be different yet - to my knowledge.
In the words of Morpheus from the Matrix, "Show me."
John Carmack has shown himself capable of repeatedly making good video games, and even when not the greatest still technologically amazing.
Mark has shown that he successfully didn’t destroy a MySpace clone that prints money. Other than that what has he done besides buy already large companies?
Have you heard of Facebook Gaming? It's a streaming platform, like Twitch. Launched in 2007. Nobody uses it.
Did you buy an HTC First, the infamous "Facebook Phone" that was so universally panned, they couldn't even ship out their first production run of phones, despite it being one of the cheapest on the market?
When's the last time you used a Portal?
Facebook has just as many stinkers, despite many smart people working the company.
The metaverse is poorly communicated. Revolutions start at level 1, but communication sometimes start at level 25.
level 1 for smart phones: Read email/chat while waiting for the bus
level 25 for smart phones: A large economy with global behemoth corporations built on the premise that everyone has computers in their pockets
Level 1 for metaverse: You can now work from your couch/porch/beachhouse/bustop as you don't need your screens
Level 25 for metaverse: Everything running in 2d on computers now gets translated to 3d in the metaverse, a new set of global behemoth corporations. Massive implications for code, data and anything big or complicated (think structural blueprints)
Whether revolutions succeed or not is decided by teens and twenty-somethings, not the 30+ crowd (parents dont get it, not now, not ever)
The real challenge here is creating hardware that is cheap and good enough that teens can and will buy it, just like with the smart phone revolution, if you get 90% penetration with the teens then the rest of the world will follow.
Quest2 costs about the same as one decent screen.
I am not a business analyst, but from where I am sitting it seems like they've at least got traction.
I am surprised to find that a small shade for my laptop screen made out of some illustration board evidently qualifies it as a "metaverse" device, because I sure do get a lot of work done out in the park.
I don’t understand why would that be an asterisk. Anyway they have the multiplayer game with the biggest reach (Fortnite) and they develop the premier game engine Unreal. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in a good position to make a play in this space.
Because it's infant level analysis, Epic doesn't have a unique competitive advantage because they have one popular game.
I know a company that has a very popular game (Minecraft) and they develop the premier game API DirectX. They also have a pretty popular game console, AR glasses, a well known operating system, etc. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in a good position to make a play in this space.
Timing matters. The latest generation of VR headsets are incredible. I feel like this point matters, the same way that Netflix needing broadband to be fast enough to stream video mattered.
People don't want to put things on their head, no matter how great the visual quality might be. We couldn't even get them to put on glasses for 3D TVs.
> One thing that you can always bet on: Things change.
Change is not inevitable. Every change has to justify its own existence.
Look at your computer. You're likely using a keyboard and a mouse. How long have they existed with no fundamental change to how they operate?
Sure, there are other devices for interacting with computers, and smartphones are totally different beasts altogether, but nothing has supplanted the basic keyboard and mouse setup for desktop computers because they work perfectly well and there isn't really much you can improve about them. Everything else that has been designed is only for niche use.
The promise here is that the Metaverse will be the next evolution of the internet, rather than just an expensive toy for a few rich people. It's supposed to be better than the internet, and so much so that we'll all want to be part of it. It's completely irrational to shrug and turn off your brain and say it's pointless to reason about claims like this because it's "inevitable" because things "change" all the time.
> I'm not sure I'd write them off as a bunch of idiots quite yet.
If you look at the really disruptive innovations in technology, the vast majority of them were not made by incumbents. The iPhone is the shining example against me here, but the examples for me are Netflix, Facebook, bitcoin, heck, the internet itself. Incumbents expend efforts entrenching their positions, protecting their products they're already invested in, preventing disruption. It's baked onto the game fundamentally. And to be a little cynical, I'd argue that an incumbent claiming to be a disruptor is not being honest with you more than likely.
It is a wise thing to bet against incumbents promising to disrupt their own industry because more often than not you'd be right.
Yes, we have the internet, but Facebook managed to dominate a huge part of it. No wonder they want to keep their dominance in the next level of it. And I would be careful about calling their domination plans bullshit, seeing as they already succeeded once before.
Second Life was phantastic, I still miss it to this day. It just had a very clunky interface, which modern devices like VR gear might improve upon. (I know SL is still around, probably many lessons to be learned).
Also, "We also have Snow Crash to blame for the absolute hell we find ourselves in today," - wut? Yeah, the "absolute hell" of billionaires investing lots of money to create fun and immersive entertainment options for the rest of us. Truly the worst dystopia imaginable?
>Yeah, the "absolute hell" of billionaires investing lots of money to create fun and immersive entertainment options for the rest of us. Truly the worst dystopia imaginable?
Yes, the "circuses" part of "bread and circuses".
Superficial appeasement doesn't really outweigh the all the many other unethical actions made by billionaires - in this case, vying for be the proprietary controllers of the literal reality of the future.
I don't like centralized control, either, but to claim that we are living in an "absolute hell" right now is just ridiculous.
You are not forced to attend the "circus", either, if you don't like it.
As for centralized control, that is actually the one thing that disappoints me about the future. Somehow all the SF books glossed over the immense cost required to develop the cutting edge technology. How much money did Facebook spend to create the Oculus Quest? I just don't see hobbyists and hackers create the same level of technology - or think about the Apple M1 SoC. Would hackers have been able to create such a thing in their mom's basement eventually? I rather doubt it. So centralisation is an issue, simply because development costs are so high. It's not simply a conspiracy by evil billionaires.
>How much money did Facebook spend to create the Oculus Quest? I just don't see hobbyists and hackers create the same level of technology
Facebook bought a company made of hackers to get in on VR on the ground floor. Yes, they're throwing money at the problem to artificially keep the price down, but using that example really hurts your point.
> In a September 2021 Washington Post interview, Tim Sweeney imagined the future of advertising. "A carmaker who wants to make a presence in the metaverse isn't going to run ads," he said. "They're going to drop their car into the world in real time and you'll be able to drive it around. And they're going to work with lots of content creators with different experiences to ensure their car is playable here and there, and that it's receiving the attention it deserves."
You can tell this absolutely makes no sense, because if we're in the metaverse, why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Or if I can't, I'm going to open up a shop next door that sells metaverse helicopter rides. If I make a vehicle in the metaverse, I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around.
Not to mention, you don't need cupholders in VR, because your avatar doesn't have a stomach. You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse? Heck, I don't need the whole front of the car, because the engine doesn't actually exist.
The whole metaverse idea is based on clunky, outdated metaphors to the real world like this. Someone who saw Ready Player One in theaters thinks that driving a car in VR is cool, without thinking for five more minutes about why it's actually not.
In Second Life, you could create islands with their own rules, for example you could create a car racing game. Then when you enter the game, you can not fly around while you play the game. It really was very interesting, and amazing how many things people created in a very short time span.
You might not know this, but Second Life was not, uh, a wide success. And Second Life is the one we remember from that era. There are dozens of these metaverse things from the mid-90s through the 2000s, none of which achieved the notoriety anywhere near Second Life. Off the top of my head:
Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Lively (2008), PlayStation Home (2008)
It was such a tired cliché by then that even Homestarrunner was making fun of it in 2007 [0].
Go look back at some of the early VRML hype from the mid 90s, it's like watching history replay itself. Most of it is before the era of the Wayback Machine, but there's a few good articles out there still [1] [2]. I can't even find any news writeups of SGI WebSpace, just screenshots, despite it being the VRML plugin for Netscape back then.
Yet social media has enabled, and arguably thrived on, griefing and trolling at an industrial scale.
What's worrying is...what if FB manages to create a metaverse that thrives on the same toxicity that FB itself does. And through the Oculus makes the tech cheap and portable enough to get a critical mass of people involved in it.
While I’m not seeing much around this topic in this particular forum, it is being discussed in many places.
The general consensus seems to be (and at this point I wholeheartedly agree) FB attempting to build a meta world is hysterical considering their seeming complete inability (with some unwillingness sprinkled in) to address trolls/astroturfing /misinformation on their flagship site was a significant driver of many people ceasing to use the site.
If they screw up something like a vanilla social network, they have no shot at running an entire second life derivative. At least one where anyone other than NFT sneakerhead type marketing victims will willingly spend their valuable free time.
SL was great and a lot of fun. It just had a rather clunky user interface, and probably other issues (nobody said it was easy). Nevertheless there was an explosion of creativity for a while.
Nowadays Minecraft and Roblox seem to fill similar niches.
That many attempts failed doesn't mean all attempts will fail. You may not know this, but there were other social networks before Facebook. There was Orkut and MySpace, for example, both disappeared. Yet Facebook now is a billion dollar company.
VRML appeared at a time when people were still using dial-up modems. Things change - eventually technology may be good enough for people to adopt VR on a larger scale.
Yet the social network as a concept that moved from one monopoly to another is a fad that is dieing. It certainly seems likely companies that have gotten their start from VR will succeed in collecting a lot of money and possibly diversifying successfully, but will VR end up being more useful than a FB style social site?
The basic problem with VR for me is that second life showed some potential that isn't going to happen because it is socially positive and a lot of negatives that make me want to kill VR as a medium before I have to deal with FB owning real estate in it.
FB has basically created the bifurcation that will limit the future of all new mediums. Half your friends will never use anything they participate in making the concept of social X a disaster for any X.
I'm not rooting for Facebook, I just take issue with the takes of people claiming the concept of metaversum is bullshit, many of whom have clearly never even played any of the modern games like Fortnite or Roblox, or tried a Quest.
Nobody would be happier than me if a decentralized alternative to social networks like Facebook could be established.
I am not really seeing it as a given, though - the big companies usually offer more convenience and the masses fall for it. And for content creators it makes more sense to go to where the masses are. I have looked into the Fediverse but it seems there is hardly anything there.
I don't know if VR will replace classic web sites like Facebook. An issue in SL, for me at least, was that it was too difficult to create a good looking avatar. In Facebook you don't have to bother with web design. Not sure how to translate that to VR - everybody having a standard living hexagon for representation probably won't work.
When Facebook went public, everyone thought it was doomed, because they made no money. It took the addition of the personalized newsfeed, aka the part of Facebook that is the least social, for it to become a billionaire firm. Nobody posts on my wall anymore.
> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I?
By this logic nobody should play Gran Turismo because a Superman game exists.
> You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse?
By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you don't need a car to surf the web and you can't test the car by visiting the website.
The web is pretty analogous to the metaverse and the most plausible path to an actual metaverse may be an evolution of the web browser. It's the only platform with a sandbox strong enough to run completely untrusted code on your local device with no centralized gatekeeper manually enforcing rules, which I think is a hard requirement for a real metaverse. Any metaverse contender that doesn't start with that is doomed to eventual irrelevance.
But I don't think, as the author of the article seems to, that today's web is already the metaverse and nothing will change. What really drives platform change is input methods. The iPhone was a new platform because it used capacitive touch instead of mouse and keyboard, and the web evolved with it. The metaverse will be a new platform because it will use still different input methods (yet to be determined, probably not the VR controllers we use today) and the web will have to change again, perhaps more radically this time.
I'd say a sizable majority play Gran Turismo because it's a fun test of skill -- learning the controls of an intricate machine, the layout of the game's tracks, and achieving some form of mastery over it. And I'm also sure some people play it for the fantasy of doing car racing in a safe environment, which is a very dangerous, expensive, and inaccessible sport for a lot of people.
So, perhaps I misread Tim Sweeney's point of view, but it seems like it starts and ends with "put cool car in metaverse, drive it down Main St., everyone stops and stares, like that one scene from Snow Crash. Or Ready Player One."
If it's more specific than that, "put cool car in video game, in metaverse" product placement, well we already have that today. Mercedes Benz already did a whole Mario Kart thing [0], and countless other racing games like the Forza series have sponsorships from real car companies. So that's not really anything novel for the metaverse, it's just the same product placement marketing strategy that's already existed. Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years.
> By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you can't test the car by visiting the website.
Pretty much all of these websites have a call-to-action for "Schedule a test drive at your local dealership". Hell, I remember an entire campaign from a major car corporation that was to the tune of "anybody can watch a TV commercial, but driving it is believing"
I have two cars - a 1980 Datsun and a Fiat Spider. They're both a "test of skill". There's no reason it wouldn't be massively fun to play with lots of other cars on tracks or in all kinds of conditions in VR. "Fun test of skill" is the whole point. The original, like, Stephenson-ish "metaverse" was somewhere people fought with swords. This was getting directly at the idea that skill and challenge were more valuable than raw code. [edit: "entertainment"]
Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?
