Does Minecraft go down for several days like Roblox does?
Does Minecraft ban/cancel people like PewDiePie as Roblox did?
Aren't monthly active users (MAU) around 100M for each?
I think Roblox is eventually doomed to slowly fizzle like Second Life, etc. Internet history is littered with the corpses of dead closed systems. Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL? Remember Myspace?
Microsoft might eventually, say, install mandatory AI inside Minecraft that forces all players to behaviorally conform to the social and political views of the most vocal group of Microsoft employees. Then some other immersive 3D world builder with more open rules of participation will send Minecraft to its grave.
Mojang would have a problem trying to control Minecraft because it's written in Java, their developers commonly associate with the players who hack the game, and the only control over the gameservers that they have is their authentication servers- which you can disable the use of by editing one flag in your server config files, allowing anyone to play even if they didn't buy the game.
This describes the current state of Minecraft, but Microsoft can tie new releases to new restrictions. The unknowing masses will adopt the new version without understanding the loss of freedom. Look at the success MS, Adobe, etc., have had getting people to pay rent each month for software like Office and Photoshop that they used to buy once and run forever.
Modded players already are decoupled from the current version.
For a while everything interesting was stuck on 1.7 so while Microsoft may have shipped 1.8, and 1.9 nobody of consequence played those in the modded scene.
Even today, the newer Minecraft versions are only used for very experimental packs. Something mainstream is on 1.12 while Microsoft have already begun shipping 1.19
Because of this, you have for many years been able to pick which version of Minecraft is started, new versions don't overwrite old ones.
This freedom to use old versions sounds good. But of Minecraft's 100M+ users, what percentage know this? What percentage just automatically update to the newest version and don't explore the mod scene?
I just read that Mojang added no opt-out telemetry to version 21w38a.[1]
How many Minecrafters are savvy enough to understand that this happened, and the long-term implications?
I initially tried to follow guides and "mods" to disable Win 10 telemetry but eventually gave up because MS changes how telemetry is disabled with every single update.
I mean, I don't know what fraction of that 100M users are Java Minecraft. Obviously Bedrock is entirely up to Microsoft, they can do whatever they want in their sandbox and I'm sure most 5 year olds don't care either way.
On Java Minecraft, which is the only way you can seriously modify the game - I haven't actually run the out-of-box experience for many years, but unless it changed you just pick the version you want from a GUI.
If you play modded more than a tiny "dip my toe in it" amount you run dedicated "launcher" software (I run MultiMC) and that takes responsibility for managing a whole bunch of exciting problems, each of your Mod packs probably expects to live in a separate Minecraft environment, with a specific version of the game, it needs to track whether the Java parameters are special (e.g. more heap, different garbage collection prefs) some people prefer to play some packs in a different screen resolution.
One of the very strange things for a few years was that Twitch (yes, that one) managed this stuff for a lot of players. You've got the Twitch.tv app, which people use to watch say, Ninja playing Fortnite, and there's a tab in there for mods, and then a tab inside that for Minecraft, and that's a valid modded Minecraft launcher. It made some sort of sense because one of the few long term audiences on Twitch is Minecraft, so while there may never be more Minecraft audiences than there are people watching this week's hot new game, by next year that game is irrelevant and the same audience is still watching Minecraft. The tie-in deal that caused this eventually went away though.
But then you have absolutely no authentication whatsoever. So anyone can join your server using any player name and it's difficult to effectively ban. Good maybe for small private servers, but won't work for anything public. Also IIRC then you get no user-selected player skins.
> But then you have absolutely no authentication whatsoever.
There are other ways. For a while, I played on a private Minecraft server which disabled authentication (for reasons; that server also had the mod which allows Bedrock players to connect to a Java server, which probably played a part). However, once you connected to that server, you had 30 seconds to type a command with a password, otherwise you'd be kicked out, and before entering that command, the player is frozen and has no access to the inventory. The closest analogue is IRC's NickServ.
That server also had a way to allow everyone to use their own user-selected player skins, even without authenticating to the skin servers, though I don't know the details on how that worked.
Indeed. All my kids went through a huge Minecraft obsession along with their friends but have all now moved on to Roblox. They find the "games" more entertaining to build and play now. It's become the social hang-out just to chat with friends as well. The Roblox VR experience is pretty fun too.
My only problem with Roblox is that it's not on the Switch and they all want better tablets and computers to play it now.
I think it's more a generational thing. If Gen X grew up on arcades and the Atari (guessing), and Millennials on games like Quake or NES games, then Gen Z grew up on Minecraft and Gen Alpha on Roblox.
Until VR technology gets better I probably don't think kids will grow up on it because I can't imagine headsets being safe to use for extended periods of time if you're under 10 years old.
> I can't imagine headsets being safe to use for extended periods of time if you're under 10 years old.
Oops. Well the only reason my kids play as much Roblox as they do is only because I don't let them play the Quest2 all day. They would if they could. (Especially the 8yo)
RecRoom is a really well done VR Roblox and my kids would live there if they could. I think we'll see a generation of kids with high interest and expectations of VR.
Maybe it's always been here, perhaps it's just another abstraction or simulation of a perceived reality.
One could say that MUD systems are metaverses(metaversi?)
What I would like to see are more decentralized simulation systems with extensive accessibility features
Multiplayer virtual worlds have been with us since the beginning. I think there was a multiplayer high fantasy package for the PDP series of minicomputers?
There's a concerted push to foist this buzzword on us either way.
I was wondering recently if it might be possible with today's GPU hardware to create a Minecraft-like world with similar dynamics but with fully simulated physics across the entire world. In Minecraft terms this would be a global simulation "tick" that allowed things like gravity to work, more sophisticated creature behaviors to play out globally, etc.
Interesting, but I was thinking of something simpler than a full on physics engine. Simulate a whole Minecraft-style voxel world like a big 3D cellular automaton with N states where N is the number of block types. Algorithms similar to HashLife may help:
It's Croquet. Which was Alan Kay building the metaverse -- as a mere stepping stone to his real goal which always was to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age.
Mojang have also cracked down on brands from 2016. "Mojang spokesperson Owen Hill pointed to situations where something like a car company would build or commission an independent developer to build a Minecraft server with specific purpose of advertising a new vehicle." https://venturebeat.com/2016/05/31/microsoft-bans-corporatio...
this is what I always thought when playing Minecraft, it’s not just digital legos, even pure vanilla is a living breathing world with day/night cycles, farming, etc, I use a plug-in called Multiverse to connect all of our old worlds together with the current world, so we can go back and use resources we dug up 10 years ago, and it supports a really nice live mapping plugin called dynmap, also built a “meta world” that acts as a go-between to quickly jump to specific builds across various worlds using an “iconic” chunk of the actual build converted to “meta world” materials: http://mc.legacycraft.vip:8123/?worldname=meta&mapname=surfa...
Very nice setup! As a sort of informal successor to dynmap, there's now (or rather since 1.13) also BlueMap [1]. It renders the map in 3D in the browser and you can look sideways at your builds. Truly impressive.
https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/bluemap.83557
The Metaverse sounds like a protocol for VR/AR worlds, but I don’t think I read there is any consortium working on such an open protocol. Unless such a protocol already exists?
(Aware of the fact that I'm taking time out of my day to read HN)
I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in, and just sitting in the backyard and resting my eyes. And I don't even have children...
Unless.. its super easy to convert what obsesses ones day into 3d and park it in the world. But then its just humanitys meme & memory junkyard.. kind of like a book with sad faces.
I think the end vision for the metaverse is to swallow up a lot of those time sinks in a typical lifespan. Working, shopping, socializing, etc. could theoretically be supplanted by a metaverse (for better or worse).
and a lot of people that don't think they are gamers are the most lucrative set of gamers.
they are the freemium and mobile segment. dismissed by both the toxic gaming communities and themselves, but noticed by the companies who will change their whole trillion dollar business name to snag them further.
I read a recent interview from mark zuck about the metaverse and someone asked him a similar question. He had an actually really insightful answer.