Well, yeah. Honestly, a massively multiplayer GTA V or Red Dead 2 would basically be the whole Metaverse concept. The only differences would be:
(1) You aren't there to complete missions; there's no storylines and it's totally open-ended. There are no writers, and
(2) The spaces and content are created by anyone, not a central company, and
(3) You can go from GTA world to Red Dead world to tons of other worlds without changing missions or skins or avatars or whatever; they're part of the same huge space you can traverse without leaving VR.
(4) You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities.
So, like, yes Stephenson's metaverse is similar to a lot of video games we have now, but it's critically different because his characters are "heroes" in that universe specifically because they coded their own avatars and their own environments.
Which is another way of saying that it rewards thought, code, and creativity -- exactly the things that video games steal people away from.
I don't know, that just sounds like pitching a TV show without writers. Even a reality TV show or a cooking show needs writers to keep things entertaining. Otherwise, you sort of just have nothing to look at.
> You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities
I ask again: why can't I code my avatar to be the most OP avatar that ever exists? I will create a weapon that kills people if they look at me. What's the incentive to purchase new things if everyone can just code the most OP version and undercut the person next door? I will have the best cars, the funniest T-shirts, and the strongest potions, and you cannot stop me. Because I write Lua scripts.
There's some element of cooperation that is usually assumed when people talk about the metaverse but I don't see any incentive to maintain it that way. Garry's Mod and Roblox are platforms that do what you're talking about, today. The way they maintain this cooperation is that they prevent users from having strong autonomy in games that others make. In Roblox, your avatar is limited to a few cosmetic choices for customization, and in Garry's Mod, you don't really have any customization at all in most game modes.
Real world is like that, you can “code” manipulate the world. However there is a limit on some extent and in such worlds there will be other limits like a consensual physics rule on servers entry, like “local laws”. Rather than LUA think on declarative contracts that limit your crafting based on agreed parameters.
> The only differences would be: (1) You aren't there to complete missions; there's no storylines and it's totally open-ended. There are no writers, and (2) The spaces and content are created by anyone, not a central company, and (3) You can go from GTA world to Red Dead world to tons of other worlds without changing missions or skins or avatars or whatever; they're part of the same huge space you can traverse without leaving VR. (4) You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities.
We already have games almost entirely like this, and the market is clear: no one plays them, to a good approximation. People play games to compete or cooperate on specific goals. This idea of sandbox multi-player interaction is only a gimmick that's interesting a few weeks tops, then the vast majority leave to play Candy Crush or Fortnite where they have clear goals.
If they want to meet with friends and hang around, real life contact just can't be beat. That's the reason why virtual persistent worlds are ultimately bullshit (as opposed to game worlds where you have an actual game to play, be that chess or matching colored gems or killing other players).
Following up on the racing of infinite-speed cars, there was also an emphasis of optimizing your own user interface. That when every car could go at whatever speeds you want, the most important thing is how to interact with the car, and to control it. So it isn't just somebody else's code, but the skill and challenge of making your own code to suit your particular needs in an interface.
Because there's no guarantee that the experience is in any way comparable to the actual driving. It's in the manufacturer's interest to do the opposite. If the controls weren't standardized the simulation might have still been useful to learn the controls, but they are.
Besides, when AI cars come along the criterias will change completely. From driving experience to cost and comfort. That could be virtualized... but there wouldn't be much point in it.
I thought modeless was wrong and that you weren't discounting the experience of driving, but rather the experience of driving a mediocre car. However, with your followup comment, it seems you're discounting the experience of driving.
Suffice it to say that plenty of people genuinely love driving, both in video games and in the real world.
Flying won't make driving obsolete any more than mountain biking has made hiking and trail running obsolete in places that are accessible to mountain bikes.
Same with manual transmissions. But watching my gf obsess over yeast cultures, I would say same about baking bread. Some people love a challenge; other people don't get it.
Can second it, its properly effortless and becomes second nature. Gives much more control over the engine.
That being said, switched my old BMW 3 series (E46) with manual to newer 5 series with automatic steptronic transmission, and especially for longer drives, the cognitive and 'manual' load is measurably less. But you don't realize it until you migrate.
It moves to almost boring territory, luckily I am not a type of person who tends to fall asleep behind the wheel (unlike my wife).
It becomes second nature, but most people find it a bit of a challenge to learn - obviously not a particularly huge or impossible one considering how common it is for people to get the hang of it in tens of hours, but still a challenge compared to just learning to drive in an automatic.
I think they are discounting that there would be anything new at all in a "Metaverse" offering driving compared to what exists today in gaming. Of course you can have fun with virtual driving, there already exists a plethora of ways, from realistic-ish high speed racing in Gran Turismo to wacky racing in Mario Kart to realistic-ish long-form driving in Truck Simulator.
And there’s the newest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. People really love the vr mode and the videos I’ve seen (I’ve never played it) already look pretty darn realistic and engaging.
Is that a criticism, or a reflection of the fact that 20 years ago it was already pretty much perfect except for graphics limitations of the tech of the time? (Genuine question as someone who tried it as a kid 20 years ago but doesn't remember much about it.)
Sure, but still it's a niche product. It's not like they're going to sell the next XBox by getting Microsoft Flight Simulator as a platform exclusive.
This is not to cast any aspersions on the game - popularity is not everything - but things like MFS are perfect examples that even the best simulators are just niche products, not the future of the web.
Virtual reality can have all sorts of landscapes, and moving along a surface, whether it be hilly or flat like Tron, will be popular. Driving is one way to move along a surface, but there's also running, swimming, base jumping, skiing, snowboarding, skating, and others. I'm sure all will be common in the metaverse.
For an example of something where driving is exciting and totally unnecessary, see Rocket League.
>Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years.
I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game.
The reason that giving you the real experience of being in a specific car is bullshit for marketing purposes is that you can see hardly anyone markets cars based on what it will actually be like to use them and of course because except for a few outliers using any specific car is the same as using pretty much every other car built in a similar time frame.
on edit: meaning every other car serving the same market segment of course.
I guess my main question here is: why will it be so close to the real experience?
Why wouldn't everyone make it the most engaging virtual car driving experience they can find, what incentive is there to make it "real" in this useful way?
I mean, I get that it's necessary for this to happen for the whole pitch to make sense, but it's just nonsense. Why these weird religious beliefs about 3D stuff, including product placement, which seem to magically behave differently than the 2D versions we've been living with for decades now.
I am just incredibly confused by this. Is it like NFTs where we aren't supposed to believe the cover story and the wink-wink acknowledgement of the grift is a in-joke/cultural thing?
> I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible...
The experience of driving a real car is heavily influenced by the real world. Take those little flap things cars sometimes have to shield your eyes from the sun - the metaverse will first have to simulate an annoyance (possibly with harmful eye-melting ultraviolet light?) then let you mitigate it with the flap. It isn't obvious why people will want that or pay money for it. If they don't simulate glare, then what is the flap for?
Cars aren't independent of reality, they exist as well designed tools that allow us to do and experience things that we otherwise couldn't. When that gets translated to some sort of virtual space all the design decisions start to fall apart. The only thing that really carries over is to get the branding in front of a person to make them think of the name - which rather undermines the original "isn't going to run ads" thesis.
If it's either a selling point of the car enough that the manufacturer wants to demonstrate it accurately, or if it's something enough people care about and want to see which car suits them better, then a third party could create a simulation tool that let's you quickly go through dozens of different sun positions, weather conditions etc. and see how your personalised body shape will be positioned in each car including being able to adjust the virtual seat position, sun flaps, etc. to compare how you'll be affected by light in a different range of cars... it could be a useful feature? Hell, maybe it even extends to being able to choose the perfect custom flap size and positioning, to either get it added into a new car sale, or ordered as an after-market minor swap to improve your driving experience.
>I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game.
Why do you think the metaverse will do a better job than the developers at assetto corsa for whom it is their primary mission?
It's all just marketing wank to get advertisers excited to put product placement in facebook's new second life metagame.
yes it's marketing wank, but how is marketing wank made - probably by a bunch of idiots (of which I am sometimes one) - sitting around a table brainstorming what they can do to sell this tech to others. And then someone says an idea and everyone says hey that's great even though it is sort of crap, and that becomes the marketing wank they're releasing.
I don't really care how marketing wank is made especially when its obviously lying marketing wank. Calling it the metaverse doesn't make it any more appealing.
I do think the potential around VR is greatly oversold however there are still benefits outside of gaming: concerts, remote conferences, having kick ass multi-screen home office for those who don’t have the space for one.
The office example is the real winner for me. But imagine what it would take: a wireless VR headset with massive resolution that still allows me to look at my surroundings so I can drink a coffee or eat my lunch and is comfortable enough to use for several hours with no breaks.
That’s why I said “for those who don’t have the space”. You might live in a one bed apartment and not have the room for a dedicated work space so VR might be the alternative in such a situation.
I appreciate this isn’t going to be a super common use case but it’s definitely something that might appeal to some who have well paid jobs in expensive to live locations (like London and SV).
Much as I hate FB, as a piano player I loved their little graphic showing how mixed reality would send the notes down to your hand positions on the piano as an endless Star Wars kind of scroll thing. I would do that just to exercise my mind with some classical or jazz pieces. I can think of a slew of other ways VR is useful. Training doctors for surgery. Training pilots. Mechanical engineering and prototyping. None of that means we should live in VR. Just that it's a powerful tool.
VR is potentially good for some video games, like 3D it's a technology and just because you're using it doesn't mean it's magically making your game better. There's an era of early 3D platformers that were terrible because the people making them don't yet understand how this form works, they're maybe expert 2D platform game designers, but not everything they learned applies cleanly to the new form.
It can take a long time to unlearn things in video games. It took years after video game arcades ceased to be the dominant factor for games to get rid of "Lives" that existed only† to ensure players pump coins into the no-longer relevant coin slot.
I think Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes shows off what VR can do well that you couldn't do otherwise. The isolation between the player defusing the bomb and everybody else is part of the game. The fact that the player defusing can't look at the bomb manual is enforced by them being in a VR environment with no manual.
In too many VR games, the VR is largely an impediment, and the takeaway is "This could be a good game, shame it's VR".
† OK things like Hundred Mario challenge and the modern Endless Super Expert show that you can do other things with this form, but it's pretty arbitrary, there's no way this would exist without the history of video game arcades.
Extremely good points. VR has the potential to revolutionize education, and by extension workplace training. With the addition of AR, that education/training can have a persistent presence on the job.
I wonder when society will realize all this technology has no value without the support of the single most valuable resource on this planet: humans and their educations. The number one asset of any/every company and every nation is their people - yet we treat people as completely disposable. Our civilization is literally insane today, and will remain so until this clear value is recognized.
The point the OP is making is VR isn’t a domain where you test drive practical family cars. Sure you have racing games but how many people can afford, let alone justify, high ended performance cars for their family? And how many racing games do you see where people are driving boring (relatively speaking) family cars?
The point about VR games are that they’re an unrealistic escape. If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
>If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
What? Why?
A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution.
Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (which is actually just your perspective if you prefer beer, the orange-juice-loving person in the group is seeing the whole group drinking orange juice) and discussing the latest celebrity scandal. All of the cosmopolitanism and variety of social media, none of its artficiality and bullshit.
(Off course there is going to be new bullshit in this world, people will go through various hoops to pull idiotic pranks on other people and scammers will have a terrifying field day with the new convincing techniques the new medium will bring, but at this point this is just more or less real life. Real Life In Your Pocket that is. (hopefully eventually, it will have a PC phase first). Who is not excited by that?)
Imagine a professional like an airline pilot or a heart surgeon transmitting a read-only record of a flight or an operation, complete with haptic feedback and a temperature-and-wind reconstruction of the transmission environment. Imagine those records dumped to storage and serving as humanity's Library Of Crafts, a correction to our ancient shortcoming of only being able to capture in symbols what could be said (and with photography and microphones, what could be seen or heard), but not what could be felt or experienced.
Won't this absolutely revolutionise learning and communication? There is a very clear path from here to eventual Greg-Egan-style post-singular communication where
you are roaming freely in abstract structures residing everywhere from your head to a server in orbit.
Every thought or system or structure ever dreamt up by the human mind began with a 1:1 snapshot of reality that was then further filtered and compressed (Hume's golden mountain). The ability to arbitrarily construct, store, transmit and reconstruct 1:1 ever-more-convincing sensory representations of the world at will is nothing short of a revolution comparable to the invention of language.