1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games. (The actual per-person-per-day numbers are very high compared to the average 2hr/week i watch tv but whatever). Most of TV and Video Games are about ignoring reality for entertainment in a fake world already. thats a few hours people can dedicate.
2) The metaverse can be more than traditional video game type entertainment. WFH has turned the office as a destination into a keyboard/monitor as a destination. You can use VR to have a much more immersive/focused work destination than either office or WFH desk. Thats 8+ hours a day you can spend in metaverse.
(I have tried the Oculus workrooms and if the virtual screen resolution was higher then i'd personally work in it.)
I'm frustrated that everywhere I look I keep seeing "metaverse" and "VR" used interchangeably. All of the things described above are VR, and none of them are the metaverse.
Watching TV or playing a game in an immersive, distraction-free VR environment sounds great, and will happen, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.
Working in a virtual home office has the potential to be extremely productive, ergonomic, and space-saving, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.
A metaverse involves some kind of shared space and shared experience across a networked medium. Not only is it more than just doing things in VR, a metaverse doesn't even require VR.
I think part of the plan is to build VR spaces and then connect them together. Take the "things" in that space and expose them to non-vr software clients.
eg. maybe your vr home has digital art, but that art can also exist and be viewed in other mediums. Or you can all sit at home and watch VRTV with friends, but one friend just watches on their phone on the bus.
Or a virtaul office desk, that can have coworkers visiting. The office server can be hosted on your corp servers (or, the social networking, maybe you self host your personal office), but when you leave to go virtually home, you're now in your home, hosted by fb nee meta.
Absolutely, the idea of a shared virtual office (as opposed to just a solitary home office) would be a realization of a VR metaverse. Of course, aside from meetings (where the whole point is to interact with other people), I think it remains to be seen whether the idea of a shared virtual office is actually something that anyone really wants, or whether it's simply a case of a lack of imagination from people who are so accustomed to the idea of shared office space that they try to shoehorn it into the virtual world without really considering if it makes sense to. Personally, if I'm going to be working in a virtual space, I'm going to be working somewhere in Earth's orbit, or under a tree on a hill on a rainy evening surrounded by fireflies, and not in a 3D-rendered cubicle.
> Not only is it more than just doing things in VR, a metaverse doesn't even require VR.
It does not matter because for the public and the media Zuckerberg is redefining the meaning of the word right in front of our eyes. Give it a few years and everybody will believe VR is an inherent feature of metaverse. Just like those of us who had been using the word "crypto" to mean "cryptography" for decades were trying to explain in vain what the word originally mean - but it made no sense as the new meaning was already popularized.
Arguably that's probably why Facebook's efforts are doomed to fail before they've even started. By branding and marketing and tying all of their "metaverse" activities to VR they've already lost in a lot of user mindset. The retrending blog post on the Requiem for the HMD [1][2] is more than enough reason to believe that VR (at it exists today, as it existed in 2019 when that blog post was written) is an albatross that Facebook has now tied around its neck as Meta.
People are already dismissing this "metaverse" furor as just more VR hype with a stupider name and the company "Meta" is risking killing the entire term "metaverse" and any usefulness it might have had altogether.
Ironically, by owning Facebook "Meta" should be in one of the best positions to build/sell a 2D "metaverse plane" as well as just about anyone else possibly could. Tear down some of the garden walls, allow a bit more of the old MySpace and Blog anarchy of clashing styles and user control, be a better web citizen. They aren't likely to do that because they are using "metaverse" as attempt to make more Oculus money and risking the Facebook lock in and walled garden for a vision with actual guts and takes risks doesn't seem to be in their interest.
That Requiem for the HMD article has not aged well. All of those issues are a matter of iterative improvements over what we have today, and the devices will be ready for mass adoption.
Have you seen the leaked Quest Pro design[1]? It's already close to being ski goggle size, and it's only a couple of generations away from something the size of sunglasses.
Displays are getting cheaper, better and higher resolution. UX is being improved, passthrough cameras already exist.
My estimate is that towards the end of this decade we'll see unprecedented adoption of VR/AR outside of the few niche use cases we see today.
Meta is jumping on the bandwagon early, making their brand synonymous with VR, and betting big that this will change how everyone uses computers today, and that it will be the tech to replace smartphones.
As much as I dislike that such a user hostile company is trying to popularize the metaverse/VR, I'm sure they did their research and are confident this will eventually sell like crazy. I think they're right.
Right now the public perception remains that "good" VR/AR headsets are always five years away, since the 1990s.
Whether or not they did their research, whether or not we are just a few iterative improvements away from mass adoption, there's still just too much feeling of "same hype cycle, different day" from the average consumer (which is the point of that article, and my implication that VR is dead right now but it was Facebook's lucky albatross so they're tying it around their necks in the hopes it is still lucky while dead [1]).
[1] Spoiler alert for a classic poem used as a metaphor here: in the poem things do not go well from here. I am pessimistic about this marketing play for "Meta".
They used to be open. Cambridge Analytica came along and congress made them decide open was a liability. Sure they were starting to close down before congress, but now they're sure as hell not opening up.
That's not the garden walls to which I refer. I remember trying to program against Facebook even in the pre-Cambridge Analytica days. Sure the APIs had way more data, but it was all still siloed in that only apps that Facebook "vetted" were allowed in, and they were always strict about the CSS and components you were allowed to use and tight on the ways you were allowed to link people outside of Facebook itself.
I don't care if the data is locked down or not, the social graph isn't the interesting part of a "metaverse" and in some ways it is probably better locked up and that can remain Facebook's lock in to keep them interested in the project. The kind of garden walls I was talking about are more federative: bringing external content in, but in ways that are true to the outside content; not just confined to Facebook looks and styles and components, not confined to a bare amount of customization of boring card styles, not embedded in a "Facebook way" but in a "web way" (whatever that means, and it doesn't really feel like it means much at all after the imagination and wilds of the 1990s).
I referenced the anarchy and chaos of blogs and MySpace, specifically: it's about user control to "do ugly things", to escape the gray walls and graffiti "their spaces". If Facebook is a "space" today, it's a building full of cubicles all alike. Sure, you can hang photos in the cubicles and they've got colorful stock ones, but your still constrained to just those cubicle walls and they mandate a lot about the allowed size and frame styles. That's almost directly the antithesis of a user owned "metaverse" whether 2D or 3D.
> Not only is it more than just doing things in VR, a metaverse doesn't even require VR.
I'm sorry, I think if you want to broaden this term like this you're going to have to stipulate some new boundaries. Else, we've got the metaverse: it's just the internet, and metaverse is just the latest in a long line of silly names for it back to the "internet superhighway".
And when Di died or 9/11 happened I had a "shared experience across a networked medium" about them, for concrete examples.
Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember? So I'm not sure where this idea even comes from.
> Else, we've got the metaverse: it's just the internet, and metaverse is just the latest in a long line of silly names for it back to the "internet superhighway".
Yes, this is absolutely correct.
A "metaverse" exists in contrast to meatspace. In meatspace I walk down the street, I look through a shop window, I see you browsing inside, I spray some graffiti on the wall, you see the graffiti when you come out of the shop. We have a shared space with the qualities of presence (I passively saw you while you were browsing) and persistence (the graffiti will be there for anyone to see).
In the metaverse, I open some application on a computer, I look at some window or readout, I see that you're online (maybe I just see a light next to a username, or maybe I see your WoW character dancing shirtless outside of Goldshire), I leave something persistent (maybe a comment on a blog post, maybe a spray on the wall in an MMOFPS), which is available for you to see at some point. There are hundreds of metaverses (that's nearly the whole point; a metaverse is a virtual space that isn't bound by the rules and limits of physical space, so why not inhabit a few dozen?) of varying complexity (many websites, IRC, BBSes) and immersiveness (Minecraft, Second Life, PlayStation Home). VR isn't intrinsic to the idea of a metaverse, it's just one potential realization of the idea.
> Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember?
Stephenson depicted his metaverse as a virtual space for the sake of the reader's imagination, so that they could envision something real and familiar instead of just a bunch of people clacking away on keyboards. The "virtual street" metaphor used in Snow Crash was always just a convenient literary device, and not at all the point of the metaverse, which to reiterate is the idea of a virtual shared universe in which to exist that is unbound from the restrictions of the physical universe.
The depiction was as relevant to the WWW as the browser is: the presentation is up to the client, remember that Lynx and Firefox are both perfectly good web clients (in principle, we've killed that aspect of the web for the most part by insisting on pixel perfect copies instead of broad rendering hints). But depending on bandwidth and rendering capability of your device you could have the entirety of the gamma ranging from text-only all the way to full immersive 3D and everything in between.
You have the right take here - the Metaverse is basically the internet with a Z axis in the DOM - and anyone is free to do with that as they may.
Its been around for longer than Second Life in pancake kvm forms but the latest iteration is based on Immersion or Embodied experience facilitated by the new hardware price/performance advances.
VR hardware is just about over the chasm and proper wide fov AR is on the horizon although semi AR/MR is possible today (e.g. Pokemon Go as a shared overlay of digital world space on to a shared real world space).
The Immersive Embodied Metaverse is available over the internet using open W3C WebXR standards today and this will get better as the space and infrastructure matures.
“The internet with a Z axis in the DOM” doesn’t really make sense when you consider that the DOM already has a Z axis, and it’s a web thing not an internet thing.
Incidentally, those of us old enough may remember the number of websites having "streets" and "neighbourhoods" in the 90s while people were still trying to figure out how to translate things from offline to online.
Virtual shopping malls where you would "walk" around by clicking around websites.
I think metaverse is just a fancy name for communicating with people online supported by technology (both present technology, future technology and meatspace communications supported by technology).
It’s clear from Facebook’s presentations for instance that they consider text messaging via WhatsApp to class as part of the metaverse.
It’s not anything new, but I think the metaverse strategy is basically Facebook saying “we want to own all communications, and push the boundaries of what owning communications even means”. That’s my take anyway, but I have found most people are focused on the VR aspect and have missed the more scary all-encompassing and broader definition.
I would classify it as slightly more than communication; a metaverse also has to give you some way to "inhabit" it. We're communicating on HN, but HN doesn't really have a way to inhabit it, so I wouldn't call HN a metaverse.
This was my understanding as well. In many ways, it feels like the "metaverse" is already here and has been for a while, it's mostly Facebook and their ancillary apps + Twitter for me.
Yeah. We still need to see how Facebook/Meta wants to materialize this.
Maybe they want to break the boundaries between your real self (as you consume apps like WhatsApp and Instagram), your social profile (true self in virtual world like the closed garden in Facebook) and the avatar in a world like Second Life. This would be a gold mine, because they already can target ads to you in the real world, so they could do it there too. Doing it were the people use fake avatars is not so easy.
So think that every user is an inhabitant, a citizen, a potential buyer in the virtual and the real world, but also a potential business owner in the virtual world.
Business owners will be tax payers that must pay fees to operate on this city-state that will have internal laws that except for few cases (at most) will not be subject to government laws and constitutional protection, and if you are difficult or problematic the authority will be able to expatriate you without prior notice, regardless of time or money invested in the platform. Maybe, at most, they could offer arbitration with a company that knows that if they don't favor Meta the contract will not be renewed.
So yeah. It is a good idea, if they can pull it.
Frankly the problem is, none of these are really well defined. I think Zuck wants the general consensus to lean towards:
VR - Is a user interface. Metaverse is a network built for that user interface.
Historically, we had screen and keyboard based user interfaces, and with it text based gaming like Zork. Then we had screen and controller based user interfaces, and with it games like Pong. At a certain point we got the screen and mouse user interface, and with it FPS, RTS, like Warcraft and Doom. Touch screens were again a new user interface and with it came games like Fruit Ninja. VR now exists as a user interface (although still needs to be improved) and many people love playing Skyrim with it, or Beat Saber.
All of these were mostly local experiences with different (better?) user interfaces.
Meanwhile, each user interface had its own networks that were built on them. e.g. Email is a "first class network" built on the text based user interface. e.g. WWW is a "first class network" built on the mouse based user interface.
The metaverse isn't a new user interface. The metaverse is a "first class network" built on top of the VR based user interface.
The issue is VR is in practice a really terrible interface for widespread shared user experiences. MMO’s are almost exclusively played in 3rd person perspective in part because looking at eye level prevents you from seeing behind the person in front of you, and removing collision detection doesn’t help. Think of walking around a crowded convention and you really can’t see many people at the same time. You can of course swap perspectives with VR, but face to avatar conversations don’t add much. Their missing out on facial expressions so in practice it’s mostly just shared voice chat with a tiny percentage of body language.
The only thing linking metaverse and VR is basic buzzword bingo, they don’t gain anything from being linked.
but you need to realize what is possible today will not be the same as what will be available 10 or 20 years down to road with so much dollars pouring into research from all these big corporations/governments around the world.
Plenty of "metaversy" things are possible today, but rejected by users.
Second Life is a tiny niche. Connecting Minecraft servers with portals has been possible for ages, and smooth connections seems like it wouldn't be terribly difficult, yet no one uses it because no one wants it.
And despite the huge increases in VR quality that has happened already, none of this has changed.
You suggest it's because the VR isn't good enough yet, but I think the evidence so far suggests VR is not the missing ingredient for people to want to live in a common virtual world.
> MMO’s are almost exclusively played in 3rd person perspective in part because looking at eye level prevents you from seeing behind the person in front of you
I mean, yes I agree. There are some workarounds, i.e. you could jump, in VR it’s very fast to swivel your head, look around the people in front of you or look behind you.
That said, I very much agree, I wouldn’t want to play WOW in VR. The DBM style warning zones on the ground alone would kill the UX. Meanwhile, as a HPally, I played WOW primarily in 2D :)(specifically raid frames). I’m very certain I would continue to play VR WOW in 2D as well. Some sort of console attached to my arm or floating in front of me to 1. See who has my beacon/buffs/debuffs 2. Quickly chose targets to spot heal or cure.
However, I’m very excited to try the second big VR-first MMO (basically the WOW not the EverQuest) built exclusively for VR!!!
Maybe, it’s a lot more skill shots, maybe it’s more aoe heals. I can’t even imagine how spot heals or cures would be targeted. Maybe it would feel like being a QB and Id need to literally throw Madden style spirals to land my spot heals??? THAT COULD BE SICK (although that skill floor/cap might be too high to balance boss fights well).
I’m not smart enough to predict the actual implementation. But I know there is enough money to be made that someones will iteratively make it happen.
There’s no physics. You can make everyone’s eye-level a few inches above the place their head is rendered for the rest. So everyone is just a bit taller than everyone else. Simultaneously
VR brings limitations and capabilities like any other mode of interaction. Mobile games don't play well on PC and PC games don't play well on mobile.
I'm sure some clever folks will find a way to build a MMO that works for VR. Maybe characters will have magical x-ray glasses that renders other characters semi-transparent, so they can look through the crowd? Perhaps VR MMO games will be grander in spatial scale with lots of small towns to limit players clumping together city centres. Maybe, trying to find something in a crowded marketplace with lots of distractions, could be a part of the quest?
I see a lot of assumptions about office worker productivity with zero real world evidence.
A lot of home office workers never learned to touch type. How the heck are they supposed to do office work if they can't see their fingers on the keyboard? Voice recognition is no solution, it still sucks for text entry and is completely useless for anything like slide presentations or spreadsheets.
There is legitimate potential for workers doing 3D stuff like CAD, architecture, and data visualization but that's a tiny niche of the workforce.
Most office work that I’ve seen requires text entry (email, spreadsheets, proposals, etc) and that’s always today done through a keyboard. Doing that work in VR where you can’t see the keyboard is surprisingly tough, even if you can touch type!
I’ve switched out my keycaps for blanks recently to try to force myself to get better at working in VR but I’m still struggling a bit with all the symbols.
I switched out keycaps IRL, not in VR. The idea was that, not being able to cheat by looking down would help improve my typing faster by forcing me to memorize the keys better. I’ve only gone from mid-50s wpm to now about 60ish but it’s helped more with the uncommon keys that don’t move the average as much. It’s those uncommon keys that kill me in VR though so it feels like a bigger bump.
about 20 years ago I was using the kde application Ktouch to learn touch typing.. it was highly effective compared to the competition of the time. Give it a try!