That sounds incoherent. Why are we all drinking OJ/beer? Can we taste it? If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers (that all understand English and American culture enough for me to gossip about US celebrities apparently?) without risking giving up the lie?
Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket, too. It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.
Why so? the first 3 paragraphs are 2 examples of why a 1:1 reconstruction of our world on demand can be an amazing thing, the remaining is the statment 'All creation or innovation that the human brain does, or is ever capable off, is simply mixing and remixing its readings of the outside world. So mutable and cheap on-demand reconstructions of the outside world will be an immense boost to creativity and innovation'
>Why are we all drinking OJ/beer?
Why are we exchanging asynchronous plaintext blocks right now instead of speaking on the phone or sharing 30-seconds videos on tiktok? This is the medium we chose, this is the medium the hypothetical group in my example chose. (from a sea of possibilities that make our communication options right now look like ancient letters)
>Can we taste it?
If the hypothetical social media app we're talking about is any good, it will have the option to sync your avatar to real-life-you on various 'motion paths', so that whenever you move along those motion paths, your avatar move in the same way. One of those 'motion paths' is all the movements your hand make when holding an actual drink, which would translate to your avatar mirroring the movement in the meta verse.
What happens if you release the drink ? you have the option of making the renderer either disappearing it or (for fidelity) putting it in a corresponding location in the dream. What happens if you can't or don't want to drink? you have the option to either make the renderer hallucinate a drink (along with believable drinking animations at believable intervals) or just make you appear in the dream as you are in meat space.
What happens if/when
the marriage of neuroscience and computers get fruitful enough that this whole thing is being served directly to your neurons, bypassing the many middle men in your eyes, ears and skin? You can have the additional option of eschewing physical mirroring of the meta verse and just have the gear directly stimulate the feeling of drinking whenever you drink in the metaverse.
>If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers [...] without risking giving up the lie?
Lie? Am I lying to you right now because my username is not the full name registered to my national number in my country's official records ? is the jvm lying to the code running inside of it by presenting virtual method calls as a hardware primitive? This is make-believe, the whole entirety of human civilization is built on it. Even my real name is no more real than the username I chose for this account, except merely by the virtue that more of my existence (more records, more of my opinions, more memories in more heads,...) is attached to it.
You have the option to say you're presenting as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of pretending to present as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of not doing that and saying to your group you're just making the renderer playing tricks on them, and on and on it goes. Whole ecosystems and apps will develop conventions and preferences toward particular options.
>that all understand English and American
This is entirely orthogonal to the technology under discussion, the internet have made millions want to understand English so they can communicate with a greater pool of people, and when cyber communication becomes as deep and convincing as the vision of the metaverse, untold millions more will be motivated to understand popular languages, and will be able to more efficiently than now because language learning (as all learning) will become much more effective and joyful, imagine the high-fidelity virtual/recorded tourism trips available by the petabytes to every person who wants them.
Again, when/If AI or neuro+cyber ever reach the moon they are aiming for, this will integrate nicely with the vision of the meta verse by, respectively, a real-time translation engine running in paralle...
This reads like some sort of techno-utopian fever dream.
People don't want to be completely disconnected from physical reality. The world you described is vulgar to any real human person, honestly it sounds like a cross between Brave New World and The
Matrix.
There would be no authenticity of experience in the world you imagine. It'd be people living out instagram fantasies continuously.
Society would eventually devolve into a decadent, fetalistic world marked by the boredom of playing a video game with god mode on, where humans would no longer be able to deal with hardship or conflict. Bored of travelling to places that don't exist, they'd try desperately to satiate their desire for authentic human interaction by sitting in virtual pubs chatting about the imagined escapades of pretend celebrities.
People construct avatars and profiles about who that want to be in a world they want to be in. Nobody wants a 1:1 with actual reality because we already live in it.
It’s the same reason we watch super hero movies, read comic books and novels. Escapism. If the virtual world is a 1:1 with actual reality then there is literally no reason to enter the virtual world.
And why are text mediums so popular? Because they’re convenient. VR lacks that same convenience.
> the first 3 paragraphs are 2 examples of why a 1:1 reconstruction of our world on demand can be an amazing thing
But they obviously weren't "a 1:1 reconstruction of our world": You can't all simultaneously be drinking beer and be drinking OJ in the real world, so all the scenarios were false.
The metaverse goes against consumer trends in web browsing. People want to consume their information on the go while doing other things, this is why mobile presently dominates the web.
Who wants to context switch from reality into a virtual world just so they can see what the new Ford pickup looks like? Nobody, thats who.
This whole concept reads to make like a Facebook exec went into a coma just as Second Life was taking off and woke up recently demanding that Facebook cease on what they believe will clearly be the future of online interaction.
Can you imagine being Zuck? Super rich for basically creating the global gossip exchange and fraud factory, and he knows this, he knows Facebook is a clusterfuck of misinformation chaos. And he probably knows he is surrounded by yes people... I wonder if he knows he is in a nightmare.
I don't think it's a nightmare because he has choice and a fair amount of power. He could quietly retire comfortably if he wanted to, but instead he's making the play to reorient his company around a virtual-reality space. That sounds like a motivated person, versus someone trapped and going through the motions.
Your input methods comment is key. Today we can have an almost true to life virtual driving experience with peripherals like direct drive steering wheels, loadcell pedals, shifters and a motorised driving rig. It's an expensive hobby with great innovation. Until the interface problem is fixed for VR then it will be a very subpar experience compared to what's already available.
You can now extrapolate this to almost any interaction in VR; walking, flying, typing or shooting.
Until there's an input method that is able to emulate these experiences effectively, then it is pure science fiction.
People are willing to pay thousands of dollars on setups precisely to simulate driving a car in VR. It's not totally implausible that if the VR technology gets convincing enough it could help move some cars too.
Very few people are willing to spend it - that's coming from someone who has spent some money on getting a VR racing setup. Many people who have tried it think its fun but then ask me how much it was and say 'well I'm glad you enjoy it'.
Driving a real car down a windy road is 1000x better than the best Vr setup.
I have literally hundreds of hours in VR racing and driving down a winding highway at 100km/h is still more fun. They sound the same on paper but they don't feel the same. Maybe if I had a full simulator that could replicate the feeling of acceleration but I don't - and nobody on metaverse on their $200 VR headsets will either.
One way to make money in a metaverse would be to artificially create limitations to what a user can do and then sell them the solutions to those problems. So why not add thirst and hunger meters and then sell food items? Or why not make travel non-instantaneous and then sell faster modes of transit?
This is how heavily-monetized games work today and it's not surprising that some in the industry are salivating at the thought of extending this economic model beyond just entertainment.
If the metaverse is truly a decentralized, collaborative space, how can we add these limitations without others breaking them? If all that's stopping them is code, why wouldn't everyone have all the most powerful items, all the time? If the metaverse ever becomes a reality, I promise I will publish a blog post for people to copy/paste some code to make their own custom overpowered equipment and free food and break the whole economic system.
We did, up until Microsoft inherited that role, and now share it with the rest of "FAAMG" (no 'N'). You're basically still correct, only ludicrously -- and I suspect intentionally -- outdated on the identity of the puppet-master.
I'll take your underhanded way of trying to ridicule the idea as a tacit admission that you actually agree it's true, but have some undisclosed motive to discredit it. (Own a lot of Facebook shares, or what?)
If I have to pay for food and transportation to go to a metaverse location to pay my taxes I'll go to the good old web site for free and a fraction of the time.
> I'll go to the good old web site for free and a fraction of the time.
if it still exists. Once the metafart comes to be it will naturally compete with the Web of old, so it will probably look for leverage to extinguish that.
Instead of watching a professional driver smoothly going around a switchback, you sit in first person POV in a car that feels, handles, and accelerates better and faster than the real thing. It even cheats to make you feel like you're a better driver—that the car makes you a better driver. You probably won't buy it on the spot, but you could; the car as an impulse buy right at the peak of your high. Even if you don't, now when you see that car on the road, you associate those good memories with the car. Maybe you even go in for a test drive of the real thing.
Why would anyone want to do that rather than fly? Why would I rather play Gran Turismo when I can be Iron Man in LEGO Marvel Superheroes?
I hate to tell you this, but in most driving games, the center of gravity is so low that it's below the ground. That keeps you from rolling the simulated car.
Gravity acts downwards so having a low center of gravity resists rolling forces. This works in reality as well with vehicles with a high center of gravity being at increased risk of rolling over those with a low center. Games often take this a step further as physics engines let you manually specify where the center of gravity is so you can make it artificially low compared with the actual mass distribution.
You haven't addressed the point. Rolling moment is proportional to the distance of the center of gravity from the ground, in either direction. If the center of gravity is exactly at ground level, the car cannot be rolled. Moving it lower, into the ground, increases the rolling tendency again - in the "wrong" direction.
This is not correct because gravity only acts downwards. This means a lower center of gravity will always be more stabilizing for a vehicle the right way up. As the car rolls the center of gravity is pushed outward. When it’s too high it quickly passes over the pivot point of the wheels and the car will roll as gravity is applying additional moment about the wheel. When it’s lower than the pivot point which is not usually physically possible it’s always resisting the roll until the vehicle is basically nearly upside down.
Draw it on a piece of paper if you need to convince yourself. This is an incredibly common trick to stabilise rigidbody physics simulated vehicles in games.
Edit: I took some time to setup OBS on my non-work machine and make a little video explaining what's going on (apologies for kids in the background and that for some reason my voice only comes out of the left channel):
https://youtu.be/qvMbdzbaAMQ
In your video you show the force in red being applied somewhere up top. What is this force? What applies it?
Your force sideways is actually from the ground, on the tyres. This acts on the CoG (or better to call it Center of Mass), so if this CoM is above the tyres you get a torque, because the mass doesn't instantly accelerate, but resists the force. This torque then needs to be countered by having more force on the tires on one side than on the other, which when you take into account things like suspension, causes body roll, or in the extreme case the car lifting wheels on one side completely off the ground.
If you put the center of mass below the car then think what happens not during turning, but during braking. The center of mass will swing forward underneath like a pendulum (think of what happens to something hanging from the rearview mirror during braking) and if you took it really far down you could even get the car to do a wheelie while braking, which is of course ridiculous.
If you want the car to be completely flat during turns, acceleration and braking then you need to put the center of mass at the ground level. This way when you turn and the ground puts a horizontal force on the car at the contact points with the road (ie. the tyres), it goes through the center of mass and there is no torque generated. No torque = no body roll.
The torque to roll the car in my example is provided by an external force, the dark brown/red arrow being applied to the top right of the 'car'. This is why the car would still roll even if you had the CoM at the ground level. I'm simplifying the true situation (suspension, roll due to the forces involved in turning and so on) to isolate just the impact of CoM position on body roll. So you need a force to induce roll otherwise the car would just sit still.
If you don't believe me you can download Unity, UE, Godot or the rigidbody simulator of your choice and just setup the experiment. Of the engines mentioned UE is perhaps the easiest to set this up with a straightforward car example.
Well sure, if an external object hits your car above the CoM then it will roll. I suspect we're talking past each other, I was referring to the handling characteristics, not the response to an impact.
I think you misunderstand. My demonstration uses an external force for simplicity. To illustrate the stabilizing effects of moving the CoM up and down. The results are the same for other sources of body roll as well.
We're very much not talking past one another. I recommend just doing the experiment to convince yourself because as I and Animats note this is a very common thing to do in games. As I said in my last reply just grab a game engine (they're all free to download) and test it yourself!
I'm sure we all agree that a lower CG is always more "stabilizing" in the sense of righting a car that is not already flat on the ground. But that's not what snovv_crash and I were talking about - we were talking about plausible handling characteristics. A CG below the ground will produce vehicle rolling motions opposite to real life. The outer wheels will lift in a tight turn, and the car will rear up when braking instead of pitching down.
There are only two forces involved - inertial forces which act on the CG, and friction forces which act at ground level. Swap the order, and you swap the direction of the torque.
Driving in a curve (make it infinite if you will: a circular track) your tyres will try to hold you glued to the road, and the centrifugal force ("doesn't actually exist", yadda yadda -- but it works for the purposes of this discussion) will try to push you outwards.
The tyres exert their force at road level, the centrifugal force at the height of the CoM. The CoM usually being above road level, the centrifugal force will tend to tilt the car outwards.
Lower the CoM to exactly road level and there is zero tilting moment; your car might slide outwards if it loses grip, but it will remain upright with no tilt, because the centrifugal force has no vertical leverage relative to the opposing gripping-force of the tyres -- they're opposing each other in the same horizontal plane.