But why does it matter if you "cheat"? That makes no sense. If you can type 95 wpm using keys with letters on them, then that's all that matters. Your goal is to be able to type effectively, not to type with a handicap.
When I was in college with a time-sharing system, someone as a joke removed all the keycaps from one of the CRTs. Didn't stop me, I'm a good enough touch typist that I just sat down and started using it.
Good typing skills are a super-power in today's world.
These days in Teams it will tell you when someone's typing. It amazes me how long people need to type just to get a simple point across.
Luckily, tracking your physical keyboard in VR has already been a thing for a while, and it has both quite solid third-party[0] and first-party implementations[1] by now.
To clarify, when I say "tracking", I don't mean just being able to use your keyboard in VR. I mean being able to actually see your keyboard in VR, along with being able to see keycaps on the virtual representation of your keyboard.
You’ll be able to see your fingers and arms and keyboard/mouse/trackpd/desk surface/chair all in vr. Even current gen oculus has a front facing camera.
> How the heck are they supposed to do office work if they can't see their fingers on the keyboard?
I have seen a video, IIRC it was from SimulaVR, in which the user had a virtual window which showed a camera view facing the real-world keyboard. So this is easy to solve: these people who need to see their fingers on the keyboard (and probably everyone else when doing a real-world action like getting a cup with a drink) would open a window with an external camera view.
I wouldn't be so sure. Bigscreen in VR is amazing. Hanging out inside a virtual cinema auditorium watching stuff together with other random people is way better than I could ever have imagined.
The fact that the definition of the "metaverse" is stipulating so much disagreement and discussion is itself the problem.
When smartphones were launched there was a simple description - "oh cool, it's a traditional phone but it has a computer running inside of it? makes sense"
I'd say that this is closer to when "the cloud" came about. No one was quite sure what it was, but everyone wanted in.
To quote (some) of Larry Ellisons famous statements about it:
"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. … The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion."
"Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
And "the cloud" as a phrase was/is indeed useless to those who want to know how things work.
The point of "the cloud" was the concept of users not needing to think where their device is communicating. The device might as well be talking to "the cloud" in the sky.
The point of "the cloud" was the occlusion to the end user.
I don't see much value in the phrase as it doesn't help me know what is going on in any way.
It took a decade from the first smartphones until iPhone/Android like devices with a mostly uniform appearance and UI had decisively won, though. There was a lot of rapid exploration of design space first.
As for VR/metaverse, there's been constant exploration of this space for decades. The VR boom in the 90s was killed by cost and primitive hardware, but we still have surviving persistent 3d worlds that came out of that wave.
We've also seen a lot of non-VR exploration. Aside from Minecraft, we have Roblox, which while a lot more limited in some ways is also a lot more meta: you have an identity that persists across worlds, with a social layer across that. Minecraft looks to be slowly moving in that direction.
We'll see people exploring a lot of other variants, and most will fail. But in the process we'll start to learn what will work.
I doubt Facebook, or Minecraft/Microsoft, or Apple, or Google will turn out to be the winner though.
We got the giant world-wide networked communication interface decades before we got the virtual-reality side of the metaverse. It turns out connecting billions of humans together on a single network was the easy part!
So all the interesting parts of the metaverse going forward are all the VR aspects which is why the discussions are focused on that.
When people talk about VR experiences in the context of “the metaverse” I assume it’s implied there’s a shared space connecting those individual experiences.
Yeah, even things like gather.town people have said worked well for things like happy hours for teams working remotely. Having some virtual equivalent of physical space helps people socialize more naturally.
TV is relaxing. I can turn my brain off and don't need to do anything. The metaverse is just a fancy videogame that big tech companies need to invent so they can monetize another platform and sell more HW.
Sure, if you pay me to work in the metaverse I'll be happy to hang out there. Otherwise I'm not interested.
We’ll do the same thing we are mostly doing with games now: watching somebody playing it sitting next to you, like you’re friends, on some sort of in-game cloud.
Conceptually, a VR workroom sounds like it could be extremely nifty. As someone easily distracted, I'd love to be able to sit in space with only a text editor open and do my thing.
In practice, excluding resolution, wearing a headset for hours on end seems even more straining both for the neck and eyes than the alternative real life workstation.
It only sounds cool until you have to be sitting in a virtual room for 8 hours while your work engagement is analyzed for various micromanagers to sift through
I'm incredulous that having a screen strapped half an inch from your eyes for 8+ hours is desirable. I have an Oculus Rift, my face is sweaty/red in a couple of hours and there is an indent around my eyes. I'm sure newer tech can be much better, especially with airflow and an AR set that lets in natural light. We're not there yet, though.
I just got to try an Oculus Quest 2 and I was really blown away by how advanced it is, I didn't expect that. But at least in my case and at my age after a 2-3 hours of full use (when you run out of battery) my eyes are really tired and I was scratching them for a few days after.
So, it still need one extra generation at least, probably an "iPhone-like" moment but it's definitely addictive.
The Quest gave me persistent "seasickness" after use the first half dozen times I used it (this was last winter, I had nothing better to do than see if I could get better at tolerating it). I eventually got more tolerant of it, but after not using it for a while I'm hesitant to pick it up again in case I am back to square one. During use I could handle stationary scenes okay, but the after-effect was nasty. An incredible piece of technology, though.
The VR-sickness persisted for hours until I realized that the solution was to try and reset my system by walking outside and gazing at the horizon (which also works on seasickness to a point).
But the metaverse itself is not content. Instead it’s another medium to consume content.
Therefore the metaverse isn’t a replacement for a video games or TV. You would simply watch TV or play a video game while in the metaverse.
The metaverse in that regard isn’t a new concept, because VR spaces have existed for a long time now. I’ve watched movies in Minecraft more recently, for example. I’ve seen every idea in the metaverse attempted in some game or application already.
The reason these VR spaces have not taken off, however, is because the medium to access these VR spaces have been pretty disappointing.
It’s the reason why the Internet took a long time to take off: using the Internet on a desktop computer sucks. When smartphones took off, so did the Internet.
Facebook has not fixed the medium problem as I see it. I have never gotten motion sickness, but I do not want to put on a VR headset for more than a few hours. I don’t even want to put on a VR headset to be honest. I’ve owned one for two years and it just sits in a drawer. I can’t imagine that many people want to put on a VR headset either if they could just watch TV while sitting on the couch, grabbing real drinks on their real table, and texting their friends.
> It’s the reason why the Internet took a long time to take off: using the Internet on a desktop computer sucks. When smartphones took off, so did the Internet.
Honestly pre-2008 spending time online was pretty niche. I spent maybe a couple hours a day max on MySpace and LiveJournal and maybe a couple of forums once or twice a week. This was between pirating music and burning CDs for friends in high school which gave me a pretty high score on the nerd-index.
I was listening to a podcast on Flat Earthers and the host basically traced the explosion of True Believers to the advent of the smartphone circa 2008 onwards; suddenly hundreds of millions more people were spending hours a day online.
But there is no P in FAANG. And Steam/etc don’t make their living on adult games. And youtube has no porn on it.
I think the issue with winning it with adult content will remain unchanged, at least for a while. Porn is so classic, that it cannot tunnel through this potential barrier.
Google and Microsoft absolutely serve porn. "Safe search"? It's what Bing is known for.
People use their Apple devices for porn, controlling sex toys, and much more.
Amazon sells lube, sex toys, lingerie, and a whole host of other totally NSFW products.
Netflix has a ton of shows with nude actors bearing their breasts. Their show "Sex/Life" shows penises in a very sexual way.
Twitter, though admittedly not FAMNGA, notoriously allows and supports porn. They're very much the opposite of Tumblr, which died the moment they banned it.
And anonymity. See how many are active in VR community under their legal full real names. Some mention their IRL names on social profiles as footnotes, but if they did care, that person is not important in VR.
> It’s the reason why the Internet took a long time to take off: using the Internet on a desktop computer sucks. When smartphones took off, so did the Internet.