Lower the CoM below the road (magically travelling through the soil without interacting with it), and there is again leverage, only this time with the centrifugal force pushing outwards below where the car is trying to stay attached to your desired trajectory and thus tilting the top of the car inwards, towards the inside of the curve or the center of the track.
:: Moving the CoM down has a stabilizing effect down to road level, but if you go lower than that it starts destabilizing again, only applying its rolling force in the opposite direction.
If everybody is making cars that handle much better than they do in the real world, wouldn't this result in an arms race of upping the "cheese" of the mechanics to heighten the intensity? And this only works until people recognize the grift -- once they know the actual car experience and the demo experience aren't related, suddenly it won't be a useful ad anymore.
That's not a likely scenario. They aren't trying to create a Camry that handles like a Porsche. They're trying to sell Camrys. The effects will be subtle and plausible. To the extent that it's discovered, there will be excuses. And even after it's discovered, it will continue, just like everyone today knows TV car ads aren't real, but they're still effective, because they tap into the right parts of our brains.
Forget about what other people who have nothing in common with you do.
Its a trap to focus on it. Many have resources, energy and no sense, taste or imagination. You cant blame them. Its like complaining to a cactus for not producing strawberries. Or yelling at swampland for not turning fertile.
What you can do is shift focus, and focus on what you and people like you are working on, and keep the focus there no matter what.
Exactly what I had in mind. Underrated movie. Maybe metaverse will end up somewhere between the currently envisioned one and like the surrogates physically existing and people at their homes interacting with the world via them, where tech companies even give the main unit for free but sell unlockable content for their surrogates.
Any game that implements a form of fast travel finds 95% or players use it all the time or most of the time. Sure you could run to Stormwind - but even the tram was completely dead one griffon flight points were usable.
Weird example. That Gryphon ride is slower than taking the tram, or at least it used to be. The advantage of the Gryphon ride is that it was automatic.
Cars are a symbol of status and people will want to have that status wherever they are - look at how much people will pay for a skin in Fortnite.
I think it’s more likely car manufacturers (the expensive ones) will only let you drive their car in the metaverse if you buy it for real in the real world.
If this metaverse really does come to pass, it will be just as (if not more) valuable as a place to be than the real world.
I know that sounds mad to most of us, but by the time it happens we’ll all be 10 years older and not the main market for it anymore. Everyone else will have grown up paying for Fortnite skins and NFTs and it will all seem a lot more… normal.
Sport team season ticket holders getting exclusive digital jerseys to wear? College students getting a code to unlock digital shirt of their alma mater?
Brand affiliation as an identity marker in a virtual space makes sense.
If they're doing that, eventually people will not really bother with the physical car - the prices for the physical car on the used markets would likely plummet (unless ownership is always tied to the metaverse one)
Caveat, I haven't really read up in depth on their renaming to a html tag element. So: I don't know about all of that, but on this topic of virtual cars and such I've got a bit of knowledge.
I've already paid a lot of money for a number of high quality car models I can drive quite accurately on high quality race track scans with lots of other people in iRacing.
These are works of love, and I greatly appreciate that the interest in iRacing has boomed as much as it has since I joined the Papyrus guys' latest offering in 2008.
Heck, soon I'll even be able to connect a real BMW M4 racing wheel to my sim setup, adding more $$$$s yet also more realism to a setup already deep my the investment path; I just don't see the use case for "having cars" in <meta name="rainbowpuke" content="Facebook" /> or whatever if it's only going to be window dressing; I mean, what's the point, unless we enter the fidelity of e.g. iRacing. So I can't see "meta" competing with them at all unless they either buy it (and they wouldn't; it's far too hardcore) or a competitor.
I can see the value of motorsport companies investing in esports, however, as the newest generation of F1 drivers have their roots in that and e.g. karts - which enables a connection to the fanbase hitherto impossible. Would they find value in giving lots of money to MetaFace instead? Time will tell; it'll be interesting to see what eventuates from all of this. First impressions are pretty much Candy Crush in VR - with all the spam you could possibly tolerate, and then some. (No thanks.)
Roblox will be looked back upon as the MS-DOS of metaverses, yet people go gaga over any vehicle you can make. They (mostly kids) spend an absurd amount of hours just jumping from one place to another to prove they can without falling. They spend real money just to turn their hat a new color. Entire genres of games and activities exist basically to just move around, jump on a few things, see numbers get bigger, and see things change colors.
With all that, I truly think yes... people absolutely will drive a car in VR.
People already drive cars in VR, in multiplayer with force feedback steering wheels and chair based motion platforms with a fairly decent but not perfect simulation. My main gaming activity right now is flying WW2 aircraft in VR in big multiplayer fights.
This is one of the articles main points this decentralised universe of cool shit you can do already exists. The question is whether interoperability actually brings anything useful.
People in tech, especially VCs, have this weird habit of seeing something simple (like music sharing, or Roblox) and instead of taking away the simplest lesson (people like free music, games are fun) they feel compelled to extrapolate some sort of vision of the future from it (people love P2P tech! Roblox isn’t just a bunch of games kids like, it’s a _metaverse_!) It’s certainly a fun job to have, massively overthinking everything all the time, but I’m not sure the results bear out.
The funniest part of this for me was Roblox changing all their mention of games to experiences earlier this year during the start of the Epic-Apple thing.
I'm patiently waiting for the desktop metaphor to die. I'm a very happy user of i3 (tiling) window manager and it's beautiful how efficiently it uses space. Meanwhile in the "desktop metaphor" world, interface designers have settled on fullscreen applications (skype, even music players) and tabs. Because no one wants to bother moving application windows around with mouse.
i3 is explicitly for power users, but someone will eventually take the idea of tiling window managers and make something with a low learning curve. And that will be the end of desktop icons and movable windows.
None. But I think you won't feel the need to maximize all if you use screen space efficient apps. When you use a tiling WM, you care about it much more. Old applications like winamp and even old skype had to fit inside resolutions like 800x600 or 1024x768. But UI designers and programmers started being lazy, just like they no longer care much about CPU/memory efficiency so we get lots of Electron and badly optimized websites(JS). And if tiling WMs became more common, developers would make fewer apps that waste screen space.
The metaverse (not Facebook's/Meta's version) can be whatever you want it to be. That's the point.
You could sign into different worlds, or turn different layers of reality on/off.
Perhaps you choose to use a reality where the rules are more akin to the real world, and so the best way to get around is a car... a car that looks and behaves like a car.
And then 15 minutes later you get bored and jump into a world where you can have rocket boots instead.
There will be markets for all different types of realities.
That’s not my concern. My main issue is that it would be pretty much impossible to recreate the dynamics of driving a car the way dedicated video game car simulators do. Who will write the code? The car manufacturer, or the platform? All you’ll end up with will be a precise 3-D model of the car and a generic driving “experience”. When you play Grand Turismo every car behaves differently because the creators took the time to customize each car. I don’t see how would this apply to a platform because the backend to support all this would probably not be there.
If if the buyer can afford the car they can just to go a dealership and test drive one, and get a 1:1 experience. This is about advertising and trying to sell advertising as experience rather than advertising. What else would you imagine facebook's virtual space to be?
Like an enhanced version of Second Life. If you don't offer some kind of immersive experience then no one will bother participating. Advertising as experience is exactly what I'm describing by having a car that behaves like the real one. Otherwise it's a dumb model with no difference from any other car/ad there.
If it works a bit like Second Life, the creator of a thing (like a car) can define the behavior of the car. So people wanting to put their car into the metaverse presumably could expend as much effort on it as they want.
I mean now if they simulate a car for Grand Turismo, they also use some kind of API (Unity Engine, OpenGL, whatever) to encode the behavior. Likewise a metaverse will have some API which you can use to encode behavior.
It remains to be seen what options it provides. In SL I think you wouldn't have been able to create a very good car simulator because the engine was too limited. But the situation might be improved for newer metaverse attempts.
I think most people in this thread are missing the point. It is not that people could only experience VR without the metaverse. People can still surf the internet, yet most people chose to spend their time on Facebook, because it is more convenient and makes some things easier. To the point that some non-Facebook internet sites make you sign in with your Facebook account.
If everybody is on meta, it makes no sense for Mercedes to create an independent VR experience to advertise their cars. It makes more sense to do it in meta, where Facebook can direct users to the Mercedes VR world.
Most people would tell you that the car showroom experience is one of the enjoyable parts of buying a car - the new car smells and discovering the knobs and features, and how comfy the lumbar support is in the shiny new models - VR doesn't come close.
I was CTO in an Augmented Reality company that did a lot of user testing (using AR to showcase products) so have atleast a rudimentary understanding of the technology and peoples relationship to it: AR and VR are 'wow' experiences that really excite people before they've tried it and for the first few experience, but apart from a small subset of people the excitement and wonder wears off pretty quickly. When selling things, aspirational photos (the product in a desirable setting) is usually more useful to a buyer than seeing it in AR in their current home.
I first used a $50K VR headset 30 years ago in a CS research department (Dire Straits - Money for Nothing video quality graphics) and it was thrilling but obviously didn't catch on because of the cost and lack of technical performance at the time. The technology available still isn't ready - poor battery / CPU performance really kills mobile AR, the low resolution/field of view/lifelike rendering makes VR painful for the average person.
>You can tell this absolutely makes no sense, because if we're in the metaverse, why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Or if I can't, I'm going to open up a shop next door that sells metaverse helicopter rides. If I make a vehicle in the metaverse, I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around.
The corporate metaverse will be advertiser driven. You won't be able to put rocket launchers on a car except in specific zones where violence is allowed. You'll have to pay the metaverse operator to get your helicopter approved, and they'll want 30% of anything you make from helicopter rides.
All of this is an advertiser friendly second life with no reason to participate. I've had plenty of fun in VR but I want nothing to do with advertiser driven VR, and a metaverse even less.
I think we need to rename the Metaverse into the Zuckerverse so that its more honest. In the zuckerberg you can take an ad from one game to another, a microtransaction from one game to another, and advertisers can send you ads right to your credit card!
Very true. Also if I choose to drive a car in metaverse it would be either a Lamborghini Aventador or a clown car propelled by bubbles. The kind of sensible cars I would consider in real life would be way too boring in an environment where anything can happen :p
Not only that, but here you're talking about increasing the cost of advertising exponentially.
The closest thing we have to what's being described here is a video game. 3D game development is one of the most difficult and unforgiving branches of software development.
To achieve what is being talked about here, BMW is going to have to hire a team of 3D artists, animators and programmers to realize this asset. And someone is going to have to make sure this asset performs well, and interacts appropriately with the world, and with all the other assets which have been created by independent and unrelated teams. Part of that is, driving around in this car can't use too much CPU and GPU budget so that it brings the framerate to a halt when it appears on screen with any combination of the infinite number of combinations of things which could exist in this world.
This stuff takes years and is hard to get right for mature AAA studios with decades of experience. The idea that every company with an ad department is going to get into this vastly expensive and unproven business is a dream for facebook but a nightmare for everyone else.
Had the same sentiment when watching MZ presentation.
Why on earth would my avatar be standing like regular people in the crowd in a concert? I want to be in the scene with hot shot musician, not in the tribune.
Back in the early 90s (late 80s?) Ford published a lame video game promoting (I think) the Mustang. It had a minimal feature walkthrough (now featuring 6 speakers!), terrible graphics, and a very limited driving simulator that was about as exciting as watching paint dry. The Metaverse version would no doubt look a lot better, but it'd be no more real than Ford's early attempt. Maybe as adware it'd be functional at selling some units, but only with people who were already invested enough in Ford to be able to engage with their ad.
I'm also reminded of the US military's funding of FPS games like America's Army (and at least involvement in Call of Duty) as recruiting tools.
So is the metaverse AR adverts? Makes sense I guess. "Please go into an AR world, then our advertisers will be able to 'physically' interact with you."
Advertisers will no longer just manipulate what we read or see but now what we interact with. Makes me yearn for the ceefax thing on the frontpage.
The huge excitement of the WEF for the metaverse makes me think this is the Internet this group of billionaires really wanted. The closed controlled platform with a single private corporation running the whole thing. Feels like a Richard Stallman dystopia.
Now that I'm reading the rest of it, I see his point and he's not stupid. But yes, it does matter who runs it and how it looks and no, second life isn't the fuckin metaverse although it was a really, really nice attempt that he dismisses out of hand as being 'centralized'. Well guess what's centralized now? No, most people don't get a vastly wider experience because the web is so much more than a central 'verse these days. The problem is that the vision they're all locked into is so petty, generic, short sighted and dull.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadwear a MetaMask, and equip MetaFilter.