Personally, I would say exactly the opposite, the only advantage a smartphone has over a desktop computer for Internet usage is portability, otherwise the experience is worse in every way.
I could attribute the little use of internet pre-1994 to lack of ISP services, or the fact that people preferred html and modern search engines to the old protocols (ftp, archie, gopher), etc. But 2008, seriously?
I spent lots of hours in internet in college (pre-www) and later paid for CompuServe. By then www was already becoming known. Again, 2008. In what country do you live?
And you should try consuming internet in a desktop or laptop. Even a Chromebook works ok (but a gaming PC is better). Most apps offer a limited experience in mobile, or tablet (it sucks) and seriously, sites render much faster on a fast PC. I can right-click 10 links on the browser, send them to open in the background, consume each tab a close what doesn't work. It is so much nice and faster experience.
> Therefore the metaverse isn’t a replacement for a video games or TV. You would simply watch TV or play a video game while in the metaverse.
Thats the point. The answer to "when do I have time to use the meta verse" is "you have time to watch tv/entertainment, so yo have time to meta verse". Because people think of this as _something added_ to their life, not something augmented.
If the problem was really just the quality of headsets, you'd expect some dose-response relationship, I think. Headsets may not be good enough, but they're much better than they used to be, so you'd expect SOME stable growth in using it for shared environments Second Life style.
But that hasn't happened. I'm thinking the problem isn't lack of good VR, it's that a truly shared metaverse isn't really something we want.
We want our own spaces. We want to have the option to just "watch", to be invisible to the world we're exploring (or to lurk, in forum/chat terms).
When even better VR comes, I think it will be used for far more solitary activities than social ones. We do see some hints of a dose-response relationship there, with reasonably popular VR games like Half Life Alyx.
I hardly ever "watch" TV. But I often have the TV on while I'm doing something else.
With this metaverse stuff you have to wear the stupid goggles. You can't just have it on in the background and glance up if something interesting comes on. This is why 3D TVs failed in the market. The technology worked fine but most regular people didn't want to wear the goggles just to watch a movie.
I think those are reasonable points - one thing from my life as someone who has basically turned my back on gaming due to the ‘real life game’ I’m involved in is that tv is a good escape/unwind when I can’t be arsed exercising/socialising but one of the reasons it is compelling is because the start-up times/stopping cost is basically zero - compared to either a pc or console game where not only do I have startup times to contend with but also the possibility of getting sucked towards the event horizon I can’t get out of and neglecting my level-ups in life
I have a Quest 2 and had a Vive before that. The Quest 2 is way more convenient. But I'm still too tired/lazy to put it on most of the time and would rather veg out on the couch.
Sure, that's also what sport coaches, musician teachers, people teaching cooking on youtube and librarians say.
Also you should get 8 hours of sleep, buy food at the farmers market, spend time with your familly, meditate, get this GTD rolling, and learn a new skill for your carreer.
But honestly, the truth is, as soon as VR is cheap and comfy, I think people will rush to it anyway for one reason: porn. So the metaverse can grow, if like in second life, it allows for porn to develop. But since FB tend to want a family friendly experience, I think we got a betamax vs VHS situation here.
There was a side dish of turn of the century real estate hucksterism. Buy because everyone else is buying. Buy high sell low as retail always does LOL.
And pr0n as you mention.
Also 3d modelers and CAD folks built elaborate structures that were always empty but impressive to admire. The supply of skilled draftsmen and architects willing to work for free VASTLY exceeds the demand.
The most interesting meta activity on second life was stuff that doesn't require second life or 3d or any of that, it was just a fancy screen saver behind people doing simple IRC texting, etc. The philosophy club meetup sounded fun but it was basically walk to a virtual campfire then watch people too high to think, try to instant message philosophical stuff to sound wittier than the next guy. Like karma farming with people too high to succeed but its OK because the platform doesn't have karma LOL. Didn't go many of those LOL.
Second life had a weird attitude toward real life where it was not allowed to use your real name. To prevent "funny names" they gave a huge list of first and last names and let you pick. I found Turbo Pascal and thought it witty because I used that once rather expensive ($250 for a pascal compiler used to be a bargain compared to what D.E.C. charged...) software package 20 yrs previously (now more like 40 yrs) and unfortunately the only reactions I got were confusion and "hey did you know your name is an actual program my dad used?" so it wasn't so fun. I'd rather have used my name.
But that was it, those five things and the rest was empty. I was there, that's how I remember it.
The problem is that the more you make the virtual world like the real world the less relaxing it is. I don't have the mental energy these days for things that are too immersive.
Some people are just not going to want to spend 8 hours a day interacting with people to go home and interact with other real people in a reality-like medium.
Rebut to 1: I watch tv to relax. It doesn't talk back. It's my semi-mute friend. I don't even look at it most of the time. I seem to need mindless taking to drown out my negative thoughts. When the tv is not on, I have my AM radio.
I've never tried VR. Games always put me in a weird mood. I once got 300 Halo 3's at a bankruptcy sale. I couldn't get out of the first room. I tried a few more games, and just didn't get it.
My hope for VR is not being lonely, and bringing more people into my life. And even then--it just sounds awful unless I was in a good mood.
Assume Joe spends 3 hours of TV a night. How much of that time is uninterrupted focused time? While watching TV, I can cook and eat dinner, do a load of laundry, answer email, casually browse the web, feed and let the dog out and at least minimally engage in small talk with family.
None of that I can do when fully immersed in VR. Which is probably why Facebook cares about it. Ads on TV are time to get up, in VR they can fully measure you engagement. Fully engaged in game and hungry, food delivery is one button press away.
It's not a great sign for the metaverse that it's such a nebulous concept for so many people. Even "the cloud" could be boiled down to "other people's computers". The internet was hard for people to understand at first, but it didn't have a unified marketing push behind it. So far, a unified marketing push is all there is to the metaverse, and still nobody knows with the f*ck it's supposed to be.
I'll bite back on these 2 points, even though you're just paraphrasing Zuck.
1) I'm definitely willing to believe that most adults spend a lot of time vegging out, even if I/we don't. Does this mean that one goal of the metaverse is to suck cash out of those folks? "People already waste a lot of time. The metaverse is great because it makes money off of that." I could also interpret this one in a lighter way. Perhaps the metaverse is somehow better than regular vegging out; gives you exercise or something.
2) My take here is similar to some sibling comments. This just sounds like a VR application, and I'm not sure where the "metaverse" comes in. Unless by "metaverse" we mean "internet", which already exists and is (thankfully) not run by Facebook. And even then, I don't see where the internet comes in either! I can dev/create offline, can't I?
> 1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games.
Isn't that still about <25 and > 60, or those without kids?
I hardly can find a calm 30-60 mins per day to just sit and read, sometimes play for 30 mins (2 kids) just before sleep.
How many people spend a lot of time on social media? Billions, this is just providing a more immersive interaction for that. VR is only a tiny portion of that and I'm expecting AR and haptics and a whole bunch of other tech that enable more diverse sensory experiences to play a part here.
I don't really want "Meta" to own all of that largely because what made the internet successful was having no gatekeeper and a very low barrier to entry. Not that that's true anymore, but having no initial gatekeeper let people do crazy things for 30 years while the current gatekeepers were establishing themselves.
With software improvements, our perception of time will eventually be slowed down in the metaverse to such an extent that one hour in the material world will equate to several days of perceived elapsed time in meta-reality.
Only if we are cloned and are pure software beings. In that case, it is possible to run at a faster "clock speed". Of course, this is all in the realm of sci-fi.
It's hard for me to believe one hour to several days but one hour (material world) to two hours would, probably, be already achievable. Now I watch most videos on youtube at 2x speed.
Metaverse may not end up being something that you end up glued to for a long period of time exclusively, the interactions will also bleed into other parts of your life. The main example would be that you could buy items for a Metaverse game in an online store on, and you would browse around there on your phone while you're waiting in line for coffee or the bus or whatever, just like we would do online shopping.