> ...just like you have the W3C that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web, I think there will need to be some of that here, too, for defining how developers and creators can build experiences that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their friends, and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences.
I'm sure Facebook is looking to have a big and profitable presence in the metaverse, but the point is that it's not one big walled garden like Facebook, but more like the Web as a whole.
The way I see it, Facebook kicking off the push towards a metaverse is kind of like Bell Labs creating Unix. Sure it took a big corp with a lot of money, but that gives the rest of the community something to emulate and build off of, or decide what parts they do and don't like, and so eventually we'll have the metaverse equivalent of Linux. (edited for clarity of the first paragraph)
What's to say that's how it's going to go here?
> I also wouldn't expect a big corp to be the one to create open standards for the rest of the community.
Exactly. So root for a W3C metaverse, not Facebook's walled garden.
Comparing themselves to W3C is a nice trick but they are not at all alike. W3C is a non-profit funded by its members. Facebook is a shareholder-controlled corporation.
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/vwrap/
The first mainstream passthrough AR device that can stitch out and replace humans will be an eye opener for many people. This will happen next year. Most likely at least Meta and Apple’s will do this. And probably a few others. It will be rough but it won’t be hard to connect the dots.
https://gfodor.medium.com/the-rise-of-avatarism-b7ecfa7c42bc
A quote:
Yeah, except that right doesn't exist, and no-one thinks it exists. At all.The idea that an entire civilisation is going to agree to all use VR goggles full time to preserve some non-existent "right" for a very small number of weirdoes to only ever be seen as their cartoon fantasy version is, frankly, laughable.
You do have freedom of form, you are just limited in the forms you can change to. You exercise it every time you get a haircut.
The question is about what changes if there are a variety of contexts where it is fair to assume most or all participants have photonic override. You are missing the point: this isn’t about goggles. Take a longer view, once the goggles become invisible.
The title image refers to an allegory I wrote, which I’m sure you didn’t read, that might help you understand what is probably going to happen as a consequence of technological curves.
That last distinction is how the US itself doesn't get classified as terrorists but can classify Al Qaeda, etc. as terrorists.
But Iran proxies (who are government actors in Iraq at least) and the Taliban are government figures of their respective countries.
I don't think they're even trying to consolidate power. They appear to be in the very unenviable position of hosting half the internet's public verbal diarrhea, with no freakin clue how to deal with it. No sympathy here for the devil, but this is basically inevitable whenever anyone tries to grab the brass ring and take over a totally chaotic system.
Facebook is essentially a failed state.
> Being 'inside' a virtual world was never really the important part"
Well, the facebook keynote presents a compelling argument how social interaction with VR can be more meaningful than through a 2D screen in many situations.
However, what IS bullshit, is the display of obviously fake demonstrations with highly experimental and expensive technology.
The reality is, most of the tech, won't be accessible or even productised for a long time, as they didn't even announce any planned dates...
5-10 years after VR starts to really take off, you’ll be able to get a decent standalone VR headset for $200 or less. They’ll probably be cheaper to make than laptops or TVs in the long run because of the smaller displays.
https://www.oculus.com/workrooms/
Avatars would feel like creepy cartoons because your brain knows the voice of the person but your eyes see a cartoon image.
Have you ever tried that? Smart phones as VR are extremely disorientating and the latency of the gyro makes it unusable.
I've got an Oculus Quest and it's amazing how well it works using the 4 camera vision-system instead of a gyro.
What they were demonstrating in the meta-verse was facial-tracking attached to VR headsets, which is super expensive experimental technology which is not going to be commercially available for quite some time.
[1] https://www.vive.com/us/accessory/facial-tracker/ & https://www.hp.com/us-en/vr/reverb-g2-vr-headset-omnicept-ed...
That's not low end VR, it's pain and frustration from knowing you just wasted 105 bucks.
It sounds to me like you never tried a setup like this. Because in reality you mainly spend time adjusting the lenses because focus is so bad you can't even tell which setting is better. The pixel grid is so huge that reading any form of text (like menus) is near impossible. The latency is bad and your view constantly drifts over time because the phone sensors don't cut it, so you better sit on a rotating chair. Oh, and if you've all that covered somehow you'll realize mediocre VR video players and bad rollercoaster demos are pretty much the best phone VR can offer.
Someone was going on and on about how Facebook is showing off a (likely) $50,000 prototype and I was just explaining that 2021's $50,000 prototype is 2031's $100 at Wal-Mart
A distraction from all the criticism they are currently receiving.
People that buy Louis Vuitton are going to shell out for NFT metaverse skins and wear dorky headsets.
That totally tracks.
It's now common for some to use stylized/beautified cartoon 'avatars' in a professional context. People communicate using contrived and performative message board speak with coworkers. Even the 'influencers' spend a large chunk of their life editing and constructing an unrecognisable version of themselves.
If you meet some of these people in real life it's obvious why they do so - reality is too dull, too expensive in time and effort to find a way of standing out from the crowd. Online you can pretend to be whatever you want to be. I see this trend continuing.
They have metaverse in their name. Their avatar system is beyond phenomenal and they keep adding new things [2].
[1] https://neos.com/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXdgnQ0cEKU
We've had video calls for decades now, but people still use text messages because not everything needs to be a video call.
Likewise, we'll keep using text chats because not everything needs to be VR.
I disagree with the author that I can see a lot of value in improved social interactions and virtual workspaces in VR once the technology gets there. You can already see glimpses of it with today's hardware and software. And, it makes sense the VR/AR will be the medium to contain all other mediums. But, that doesn't mean that we need to live in "metaverse" as defined by Neal Stephenson or how Zuck imagines it.
Yes, you'll be able to create your Facebook (or Meta) avatar, and use it to log into work meetings and social events - but that's not much different than using Facebook Login today. There are already a bunch of siloed social experiences in VR, like Facebook Horizon, VRChat, Altspace and Rec Room.
I don't see FB or any other of these apps moving to open protocols that would allow decentralization and federation, just as todays "2D" social media companies, including all the ones owned by FB, aren't doing it.
If Zuckerberg is serious about a federated metaverse and open protocols, he should start by opening up Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
In the end, the metaverse will be the internet, but mostly experienced through the medium of VR/AR.
Edit: Typos
In the same way that e-books will make normal books completely obsolete? I doubt it.
I now buy books as a fancy way to donate to authors I like.
Whether Meta will be able to dominate the scene if the way they do photo sharing I dunno. Their demo video doesn't enthuse me (https://youtu.be/SAL2JZxpoGY).
I guess they may be able to work the network thing - I put my photos in insta/fb because thats where my friends/family are. But will I go on Meta to chat to mum? Probably not. I think text messaging/phone are fine for that.
We need a few desktop screens up for information, a big whiteboard, and the ability to see each others screens. With Immersed and Horizon Workrooms we get all of that already. Before workrooms was really stable we were using Immersed and keeping Mural (white boarding) up on one of our desktops together.
I also do daily workouts and meditation every morning before I start work, all in VR.
I haven't had any motion sickness yet.
The only difficulty I have run into is my bad eyesight. I have found the prescription lenses inserts from Reloptix to be the best, for me at least.
The biggest problem with wearing it for hours is comfort. The strap that comes with the Quest 2 is not good enough. You will feel the weight of it on your cheeks the most, it will get sore pretty quickly. You have to upgrade. I use a halo strap from VR Panda, it solves that problem for me.
And I'll do what I could to create better and more convincing alternative...
The presentation is cringeworthy, but VR is very attractive for teenagers and preteens. I know this from personal experience with my kids.
Same with the concept of NFTs. Using real money to pay for an in game asset like a fortnite skin is completely natural to them.
It's meaningless, though, since the same (massive) caveats apply as when cryptocoins tried to claim they were a viable and better alternative to traditional financial services: buying and owning digital assets is entirely possible to handle with existing, more efficient technology.
Nobody that sells digital assets has any reason to buy into whatever purported benefits a distributed system provides other than hype: you don't need a distributed system if you already control all the servers and everyone is fine with that. The subset of customers that will be _REALLY MAD_ that they can't use their Fortnite skins should Epic disappear is vanishingly small.
NFTs don't even have the edge case that they're useful for transactions for illegal goods. It's grifters boosting bullshit trying to make a profit through and through.
If you think about it, land ownership is also just a very well established social convention.
If you think NFTs add to that the ability to resell as a hedge against initial purchase price, then Valve added a player driven market to TF2 in 2012, the same year Blizzard added the real money auction house.
If you think NFTs add the ability to use content across games, Metal Gear Solid had features involving reading other game save files in 1998, Nintendo Amiibo launched in 2014, and Steam also allows for this via player inventories.
If you think NFTs add the ability to cash out for real money, that's been possible via external third party sites in TF2 since 2013, and analogously for real money gold sales in World of Warcraft since about 2004.
There are ways in which all of the examples above are not totally perfect and/or are more technically clunky than the vision of what this looks like in 5-10 years, but qualitatively more or less every feature of NFTs already exists in various forms over the last 20 years, in some cases all in the same product.
If the Segway was invented and the inventor cited Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov as influences, but had never heard of or wasn't willing to talk about scooters, vespas, skateboards, or cars, that'd be a huge red flag, even if you think that Segways add a bit of value.
So I think the parent's question is still pretty well taken -- what's the connection between the thing everyone's been willing to do for 20 years and the thing that's alleged to be new and different?
Even in the late 90’s folks were buying and selling virtual items in Ultima Online.
Headsets are horribly bad. The day I can get my VR onto my glasses, that's the day that VR will be for everybody. My headset, and many people I known headsets, is in a box. I love VR, I love the games, but I find it too cumbersome for day to day use compared with my screen.
> NFT
Yes. This is already extremely popular, but you do not need NFTs. Your old and proved in-game assets make millions a day. NFT allows for a distributed proof that most people does not care for. It's going to require a lot of marketing and government regulations and trial sentences to make it enforceable and safe.
I tried all the things, from VR experiences to porn. Kind of neat, but I still very much prefer the real world. I guess I will play through resident evil 4 and half life alyx, and then the thing will collect dust in a corner again.
One thing that felt quite dystopian was the giant house you can get as your home environment. I can see people living in a tiny apartment with no access to beautiful nature using this to escape from the real world, as soon as the quality gets a bit better.
Regarding NFTs: I don't get it, but I also don't dismiss it completely as a scam. There is of course a large FOMO / get rich quick component, but also an underlying desire for digital ownership and agency.
I don't know what the focus thing is about, though, unless the headset is shifting around on your head, and the fix for that is a new strap. The stock strap is pretty meh.
On the Wii, the killer experience for most people wasn't Mario Bros, but was Wii Sports. On the Quest, there's a lot of games that let you use your body well, such as Walkabout Minigolf or Beat Saber. Alyx is good, but not as compelling as the sports games, IMO. It also plays on the computer and requires a wire or a good router and has occasional problems because of that link. Games that play directly on the headset are generally less frustrating.
The NFT craze (and cryptocurrencies in general) is largely fuelled by an inflationary global currency ($) and dare i say it, a lot of money laundering too. But that does not make the sector illegitimate.
in fact some of the platforms that have risen out of web3 already (ssb/patchwork) for example are indeed just better versions of dystopian counterculture that have gone before.
i’d say the author here is just keen to shout at the TV as the big corporate news breaks.
Billionaires will be the ones who may end up benefiting least from a true move to a dystopian, decentralised internet as Web3 is hinting at.
Any tips how to get the kids to appreciate the real world more? It's not like I am not trying, but I also don't want to deprive them of computer games.
I basically grew up gaming and hacking on computers (starting with an Atari 800), and I liked it.
It could also mean art or music.
And finally... It could still be on the computer, making digital art, video games, writing novels, etc, instead of just playing games and chatting. Learning to create the experiences is hard, but the reward for having created them is pretty compelling and the skill carries across different softwares pretty easily, setting them up with those skills for life.
But maybe that is normal. After all it took myself decades to figure out life so much that now I enjoy real life. Was just hoping there might be a shortcut.
Of course they're addicted to screens, like all kids these days.
It's just that they want a quick and easy fix, and certainly not to wear one around their heads.
Addictive screen technology has no "wow" factor for people that had them from birth. Screens are about as exciting and cool as daytime television was in the pre-Internet era. (And similarly, we somehow can't stop wasting hours a day on them still.)
I'm not sure I'd write them off as a bunch of idiots quite yet.
A bunch of idiots with a lot of money maybe...
But look: Something is happening.