Metaverse would also wrap itself around a lot of the things people do already, like watch movies or concerts, coupled with games of any size and type. So as opposed to a stereotypical 6-hour WoW raid lifestyle, you could, for example, watch a virtual concert with friends, then afterwards jump onto a couple rounds of some Fortnite game variant, similar to how we do it today but just within the 'verse. But you could also immerse yourself for longer if you want to.
Honestly Metaverse seems more to me like a digital version of a big shopping mall with a bowling alley, arcade, and movie theater. You can hang out all day there or just drop in to get something from a store, or just get dinner and a movie.
Agreed. There's way too many things to do in reality. I have about 30-60 minutes a day of Me Time, and the last thing I want to do is piss it away in front of a computer when I've already spent 70% of my time doing exactly that.
Go outside, people. Talk to your friends in reality if possible. Experience the place you live in; participate in something physical to improve it materially. There's no end of socialization and minigames in reality, the graphics are better, and it's free.
You're preaching to the choir. This is why I'd always rather read an article or a book than watch a video if I'm trying to learn something. I'll watch TV or a movie if I'm only aiming to be entertained. But for something I want to try to retain or if I'm trying to get business done, text wins for me.
More like 6 hours, if you consider work time, commute time (for folks who'll still have to do that), meal prep, etc.
But I don't think that's really the point. People use those 6 hours in a bunch of different ways. Some of those hours might be replaced by a metaverse experience entirely (as in, "I used to do play video games on my console, but I can get the same experience, but better, playing games in the metaverse"), and other activities might get nudged out because they aren't as (subjectively) enjoyable as the metaverse to some people. And other people will just not do the metaverse thing, because other activities are more fun to them. FB is betting on the user group being very large, and I don't know that I'd disagree with them.
And the same thing will always happen: people will continue to kick themselves for not finishing that book, or getting that extra workout in. That will continue to be the case with or without the metaverse.
Also consider that something like a metaverse could become the standard way for remote knowledge workers to get in a "room" together to collaborate. That alone seems like a large user base.
You answered your own question - it's a play for the next generation.
My kids bounce between a multitude of shared digital spaces (games, chat, social, videos etc) and they would be right at home at some kind of metaverse that would bridge them all (if that's even possible).
The Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts the American Time Use Survey [1], which tracks how people spend their time. This includes a breakdown by age (see table 9).
In every single age group, the average person spends over 4 hours per day on leisure and sports activities, the majority of which is watching TV (and very little of which is exercise or reading).
This is true even for people with children, with the exception of those with a child under 6 years of age. They spend an average of 3.86 hours/day on leisure and sports activities, 1.91 hours/day of which is watching TV.
It seems as though there is plenty of time for the metaverse.
I also kick myself for not finishing things. Namely programming projects, my game backlog and lots of other things that are strictly digital. While you seem to want to get away from the computer I want to spend more time in front of it.
I'm 43, I don't play regularly because of work/kids/etc. but every now and then I log into one of my favourite servers and spend some time there.
Two years ago I have built a base on 2b2t[1], located millions of blocks away from spawn, it took many hours of travelling through nether highways to get there. Before starting the journey, I had to escape spawn (a very dangerous area since 2b2t is an anarchy server) and I had to find valuable items from scavenging abandoned bases. After I finished my base, I made friends on the server, I have also helped building one of the highways, using a hacked Minecraft client that includes tools to build tunnels automatically[2].
There is also another server that I have visited regularly, MinecraftOnline[3], I built a house there and I made some friends, this one has rules and moderators unlike 2b2t which is an anarchy server. On both servers there is a rich community, a subculture specific to the server, and even specific activities that stem from each server's subculture[4][5]
Based on my experience, I have to agree with the article, Minecraft is an amazing and diverse metaverse.
2b2t is amazing, you just keep on discovering things everywhere you go. It's just a shame the chat is so toxic. MinecraftOnline isn't much better just because there's no griefing, they really stick to their "100% free speech" rule.
Most "hacked" clients that are commonly used on anarchy servers have additional options for chat, including spam filters and even options for hiding the chat completely. I use spam filters a lot and sometimes hide the chat completely. One option that I like is hiding all messages except private messages.
Working remotely? That's 8 hours of digital world / metaverse experience right there. Most people have at least another 2 hours of screen time on top of that. I know I have days that are just screen time essentially.
29 years old no kids here, have lots of coworkers in the same cohort. During the pandemic in particular a lot of friends started to pick up VRChat, and a majority of people in my age group still regularly play games. I think that's not that untypical honestly, I can see quite a few adults sinking at least a few hours per week into it if it gets interesting enough.
Seconding this - have used VRChat a lot during the pandemic. Asking me why I’d spend time on the metaverse is like asking why I’d go to a bar. I won’t defend it as the best possible use of my time, but it’s fun to go meet people.
Given how much time everyone I interact with (and myself) spend with our heads buried on phones, mindlessly scrolling, I’d say an extremely large number of people would gladly transition to an augmented reality world, and stare at walls for an equally long amount of time
This article and most people I have seen so far, get the concept of metaverse wrong. It's much simpler conceptually (though exceptionally hard technically) than people understand.
The metaverse is the result of instrumenting the real world to capture and interact with the data the real world provides. Think "Digital Twin" of the world that refreshes at 100Hz.
It's not a place you go, it becomes the landscape you live in, because everything becomes a data source.
I don't mean this as a criticism of anyone. I do find though that there are types of people (likely including you and I) who feel compelled to move and do things such that our down time is extremely valuable. I do have kids which makes it quite a bit more challenging. I feel motivated on an hourly basis to accomplish things, though - it matters to me to make progress on the things I care about.
There are other people who very much don't care. To them, progress might be watching the next episode of a show, or grinding in some game they love.
I'm fine with either type of person, really. It does explain why what seems like an impossible use of time to us is actually very appealing to others. Why would we be in there when there's a book to read, a concept to learn, people we don't see often enough, etc? And yet, why wouldn't they?
I think the metaverse aims to appeal to us as well eventually; imagine interactive classes on X or Y to help you learn faster with tools that are currently impossible? What if we could save time by seeing loved ones more easily in the metaverse, making more time for those things we want to make progress on? I'm not bullish on that, though. It sounds creepy. I want to hug the people I love, hear them laugh in person, make them nice food. I'm not interested in expediting that facet of my life.
Even now, despite growing up with webcams around I still find FaceTime fairly impersonal and uninteresting. I use it only when I really need to.
Depends what you mean by “metaverse.” I have 3 kids and use my Oculus maybe 3 times a week for 30-45 minutes each time. Lovely escapism. I can go to the beach and the mountains and back in a half hour.
Seriously. I don’t have time to do the things I need to do, much less the things I want to do. I haven’t had time for TV, books, movies, etc. in years.
Maybe thinking of it as a separate experience is limiting how people make use of it.
I wonder if anyone has run remote team meetings or virtual classrooms in Minecraft as I imagine it would be a lot less fatiguing than Zoom style teleconferencing. The fact that in MC you can easily see where other players are looking adds a lot to the experience.
Also it does sound like you're mixing your run of the mill grindy MMO with Minecraft. Your MC world will still be there if you don't touch it for a week. Even on a server.
Okay, it may depend on the culture of said server, but that's exactly the point of the article.
I play MC on an 18+ server that's building oriented. That means everyone has a job and other interests. We just show up and place our blocks when we feel like it. I just logged in yesterday after a 2 week break. People disappear for months. Nobody sees a problem with it.
I feel the same. The other day there was a video submit to HN that I didn't watch because I wasn't in a situation where I could watch a video. Basically making pancakes for kids, having an IRL conversation in the background, and checking HN while waiting to turn the pancake.
If HN was on metaverse where I have to get an immersive headset on to use it... Yeah, I wouldn't be using it nearly as often as I do.
As you get older, the best feature of our existing 'metaverse' is its ability to integrate with the 'meat-a-verse' seamlessly. The higher the barrier of moving between the *verses, the harder it is to use the one in which we can't actually keep our meat fit and fed.
The concept of the metaverse also involves doing those activities (e.g., work, fitness, entertainment) inside the metaverse. For instance, the home workout videos that people watch on their TVs these days could someday be replaced by an immersive fitness experience on AR glasses.
People already spend hours and hours per day on social media, very often just to fill time and avoid boredom. I can absolutely see the metaverse taking up some of that time.
Is there anything GNU or good that's essentially AC for android? By good I mean isn't a slot machine with an AC style minigame. I already know about the current official android AC spinoff.
not really, WoW is a game, and no game can be a metaverse, because one of the most core and intrinsic qualities of what makes something a game is that it is a separate space from reality. Games studies people refer to this as "the magic circle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle_(virtual_worlds)): the boundary separating reality from "game space".
For example, let's say you're playing a game of Checkers. That's separate from real life. You can't buy a captured Checkers pieces on eBay and then in your next game of Checkers, start with more pieces than your opponent. Being able to do those things would cause the game to break down, because the game would no longer be a contest of your wits in Checkers, it would be a contest of your existing wealth. You can't purchase points in a basketball game, you can't purchase mulligans in golf, etc. A lot of people in the blockchain/NFT space seem to be of the position that games don't currently let you purchase things with real money or sell them to other players for real money because they lack the technical capabilities, but that is not and has never been the problem. There's also the "trading an item in one game for an item in another game" but that's equally useless, it's the same thing but with a barter system, and the barter system would eventually just give way to money anyway. The problem is that introducing those mechanics causes the magic circle to break down.
By contrast a metaverse is a metaverse because the things happening in it are not in a separate, isolated space. Both games and metaverses are virtual in nature, but what makes something a metaverse is the lack of a magic circle, while what makes something a game is the presence of a magic circle. The metaverse is a virtual facet of reality; games' whole thing is that they are not reality.
A metaverse can contain a game, but not vice versa. Plus WoW is entirely owned and operated by one entity; a metaverse is pretty definitionally a situation in which any party can create their own space without needing the permission of another party, kinda like anyone can create a website without needing the permission of any party. Well, of course, you need an IP address and if you want people to be able to reach it, a DNS record and if you want SSL some certificates, so that's not a perfect analogy, but the web isn't really decentralized anyway (for these specific reasons).
There will never be a metaverse! The amount of electricity and device manufacturing required for it to exist at scale will likely exhaust our capabilities as a planet and lead to yet more conflict and strife.
My take is almost the complete opposite. In the Metaverse, you can spin up a office building for an unlimited number of users who can access from across the globe. Please compaire that use case, and so many more like it, to the real world alternatives in terms of resource consumption. It's an economy of infinite bits, not limited atoms.
While it is true that concrete and steel cost resources as well, in a resource constrained world, we will use what we already have in place as these things are quite durable.
I don't envision a future of mega skyscrapers and bullet trains, nor do I envision a world of Oculus clad employees driving a virtual forklift.
Rather I view the world continuing to exist as we currently have it: forklift driver is prompted by his UI to go to the next location to physically grab an item.
all Roblox games run on servers owned by the Roblox corporation so not really. Minecraft is totally federated, anyone can create their own Minecraft server if they want to. Roblox doesn't release the server software and doesn't let you run your own server, so you can never really own your own space; they own all of the spaces.
Who said something needs to be federated for it to be the metaverse? That's nowhere in the definition.
I'd argue that scifi examples (like Ready Player One) show that it can be proprietary.
I'm not saying it's good to be controlled by one org. Just that the number of orgs controlling the infra has nothing to do with being the metaverse or not.
Why do people cite fictional examples as if they matter at all? Honestly wondering. It's certainly good for imagining the possibilities, but this thread is talking about something that could actually happen.
Facebook itself would be a better example to your point as it's the largest social network.
in the absence of actual examples, fiction can and sometimes does function as thought experimentation. It can be valid, although in this case, I would argue is not, because Ready Player One does not actually offer any real critique of the OASIS or of the metaverse concept generally; in the story, the OASIS is the damsel in distress, not the aggressor.
This is a good point, though the edges are graying there too.
I've been seeing a lot of ads lately for an iOS game (an awful looking game, but that's beside the point) whose major claim to fame in their ads is that you can earn Roblox's Robux by playing. They probably aren't using any sort of federated Roblox "metaverse ecommerce platform" today, they are probably just laundering Robux gift certificates. (I'm not entirely sure, it's not a game I have reason to download as awful and creepy as it appears.)
So there are at least some game spaces they don't own. (Whether or not you agree those are worthwhile game spaces.)
2nd Life is still out there. I say s someone who was invited to (and attended) a 2nd Life based event during lockdown. I also was invited to a bunch of similar virtual events on the 100 competitors that seemed to spring up.
That is often considered the primary reason VHS beat out the arguably superior tech of Betamax: one was willing to license to porn and the other preferred not to.
Definitely a lesson for any would be "metaverse" to keep in mind.
Minecraft is great but to my knowledge you can't make a portal in one Minecraft world to another world, you can't take an object from one Minecraft world to another world, and you can't transit from one simulation to another simulation (all Minecraft worlds run the same simulation: the Minecraft simulation). It's not really a metaverse in that it's not one connected uncoordinated space, it's many separate, instanced spaces. But it does at least let you run your own space. Valheim is more metaverse than minecraft is since you can gather resources in one Valheim server and take them to another, but there's no real security on that and there's no public history so it's not really stable; there's no notion of what's "real". Although I do agree with the framing that something being a metaverse has little to do with head-mounted displays.
You are correct in vanilla minecraft as far as I'm aware, but there are a number of plugins/mods that have been supporting this type of functionality for a while.
The principle being demonstrated here is persistence, and it exists on a spectrum. In a single Minecraft server your inventory is persistent, but across Minecraft servers only your account identity is persistent. In Valheim or Terarria both your account and your inventory is persistent across servers.
Right now the talking heads are trying to sell us a metaverse on the idea that one account could have a persistent inventory between Minecraft and Valheim and Terraria, but anyone who's ever played a game can tell you immediately that this makes no mechanical sense whatsoever (cross-game promotions are common, and welcome (e.g. an Aloy costume in Monster Hunter World for PS4 owners, or Nintendo Amiibo giving you random rewards in various games), but don't involve literally round-tripping your character between games of potentially wildly disparate genres), and anyone who's ever written a piece of software can tell you immediately that this would be an infeasible logistical nightmare to implement.
right I agree with all that, I'm not advocating for the idea of moving the content that an item represents from one simulation to another, but the idea that transferring what that thing symbolizes should be considered separate and isn't as easily dismissable. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29086662
I feel like taking an object from one simulation to another and having different simulations are oposites. Either you have the same simulations and thus objects share behavior, or the simulations are different and the objects are just 3D things.
> taking an object from one simulation to another and having different simulations are oposites
not really, we just have to get into some semiotics here and consider the difference between the signifier and the signified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier). In semiotics, a signifier is a physical artifact; the manifestation of something. A physical stop sign, for example. The signified is the concept embodied by a signifier. All of the stop signs in the world correspond to (roughly) the same concept of stopping, but they are separate instances of that concept. Separate signifiers (instances of "stop sign"), all with the same thing signified (the idea that you should stop).
Now in games, we have the notion of the signifier and the signified, too. Let's take an example item from WoW. I'm using this as an example because it's a game I'm familiar with. An item like Staff of Westfall (https://classic.wowhead.com/item=2042/staff-of-westfall) expresses several things. The first thing that it expresses is that it's a weapon so it uses your weapon slot to equip it, and the stat bonus of +5 intellect that gives you additional mana and +11 spirit that gives you mana regeneration. Great, that's nice. Those things can be taken to be the content of the item: its in-simulation properties and effects. But what does the existence of this item signify? The Staff of Westfall can only be obtained by each player exactly once, cannot be traded between players, and can only be obtained by going to The Deadmines, a particular dungeon, and defeating the final boss. Equipping the Staff of Westfall has the effect that it gives you mana and mana regen, but it also communicates something non-mechanical: that the player carrying the Staff of Westfall has gone to the Deadmines and fought and beaten Edwin VanCleef.