You can close your eyes and pretend it's not. Apps are going to go away and the web continue to be The Way people access information online, and sucky little progressive web applications that hardly anyone is using or making money off are going to become awesome and NFTs will die. I mean, heck, it's only a matter of time until all those people who invested in bitcoin lose it alllllllllll right?
You can sit there and laugh as how stupid they all are.
...maybe? If you want to.
That's probably not a wise thing to do though.
I think there are enough things going on, with enough competent folk doing them, and enough money behind them, that you're looking at the start of a change.
Who knows how it'll go, but I think it might surprise people who are sitting around laughing.
One thing that you can always bet on: Things change.
Corporations rule us today and will only continue to grow larger and more powerful. There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms. See the futile fight for privacy some of us still care about as an example.
We, the technologists, are complicit or directly benefit financially from this change. Governments are slowly catching up, pretending to control the monster they've let loose on their citizens, but are really in symbiosis with corporations, so nothing will change there.
This Metaverse thing is not something to laugh about or dismiss. It will happen one way or the other. And all of it makes me want to pick up gardening and go live in a mountain shed away from it all.
We've all read the sci-fi books or seen the movies to know how this plays out, yet are actively working towards that future. I have no words to describe it but mass insanity.
I'm trying really hard to think about the positive aspects of this, but I'm coming up short. Will the future be more convenient? Sure. Will this help some people live out a better life in the real world? Probably. But the vast majority will be mindlessly plugged into this thing, isolated from meatspace, at the direct benefit of the corporations that produced the experience.
There won't be a big war between man and machine. The Matrix will be built by humans, machines will help us do it, and we'll all want a taste of that juicy steak we saw in that ad.
What are we doing...?
I don't think history supports this prediction. We've been through several cycles of of this over the past few hundred years already -- the rise of powerful corporatocracy, followed by the people ultimately getting sick of that and knocking corporate power back.
I see no reason to expect that pattern won't continue to repeat as we move into the future.
Why would an asset designed for one game make sense or look good or feel at home in a completely different one?
Why would companies make one of them and sell it for a million bucks instead of trying to convince more players to buy it in a shop for two bucks?
Is the mechanic of a weapon gonna adjust to the new game when you import it or stay the same? If it stays the same, it's gonna be exploit galore. If it changes, well then, what's the point? Gonna be the same AK-47 as everyone else's, but this tiny sticker on it that nobody's gonna pay attention to is unique!
Even if we pretend this is somehow a promising field, why even use NFTs and make each one a couple of pixels different instead of making a common one, selling it for like $50, buyers get a file in whichever format is agreed upon, and import them in the settings.
Okay, but none do, and none will, and any other video game that did code in a substantially similar functionality would simply sell the same content in their own game, there's no benefit to the company to spend the time and money to make the content and not get compensated for it especially given radically different content architectures, visual styles, levels of detail, physics, object-player interactivity, etc. You can tell this is true, because they could already make it interoperable now and they don't -- like it's entirely possible that Marvel could sell "buy the Spider-Man game and get Spider-Man costumes in every other game he's a crossover character, across all platforms" and they... absolutely don't do this!
But also this vision is predicated on there being a small number of canonical NFT brands, when in reality you can open up Grand Theft Auto Online and there are literally tens of thousands of items made for the game. So if there's 10,000 items made for GTA Online and 50,000 items made for the Sims Series, then interoperability means that Square Enix needs to add 60,000 items to Final Fantasy to support subsidizing the NFT marketplace for the other two games? Or else you sit around trying to import your Mercedes Hood Ornament NFT from Forza into Mortal Kombat 13 and it tells you "hey, we don't support that one! Or that one! Or that one! Or that one!"
And you can tell this is true because Nintendo already has a system for this called Amiibo where you buy little figurines with fungible codes that putatively can work in any game that supports them. And 99% of games on Switch don't support any, the ones that support any only support 1 or 2, and only one game supports more than 10 or so, and it's a crossover fighting game called Smash Bros.
You might say, okay, but Amiibo are finnicky, they take up space, NFTs improve on Amiibo by not having you actually need a physical object. Okay, but the vast majority of the value is in the physical object. You can tell this is true because Nintendo has the capability of reprinting the relatively expensive physical figurines as marginally nearly zero cost trading cards and... they don't, because there's no real demand.
But then you say, no, the key thing to NFTs is their non-fungibility. Okay, but that's a horrid fit for games. Now instead of modelling Mario once, I need to model Mario a hundred thousand times. If the differences are small between each model, then I get the benefits of procedural generation so it's less work, but the market collapses because the token is as-if fungible and that means the supply is as-if unbounded. And as Nintendo, wouldn't I rather sell each Mario costume for $1 to every player that wants it rather than selling one Mario costume for $100 to someone and then establish an elaborate crypto-driven derivative market where I get a chunk of each secondary sale?
It seems like the most obvious way you can make NFTs actually be something different is when you overtly lean into the bizarre gambling, ultra-rare one offs, and big money market speculation stuff, and at that point you no longer have a game at all, which is probably pretty bad if you're a game manufacturer. But game manufacturers have tried this too, with limited edition sales (Nintendo sold a game last year that they discontinued after 6 months to preserve scarcity, both digital and physical; Nintendo has also done ultra-rare and non-fungible collectible Pokemon leveraging real world events), numbered editions (Atlus with Devil Summoner 2 on the PS2 in 2006 or so). Even one-off multi-thousand dollar stuff has been done in the gaming industry, with special issue collectible hardware (Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have all done this).
Like the issues raised in the currently top upvoted thread, almost everything about NFT in vid...
In the end that really doesn't matter, each version for same weapon is listed under few categories. And for players it mostly doesn't matter which one they pick. So even in the case we have good example what non-fungibility is, it really does not matter much.
As the article points out this is a dumb idea that doesn't make any sense. You could port an ownership token from one game to the next, but the receiving game has to implement some semantics for that item that are completely divorced from the originating game anyway.
They’ll find it’s easier to just use a centralised database they collectively run or contract out or whatever. The whole idea of putting the “ownership records” on a public blockchain doesn’t help the system work at all and adds a ton of complexity (not to mention environmental concerns).
But like, eh, yay blockchain!
Another possibility is mapping everything to a limited set of items. So like, I can bring over any of my golf clubs from PGA Tour 2K12 to Grand Theft Auto, but they all just map to a generic "golf club" I can beat people up with. But this isn't very compelling after the first couple times someone tries it.
Tim Sweeney has been talking up a technically reasonable vision of the Metaverse for several years now. But Epic hasn't shipped much. You can load new game maps into Fortnite. That's about it. Unreal Engine 5 doesn't have much in the way of support for a world where users can change almost everything. It's still based on a model where you do massive optimization during build time.
This seems extremely dubious to me and also shows a severe lack of humility. There are many very smart people at these companies and Mark Zuckerberg has consistently shown himself to be a canny and innovative founder (even if you dislike him for whatever reason).
It may end up being BS but dismissing it out of hand seems extremely foolish.
There is good reason to be skeptical given the long list of failures and Zuck hasn't shown why his take would be different yet - to my knowledge.
In the words of Morpheus from the Matrix, "Show me."
Mark has shown that he successfully didn’t destroy a MySpace clone that prints money. Other than that what has he done besides buy already large companies?
Did you buy an HTC First, the infamous "Facebook Phone" that was so universally panned, they couldn't even ship out their first production run of phones, despite it being one of the cheapest on the market?
When's the last time you used a Portal?
Facebook has just as many stinkers, despite many smart people working the company.
The metaverse is poorly communicated. Revolutions start at level 1, but communication sometimes start at level 25.
level 1 for smart phones: Read email/chat while waiting for the bus
level 25 for smart phones: A large economy with global behemoth corporations built on the premise that everyone has computers in their pockets
Level 1 for metaverse: You can now work from your couch/porch/beachhouse/bustop as you don't need your screens
Level 25 for metaverse: Everything running in 2d on computers now gets translated to 3d in the metaverse, a new set of global behemoth corporations. Massive implications for code, data and anything big or complicated (think structural blueprints)
Whether revolutions succeed or not is decided by teens and twenty-somethings, not the 30+ crowd (parents dont get it, not now, not ever)
The real challenge here is creating hardware that is cheap and good enough that teens can and will buy it, just like with the smart phone revolution, if you get 90% penetration with the teens then the rest of the world will follow.
Quest2 costs about the same as one decent screen.
I am not a business analyst, but from where I am sitting it seems like they've at least got traction.
They were successful with one thing. Now they are talking about something else.
Why shouldn't "MetaVerse" be compared to the insane optimism of AI in the 1980'ies? Something that seemed just around the corner, but never arrived.
It's like Thorium reactors: half the people think it's the next great thing, the other half thinks it will never come into production.
I know a company that has a very popular game (Minecraft) and they develop the premier game API DirectX. They also have a pretty popular game console, AR glasses, a well known operating system, etc. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in a good position to make a play in this space.
But they are fatiguing, unflattering, and uncomfortable, even for 20 or 30 minutes worth of usage.
Maybe in 10 years when the software stacks are ready the headsets will be good enough for passive use.
Change is not inevitable. Every change has to justify its own existence.
Look at your computer. You're likely using a keyboard and a mouse. How long have they existed with no fundamental change to how they operate?
Sure, there are other devices for interacting with computers, and smartphones are totally different beasts altogether, but nothing has supplanted the basic keyboard and mouse setup for desktop computers because they work perfectly well and there isn't really much you can improve about them. Everything else that has been designed is only for niche use.
The promise here is that the Metaverse will be the next evolution of the internet, rather than just an expensive toy for a few rich people. It's supposed to be better than the internet, and so much so that we'll all want to be part of it. It's completely irrational to shrug and turn off your brain and say it's pointless to reason about claims like this because it's "inevitable" because things "change" all the time.
Big wigs with lots of money can't be wrong!
If you look at the really disruptive innovations in technology, the vast majority of them were not made by incumbents. The iPhone is the shining example against me here, but the examples for me are Netflix, Facebook, bitcoin, heck, the internet itself. Incumbents expend efforts entrenching their positions, protecting their products they're already invested in, preventing disruption. It's baked onto the game fundamentally. And to be a little cynical, I'd argue that an incumbent claiming to be a disruptor is not being honest with you more than likely.
It is a wise thing to bet against incumbents promising to disrupt their own industry because more often than not you'd be right.
Second Life was phantastic, I still miss it to this day. It just had a very clunky interface, which modern devices like VR gear might improve upon. (I know SL is still around, probably many lessons to be learned).
Also, "We also have Snow Crash to blame for the absolute hell we find ourselves in today," - wut? Yeah, the "absolute hell" of billionaires investing lots of money to create fun and immersive entertainment options for the rest of us. Truly the worst dystopia imaginable?
Yes, the "circuses" part of "bread and circuses".
Superficial appeasement doesn't really outweigh the all the many other unethical actions made by billionaires - in this case, vying for be the proprietary controllers of the literal reality of the future.
You are not forced to attend the "circus", either, if you don't like it.
As for centralized control, that is actually the one thing that disappoints me about the future. Somehow all the SF books glossed over the immense cost required to develop the cutting edge technology. How much money did Facebook spend to create the Oculus Quest? I just don't see hobbyists and hackers create the same level of technology - or think about the Apple M1 SoC. Would hackers have been able to create such a thing in their mom's basement eventually? I rather doubt it. So centralisation is an issue, simply because development costs are so high. It's not simply a conspiracy by evil billionaires.
Facebook bought a company made of hackers to get in on VR on the ground floor. Yes, they're throwing money at the problem to artificially keep the price down, but using that example really hurts your point.
You can tell this absolutely makes no sense, because if we're in the metaverse, why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Or if I can't, I'm going to open up a shop next door that sells metaverse helicopter rides. If I make a vehicle in the metaverse, I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around.
Not to mention, you don't need cupholders in VR, because your avatar doesn't have a stomach. You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse? Heck, I don't need the whole front of the car, because the engine doesn't actually exist.
The whole metaverse idea is based on clunky, outdated metaphors to the real world like this. Someone who saw Ready Player One in theaters thinks that driving a car in VR is cool, without thinking for five more minutes about why it's actually not.
Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Lively (2008), PlayStation Home (2008)
It was such a tired cliché by then that even Homestarrunner was making fun of it in 2007 [0].
Go look back at some of the early VRML hype from the mid 90s, it's like watching history replay itself. Most of it is before the era of the Wayback Machine, but there's a few good articles out there still [1] [2]. I can't even find any news writeups of SGI WebSpace, just screenshots, despite it being the VRML plugin for Netscape back then.
[0] https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147 [1] https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html [2] https://community-place.neocities.org/
You know what? the internet was better when it topped out at 56k for mortals.
And remember webrings and Internet Link Exchange?
I'd also say that MySpace and Tumblr carried that vision forward.
It's ironic that Facebook won, with its bland conformity, and now they think they're going to bring us the metaverse.
What's worrying is...what if FB manages to create a metaverse that thrives on the same toxicity that FB itself does. And through the Oculus makes the tech cheap and portable enough to get a critical mass of people involved in it.
The general consensus seems to be (and at this point I wholeheartedly agree) FB attempting to build a meta world is hysterical considering their seeming complete inability (with some unwillingness sprinkled in) to address trolls/astroturfing /misinformation on their flagship site was a significant driver of many people ceasing to use the site.
If they screw up something like a vanilla social network, they have no shot at running an entire second life derivative. At least one where anyone other than NFT sneakerhead type marketing victims will willingly spend their valuable free time.
Nowadays Minecraft and Roblox seem to fill similar niches.
That many attempts failed doesn't mean all attempts will fail. You may not know this, but there were other social networks before Facebook. There was Orkut and MySpace, for example, both disappeared. Yet Facebook now is a billion dollar company.
VRML appeared at a time when people were still using dial-up modems. Things change - eventually technology may be good enough for people to adopt VR on a larger scale.
Yet the social network as a concept that moved from one monopoly to another is a fad that is dieing. It certainly seems likely companies that have gotten their start from VR will succeed in collecting a lot of money and possibly diversifying successfully, but will VR end up being more useful than a FB style social site?
The basic problem with VR for me is that second life showed some potential that isn't going to happen because it is socially positive and a lot of negatives that make me want to kill VR as a medium before I have to deal with FB owning real estate in it.
FB has basically created the bifurcation that will limit the future of all new mediums. Half your friends will never use anything they participate in making the concept of social X a disaster for any X.
Nobody would be happier than me if a decentralized alternative to social networks like Facebook could be established.
I am not really seeing it as a given, though - the big companies usually offer more convenience and the masses fall for it. And for content creators it makes more sense to go to where the masses are. I have looked into the Fediverse but it seems there is hardly anything there.
I don't know if VR will replace classic web sites like Facebook. An issue in SL, for me at least, was that it was too difficult to create a good looking avatar. In Facebook you don't have to bother with web design. Not sure how to translate that to VR - everybody having a standard living hexagon for representation probably won't work.
By this logic nobody should play Gran Turismo because a Superman game exists.
> You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse?
By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you don't need a car to surf the web and you can't test the car by visiting the website.
The web is pretty analogous to the metaverse and the most plausible path to an actual metaverse may be an evolution of the web browser. It's the only platform with a sandbox strong enough to run completely untrusted code on your local device with no centralized gatekeeper manually enforcing rules, which I think is a hard requirement for a real metaverse. Any metaverse contender that doesn't start with that is doomed to eventual irrelevance.
But I don't think, as the author of the article seems to, that today's web is already the metaverse and nothing will change. What really drives platform change is input methods. The iPhone was a new platform because it used capacitive touch instead of mouse and keyboard, and the web evolved with it. The metaverse will be a new platform because it will use still different input methods (yet to be determined, probably not the VR controllers we use today) and the web will have to change again, perhaps more radically this time.
So, perhaps I misread Tim Sweeney's point of view, but it seems like it starts and ends with "put cool car in metaverse, drive it down Main St., everyone stops and stares, like that one scene from Snow Crash. Or Ready Player One."
If it's more specific than that, "put cool car in video game, in metaverse" product placement, well we already have that today. Mercedes Benz already did a whole Mario Kart thing [0], and countless other racing games like the Forza series have sponsorships from real car companies. So that's not really anything novel for the metaverse, it's just the same product placement marketing strategy that's already existed. Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years.
> By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you can't test the car by visiting the website.
Pretty much all of these websites have a call-to-action for "Schedule a test drive at your local dealership". Hell, I remember an entire campaign from a major car corporation that was to the tune of "anybody can watch a TV commercial, but driving it is believing"
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/29/5760538/drive-a-mercedes-...
Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?
So, like, yes Stephenson's metaverse is similar to a lot of video games we have now, but it's critically different because his characters are "heroes" in that universe specifically because they coded their own avatars and their own environments.
Which is another way of saying that it rewards thought, code, and creativity -- exactly the things that video games steal people away from.
> You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities
I ask again: why can't I code my avatar to be the most OP avatar that ever exists? I will create a weapon that kills people if they look at me. What's the incentive to purchase new things if everyone can just code the most OP version and undercut the person next door? I will have the best cars, the funniest T-shirts, and the strongest potions, and you cannot stop me. Because I write Lua scripts.
There's some element of cooperation that is usually assumed when people talk about the metaverse but I don't see any incentive to maintain it that way. Garry's Mod and Roblox are platforms that do what you're talking about, today. The way they maintain this cooperation is that they prevent users from having strong autonomy in games that others make. In Roblox, your avatar is limited to a few cosmetic choices for customization, and in Garry's Mod, you don't really have any customization at all in most game modes.
So Second Life ...
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Content_Creation
If they want to meet with friends and hang around, real life contact just can't be beat. That's the reason why virtual persistent worlds are ultimately bullshit (as opposed to game worlds where you have an actual game to play, be that chess or matching colored gems or killing other players).
Because there's no guarantee that the experience is in any way comparable to the actual driving. It's in the manufacturer's interest to do the opposite. If the controls weren't standardized the simulation might have still been useful to learn the controls, but they are.
Besides, when AI cars come along the criterias will change completely. From driving experience to cost and comfort. That could be virtualized... but there wouldn't be much point in it.
Suffice it to say that plenty of people genuinely love driving, both in video games and in the real world.
Flying won't make driving obsolete any more than mountain biking has made hiking and trail running obsolete in places that are accessible to mountain bikes.
That being said, switched my old BMW 3 series (E46) with manual to newer 5 series with automatic steptronic transmission, and especially for longer drives, the cognitive and 'manual' load is measurably less. But you don't realize it until you migrate.
It moves to almost boring territory, luckily I am not a type of person who tends to fall asleep behind the wheel (unlike my wife).
This is not to cast any aspersions on the game - popularity is not everything - but things like MFS are perfect examples that even the best simulators are just niche products, not the future of the web.
Virtual reality can have all sorts of landscapes, and moving along a surface, whether it be hilly or flat like Tron, will be popular. Driving is one way to move along a surface, but there's also running, swimming, base jumping, skiing, snowboarding, skating, and others. I'm sure all will be common in the metaverse.
For an example of something where driving is exciting and totally unnecessary, see Rocket League.
Yeah, that's just "the layout of the game's tracks" from the G^~5P, only now in more detail.
I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game.
The reason that giving you the real experience of being in a specific car is bullshit for marketing purposes is that you can see hardly anyone markets cars based on what it will actually be like to use them and of course because except for a few outliers using any specific car is the same as using pretty much every other car built in a similar time frame.
on edit: meaning every other car serving the same market segment of course.
Why wouldn't everyone make it the most engaging virtual car driving experience they can find, what incentive is there to make it "real" in this useful way?
I mean, I get that it's necessary for this to happen for the whole pitch to make sense, but it's just nonsense. Why these weird religious beliefs about 3D stuff, including product placement, which seem to magically behave differently than the 2D versions we've been living with for decades now.
I am just incredibly confused by this. Is it like NFTs where we aren't supposed to believe the cover story and the wink-wink acknowledgement of the grift is a in-joke/cultural thing?
The experience of driving a real car is heavily influenced by the real world. Take those little flap things cars sometimes have to shield your eyes from the sun - the metaverse will first have to simulate an annoyance (possibly with harmful eye-melting ultraviolet light?) then let you mitigate it with the flap. It isn't obvious why people will want that or pay money for it. If they don't simulate glare, then what is the flap for?
Cars aren't independent of reality, they exist as well designed tools that allow us to do and experience things that we otherwise couldn't. When that gets translated to some sort of virtual space all the design decisions start to fall apart. The only thing that really carries over is to get the branding in front of a person to make them think of the name - which rather undermines the original "isn't going to run ads" thesis.
Why do you think the metaverse will do a better job than the developers at assetto corsa for whom it is their primary mission?
It's all just marketing wank to get advertisers excited to put product placement in facebook's new second life metagame.
A huge monitor is way cheaper.
I appreciate this isn’t going to be a super common use case but it’s definitely something that might appeal to some who have well paid jobs in expensive to live locations (like London and SV).
It can take a long time to unlearn things in video games. It took years after video game arcades ceased to be the dominant factor for games to get rid of "Lives" that existed only† to ensure players pump coins into the no-longer relevant coin slot.
I think Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes shows off what VR can do well that you couldn't do otherwise. The isolation between the player defusing the bomb and everybody else is part of the game. The fact that the player defusing can't look at the bomb manual is enforced by them being in a VR environment with no manual.
In too many VR games, the VR is largely an impediment, and the takeaway is "This could be a good game, shame it's VR".
† OK things like Hundred Mario challenge and the modern Endless Super Expert show that you can do other things with this form, but it's pretty arbitrary, there's no way this would exist without the history of video game arcades.
I wonder when society will realize all this technology has no value without the support of the single most valuable resource on this planet: humans and their educations. The number one asset of any/every company and every nation is their people - yet we treat people as completely disposable. Our civilization is literally insane today, and will remain so until this clear value is recognized.
The point about VR games are that they’re an unrealistic escape. If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
What? Why?
A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution.
Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (which is actually just your perspective if you prefer beer, the orange-juice-loving person in the group is seeing the whole group drinking orange juice) and discussing the latest celebrity scandal. All of the cosmopolitanism and variety of social media, none of its artficiality and bullshit.
(Off course there is going to be new bullshit in this world, people will go through various hoops to pull idiotic pranks on other people and scammers will have a terrifying field day with the new convincing techniques the new medium will bring, but at this point this is just more or less real life. Real Life In Your Pocket that is. (hopefully eventually, it will have a PC phase first). Who is not excited by that?)
Imagine a professional like an airline pilot or a heart surgeon transmitting a read-only record of a flight or an operation, complete with haptic feedback and a temperature-and-wind reconstruction of the transmission environment. Imagine those records dumped to storage and serving as humanity's Library Of Crafts, a correction to our ancient shortcoming of only being able to capture in symbols what could be said (and with photography and microphones, what could be seen or heard), but not what could be felt or experienced.
Won't this absolutely revolutionise learning and communication? There is a very clear path from here to eventual Greg-Egan-style post-singular communication where you are roaming freely in abstract structures residing everywhere from your head to a server in orbit.
Every thought or system or structure ever dreamt up by the human mind began with a 1:1 snapshot of reality that was then further filtered and compressed (Hume's golden mountain). The ability to arbitrarily construct, store, transmit and reconstruct 1:1 ever-more-convincing sensory representations of the world at will is nothing short of a revolution comparable to the invention of language.
Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket, too. It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.
Why so? the first 3 paragraphs are 2 examples of why a 1:1 reconstruction of our world on demand can be an amazing thing, the remaining is the statment 'All creation or innovation that the human brain does, or is ever capable off, is simply mixing and remixing its readings of the outside world. So mutable and cheap on-demand reconstructions of the outside world will be an immense boost to creativity and innovation'
>Why are we all drinking OJ/beer?
Why are we exchanging asynchronous plaintext blocks right now instead of speaking on the phone or sharing 30-seconds videos on tiktok? This is the medium we chose, this is the medium the hypothetical group in my example chose. (from a sea of possibilities that make our communication options right now look like ancient letters)
>Can we taste it?
If the hypothetical social media app we're talking about is any good, it will have the option to sync your avatar to real-life-you on various 'motion paths', so that whenever you move along those motion paths, your avatar move in the same way. One of those 'motion paths' is all the movements your hand make when holding an actual drink, which would translate to your avatar mirroring the movement in the meta verse.
What happens if you release the drink ? you have the option of making the renderer either disappearing it or (for fidelity) putting it in a corresponding location in the dream. What happens if you can't or don't want to drink? you have the option to either make the renderer hallucinate a drink (along with believable drinking animations at believable intervals) or just make you appear in the dream as you are in meat space.
What happens if/when the marriage of neuroscience and computers get fruitful enough that this whole thing is being served directly to your neurons, bypassing the many middle men in your eyes, ears and skin? You can have the additional option of eschewing physical mirroring of the meta verse and just have the gear directly stimulate the feeling of drinking whenever you drink in the metaverse.
>If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers [...] without risking giving up the lie?
Lie? Am I lying to you right now because my username is not the full name registered to my national number in my country's official records ? is the jvm lying to the code running inside of it by presenting virtual method calls as a hardware primitive? This is make-believe, the whole entirety of human civilization is built on it. Even my real name is no more real than the username I chose for this account, except merely by the virtue that more of my existence (more records, more of my opinions, more memories in more heads,...) is attached to it.
You have the option to say you're presenting as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of pretending to present as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of not doing that and saying to your group you're just making the renderer playing tricks on them, and on and on it goes. Whole ecosystems and apps will develop conventions and preferences toward particular options.
>that all understand English and American
This is entirely orthogonal to the technology under discussion, the internet have made millions want to understand English so they can communicate with a greater pool of people, and when cyber communication becomes as deep and convincing as the vision of the metaverse, untold millions more will be motivated to understand popular languages, and will be able to more efficiently than now because language learning (as all learning) will become much more effective and joyful, imagine the high-fidelity virtual/recorded tourism trips available by the petabytes to every person who wants them.
Again, when/If AI or neuro+cyber ever reach the moon they are aiming for, this will integrate nicely with the vision of the meta verse by, respectively, a real-time translation engine running in paralle...
People don't want to be completely disconnected from physical reality. The world you described is vulgar to any real human person, honestly it sounds like a cross between Brave New World and The Matrix.
There would be no authenticity of experience in the world you imagine. It'd be people living out instagram fantasies continuously.
Society would eventually devolve into a decadent, fetalistic world marked by the boredom of playing a video game with god mode on, where humans would no longer be able to deal with hardship or conflict. Bored of travelling to places that don't exist, they'd try desperately to satiate their desire for authentic human interaction by sitting in virtual pubs chatting about the imagined escapades of pretend celebrities.
It’s the same reason we watch super hero movies, read comic books and novels. Escapism. If the virtual world is a 1:1 with actual reality then there is literally no reason to enter the virtual world.
And why are text mediums so popular? Because they’re convenient. VR lacks that same convenience.
But they obviously weren't "a 1:1 reconstruction of our world": You can't all simultaneously be drinking beer and be drinking OJ in the real world, so all the scenarios were false.
Who wants to context switch from reality into a virtual world just so they can see what the new Ford pickup looks like? Nobody, thats who.
This whole concept reads to make like a Facebook exec went into a coma just as Second Life was taking off and woke up recently demanding that Facebook cease on what they believe will clearly be the future of online interaction.
"Does Zuck have Second Life second-system syndrome?"
Nobody thinks he's cool in this world, so he'll just spam "new worlds" until somebody thinks he's cool in one of them.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/
You can now extrapolate this to almost any interaction in VR; walking, flying, typing or shooting.
Until there's an input method that is able to emulate these experiences effectively, then it is pure science fiction.
Driving a real car down a windy road is 1000x better than the best Vr setup.
This is how heavily-monetized games work today and it's not surprising that some in the industry are salivating at the thought of extending this economic model beyond just entertainment.
We're talking about facebook here. I expect the metaverse to be designed 100% according to the wishes of ad buyers. And Cambridge Analytica.
I'll take your underhanded way of trying to ridicule the idea as a tacit admission that you actually agree it's true, but have some undisclosed motive to discredit it. (Own a lot of Facebook shares, or what?)
if it still exists. Once the metafart comes to be it will naturally compete with the Web of old, so it will probably look for leverage to extinguish that.
Why would anyone want to do that rather than fly? Why would I rather play Gran Turismo when I can be Iron Man in LEGO Marvel Superheroes?
Draw it on a piece of paper if you need to convince yourself. This is an incredibly common trick to stabilise rigidbody physics simulated vehicles in games.
Edit: I took some time to setup OBS on my non-work machine and make a little video explaining what's going on (apologies for kids in the background and that for some reason my voice only comes out of the left channel): https://youtu.be/qvMbdzbaAMQ
Your force sideways is actually from the ground, on the tyres. This acts on the CoG (or better to call it Center of Mass), so if this CoM is above the tyres you get a torque, because the mass doesn't instantly accelerate, but resists the force. This torque then needs to be countered by having more force on the tires on one side than on the other, which when you take into account things like suspension, causes body roll, or in the extreme case the car lifting wheels on one side completely off the ground.
If you put the center of mass below the car then think what happens not during turning, but during braking. The center of mass will swing forward underneath like a pendulum (think of what happens to something hanging from the rearview mirror during braking) and if you took it really far down you could even get the car to do a wheelie while braking, which is of course ridiculous.
If you want the car to be completely flat during turns, acceleration and braking then you need to put the center of mass at the ground level. This way when you turn and the ground puts a horizontal force on the car at the contact points with the road (ie. the tyres), it goes through the center of mass and there is no torque generated. No torque = no body roll.
If you don't believe me you can download Unity, UE, Godot or the rigidbody simulator of your choice and just setup the experiment. Of the engines mentioned UE is perhaps the easiest to set this up with a straightforward car example.
We're very much not talking past one another. I recommend just doing the experiment to convince yourself because as I and Animats note this is a very common thing to do in games. As I said in my last reply just grab a game engine (they're all free to download) and test it yourself!
There are only two forces involved - inertial forces which act on the CG, and friction forces which act at ground level. Swap the order, and you swap the direction of the torque.
The tyres exert their force at road level, the centrifugal force at the height of the CoM. The CoM usually being above road level, the centrifugal force will tend to tilt the car outwards.
Lower the CoM to exactly road level and there is zero tilting moment; your car might slide outwards if it loses grip, but it will remain upright with no tilt, because the centrifugal force has no vertical leverage relative to the opposing gripping-force of the tyres -- they're opposing each other in the same horizontal plane.
Lower the CoM below the road (magically travelling through the soil without interacting with it), and there is again leverage, only this time with the centrifugal force pushing outwards below where the car is trying to stay attached to your desired trajectory and thus tilting the top of the car inwards, towards the inside of the curve or the center of the track.
:: Moving the CoM down has a stabilizing effect down to road level, but if you go lower than that it starts destabilizing again, only applying its rolling force in the opposite direction.
Its a trap to focus on it. Many have resources, energy and no sense, taste or imagination. You cant blame them. Its like complaining to a cactus for not producing strawberries. Or yelling at swampland for not turning fertile.
What you can do is shift focus, and focus on what you and people like you are working on, and keep the focus there no matter what.
Flying? I hope I can teleport as easily as I can jump to a web page by clicking a bookmark or typing its URL.
Second Life had teleport. I walked, drove a car, went flying only for the fun of it or for very short distance movements.
Cars are a symbol of status and people will want to have that status wherever they are - look at how much people will pay for a skin in Fortnite.
I think it’s more likely car manufacturers (the expensive ones) will only let you drive their car in the metaverse if you buy it for real in the real world.
If this metaverse really does come to pass, it will be just as (if not more) valuable as a place to be than the real world.
I know that sounds mad to most of us, but by the time it happens we’ll all be 10 years older and not the main market for it anymore. Everyone else will have grown up paying for Fortnite skins and NFTs and it will all seem a lot more… normal.
Sport team season ticket holders getting exclusive digital jerseys to wear? College students getting a code to unlock digital shirt of their alma mater?
Brand affiliation as an identity marker in a virtual space makes sense.
But in the end it will be whoever’s walled garden the metaverse is planted in that makes the real money. 15% of everything.
That’s why fb want this so bad.
I've already paid a lot of money for a number of high quality car models I can drive quite accurately on high quality race track scans with lots of other people in iRacing.
These are works of love, and I greatly appreciate that the interest in iRacing has boomed as much as it has since I joined the Papyrus guys' latest offering in 2008.
Heck, soon I'll even be able to connect a real BMW M4 racing wheel to my sim setup, adding more $$$$s yet also more realism to a setup already deep my the investment path; I just don't see the use case for "having cars" in <meta name="rainbowpuke" content="Facebook" /> or whatever if it's only going to be window dressing; I mean, what's the point, unless we enter the fidelity of e.g. iRacing. So I can't see "meta" competing with them at all unless they either buy it (and they wouldn't; it's far too hardcore) or a competitor.
I can see the value of motorsport companies investing in esports, however, as the newest generation of F1 drivers have their roots in that and e.g. karts - which enables a connection to the fanbase hitherto impossible. Would they find value in giving lots of money to MetaFace instead? Time will tell; it'll be interesting to see what eventuates from all of this. First impressions are pretty much Candy Crush in VR - with all the spam you could possibly tolerate, and then some. (No thanks.)
With all that, I truly think yes... people absolutely will drive a car in VR.
This is one of the articles main points this decentralised universe of cool shit you can do already exists. The question is whether interoperability actually brings anything useful.
Even if I can drive a square block by designating it a car, it’s not really a car I want to drive in.
i3 is explicitly for power users, but someone will eventually take the idea of tiling window managers and make something with a low learning curve. And that will be the end of desktop icons and movable windows.
How much extra do I pay to get wired up to feeding and waste tubes for 24/7 access?
I’ve seen the Matrix, so I assume I need a big pod full of pink gloop in my bathroom too?
You could sign into different worlds, or turn different layers of reality on/off.
Perhaps you choose to use a reality where the rules are more akin to the real world, and so the best way to get around is a car... a car that looks and behaves like a car.
And then 15 minutes later you get bored and jump into a world where you can have rocket boots instead.
There will be markets for all different types of realities.
I mean now if they simulate a car for Grand Turismo, they also use some kind of API (Unity Engine, OpenGL, whatever) to encode the behavior. Likewise a metaverse will have some API which you can use to encode behavior.
It remains to be seen what options it provides. In SL I think you wouldn't have been able to create a very good car simulator because the engine was too limited. But the situation might be improved for newer metaverse attempts.
I think most people in this thread are missing the point. It is not that people could only experience VR without the metaverse. People can still surf the internet, yet most people chose to spend their time on Facebook, because it is more convenient and makes some things easier. To the point that some non-Facebook internet sites make you sign in with your Facebook account.
If everybody is on meta, it makes no sense for Mercedes to create an independent VR experience to advertise their cars. It makes more sense to do it in meta, where Facebook can direct users to the Mercedes VR world.
People have managed to create good apps for the Oculus Quest, too.
I was CTO in an Augmented Reality company that did a lot of user testing (using AR to showcase products) so have atleast a rudimentary understanding of the technology and peoples relationship to it: AR and VR are 'wow' experiences that really excite people before they've tried it and for the first few experience, but apart from a small subset of people the excitement and wonder wears off pretty quickly. When selling things, aspirational photos (the product in a desirable setting) is usually more useful to a buyer than seeing it in AR in their current home.
I first used a $50K VR headset 30 years ago in a CS research department (Dire Straits - Money for Nothing video quality graphics) and it was thrilling but obviously didn't catch on because of the cost and lack of technical performance at the time. The technology available still isn't ready - poor battery / CPU performance really kills mobile AR, the low resolution/field of view/lifelike rendering makes VR painful for the average person.
(Well, he would if he existed.)
The corporate metaverse will be advertiser driven. You won't be able to put rocket launchers on a car except in specific zones where violence is allowed. You'll have to pay the metaverse operator to get your helicopter approved, and they'll want 30% of anything you make from helicopter rides.
All of this is an advertiser friendly second life with no reason to participate. I've had plenty of fun in VR but I want nothing to do with advertiser driven VR, and a metaverse even less.
incredible work zuck.
The closest thing we have to what's being described here is a video game. 3D game development is one of the most difficult and unforgiving branches of software development.
To achieve what is being talked about here, BMW is going to have to hire a team of 3D artists, animators and programmers to realize this asset. And someone is going to have to make sure this asset performs well, and interacts appropriately with the world, and with all the other assets which have been created by independent and unrelated teams. Part of that is, driving around in this car can't use too much CPU and GPU budget so that it brings the framerate to a halt when it appears on screen with any combination of the infinite number of combinations of things which could exist in this world.
This stuff takes years and is hard to get right for mature AAA studios with decades of experience. The idea that every company with an ad department is going to get into this vastly expensive and unproven business is a dream for facebook but a nightmare for everyone else.
You'd be surprised how popular truck and flight simulators are.
I'm also reminded of the US military's funding of FPS games like America's Army (and at least involvement in Call of Duty) as recruiting tools.
Advertisers will no longer just manipulate what we read or see but now what we interact with. Makes me yearn for the ceefax thing on the frontpage.
I don't doubt it's coming. It's close. In my lifetime? Maybe.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/facebook-meta-what-is...