Now, can the Staff of Westfall be transferred to another simulation? Yes and no. The signifier, the physical (virtual?) staff can be transferred to another game in some sense. The 3D model can be transferred, the physical appearance of the item can be transferred. But that was always on your computer all along; it's not particularly meaningful. The effects of the item may or may not be transferable; if a game is not the exact simulation that WoW is, what does +5 intellect and +11 spirit mean? The game operator may elect to translate that to some other concept in their game, or they may not. I think this notion of "transfer" is what you're eluding to: the transfer of the signifier. This concept is probably very useless. It's also the concept that people are generally talking about when they talk about the transfer of items between games. I think it has no merit at all.
But there's something else that can be transferred: the thing that ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies: the concept that the person holding that item has slayed Edwin VanCleef (in WoW). Transferring the Staff of Westfall may not mean transferring the physical model or its attributes, but it may mean something more along the lines of transferring the meaning of what the player has accomplished. Admittedly, I'm not sure why this would be useful or what the applications of such a system would be; what I'm getting at instead is the idea that transferring an asset may mean many things, and that transferring an asset from one simulation to another is not necessarily the opposite.
> Now, can the Staff of Westfall be transferred to another simulation? Yes and no. The signifier, the physical (virtual?) staff can be transferred to another game in some sense. The 3D model can be transferred, the physical appearance of the item can be transferred. But that was always on your computer all along; it's not particularly meaningful. The effects of the item may or may not be transferable; if a game is not the exact simulation that WoW is, what does +5 intellect and +11 spirit mean? The game operator may elect to translate that to some other concept in their game, or they may not. I think this notion of "transfer" is what you're eluding to.
> But there's something else that can be transferred: the thing that ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies: the concept that the person holding that item has slayed Edwin VanCleef (in WoW). Transferring the Staff of Westfall may not mean transferring the physical model or its attributes, but it may mean something more along the lines of transferring the meaning of what the player has accomplished. Admittedly, I'm not sure why this would be useful or what the applications of such a system would be; what I'm getting at instead is the idea that transferring an asset may mean many things, and that transferring an asset from one simulation to another is not necessarily the opposite.
What the "ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies" is a relatively easy problem to solve. In a way, it's a list of achievements. So the only thing you need to do is to link that list of achievements (or facts if you want to be more general) to a centralized or federated identity. That's easy to do. The 3D object is already harder: not all engines render 3D objects the same way. Maybe there's a "3D object standard" like SVG and you could use that. That's maybe not easy, but not the hardest.
You're hinting at the hard part when saying "it's a weapon so it uses your weapon slot to equip it, and the stat bonus of +5 intellect that gives you additional mana and +11 spirit that gives you mana regeneration". If we remove that part, the "usefulness" of the item, the only thing that's left is appearance and signaling. There's no substance. What's a pen without the ability to write? What's a computer without the ability to run programs? What's a car without the ability of moving? This is why I say that taking an object from one simulation to another is not compatible (at the same effort level) with having different simulations.
Your arguments support stating that taking an object from one simulation to another is a conceptually hard, not necessarily impossible. We do not have that compatibility now, but IMHO the word "metaverse" becomes applicable only when (and if) when it includes at least partial compatibility of this sort; that is the difference between separate environments and environments in a shared metaverse.
At first I thought of replying with something like
> "Yes, everything is possible with enough engineering time. My point is that you can easily do horizontal integration (lots of simulations, mostly cosmetic, almost no behavior) or vertical integration (lots of behavior, few simulation). Both of those have a small surface. But if you want the two at the same time, your surface begins to grow rapidly. You have to implement N behaviours for M simulations. That's not impossible of course. But it's hard."
but the more I think about it, the more I think it's wrong. It's not hard, it is impossible, depending on your definition of different simulations.
For example, what would the Staff of Westfall be in a virtual coworking space? Could you beat up people with it? That would make sense, although I'm not sure it would be suited to a virtual coworking space. Let's just hope your colleague doesn't play shooters. Would it make you "smarter" in a way, by increasing the speed of your computer for example? That is starting to be a bit weird. You could have a badge, or title to say that you've slain the boss, this could work. But how about all the generic equipment? The consumable? How would you express a mana potion in your coworking space? Stimulants maybe? But what would they do? WoW is a game where you (can) try to make your virtual character stronger than the others players/NPC. But that's not really how real life works. That's not how a virtual coworking space would work. "mana" doesn't even exists in your virtual coworking space.
And if your solution to that is to establish some base rules that all simulations follow (physics, capable of executing code contained in an object), then at this point all simulations start becoming the same.
A good analogy for that: how would you reconcile the world in people's dream and the real world? The more you want to bring things from one to the other, the more they lose their distinction. I think the key point here is that a "simulation" is not a name you give to something, but a bag of behaviours, expectations, things. When you bring those things from one simulation to the other, they start being the same. Thus my initial point, having diverse simulations and bringing objects between them are two opposing wishes.
My argument probably is that establishing some base rules that all simulations follow and some interchange standards is the key part of the metaverse concept. If you don't have that, then you have x separate unconnected "universes", but you can talk about a metaverse only if you have linked them in some ways.
You go in a lot of detail about the "Staff of Westfall" topic which rises some very hard problems, but not all of them need to be solved for a "minimum viable metaverse" (and perhaps not all of them should be solved - likely the optimal spot is somewhere in the middle between those two opposing wishes) - however, there's nothing metaverse-like until we do at least the basics of such connections e.g. ability to link and/or transfers of users, names/identities/aliases and at least some aspects of avatars; and in the case if two simulations are sufficiently similar and want to interoperate, then developing common standards to enable that avatar/item transfer.
Like, it's okay for a particular simulation to have a rule "custom hats are okay, but magic staffs have to stay outside" - but then it needs a protocol that allows them to separate different "accessories" of incoming avatars. And it's okay for a particular simulation (e.g. a virtual conference setup) to have a rule "magic staffs are only decorative items here", but then it needs a technical process to obtain the visual aspects of that staff so that it can properly display it with the new avatar - the simulation might be very different (VR, different styles of 3d vs 2d environment vs perhaps textual representation), so such standards are nontrivial but necessary to have a connected metaverse. (If we want to have it. Myself, I'm not so sure, but some people definitely do)
And if a simulation wants to allow the items inside but have a transformation to fit their specific mechanics - or even transform meaningful items to fit their theme (e.g. a space opera rpg representing the "Staff of Westfall" as a lightsaber) then there should be a standard for that "receiving simulation" to obtain the relevant attributes of that staff so that it can make that transformation, then they should not have to implement a different technical integration for every other simulation, that should be part of the metaverse standards.
I think at this point we basically agree on most things. The only differences might be on what is an "ideal multiverse", what would be a "mvp multiverse", and what it means for two simulations to be different.
> what would the Staff of Westfall be in a virtual coworking space? Could you beat up people with it?
You’re still limiting the question to the plane of content: the object’s physical (virtual) characteristics.
Consider the staff as it exists in the plane of expression: what is the person expressing by displaying the item? It would express that you play WoW, are an Alliance player, and play a caster of some sort. That might be a valuable ice breaker or conversation starter; a thing that helps people identify a shared experience or facet of their shared identity.
You have to see through the object’s simulated characteristics and into what the object’s existence means for it to have value. If the object doesn’t mean anything, then there’s not much point in moving it from space to space.
> If the object doesn’t mean anything, then there’s not much point in moving it from space to space.
Again, that's if you consider that the only value that exists is showing and signaling. That's, in my opinion, a really limited view of things. Objets are not just here to mean something, but also to do something. In fact, that's the main point of most objects. If your objects are only here because they mean something, they could very well just be a list of facts. Linking a list of facts to your identity, even if it's decentralized, is trivial. But it's not the everything you can do. I have a pickaxe in Minecraft. If I could use it to break rock in <cool metaverse stuff>, that would be great. If I can just show a pickaxe, what's the point of the pickaxe?
The whole thread is that taking an object from one simulation to another is not really the opposite of having distinct simulations: it just forces us to reconcile with what an object is.
The only way you can have separate simulations is if a person can define their own simulation. If you can't define "I won't let you bonk your coworkers on the head with a stick" then you're not in control of your simulation; you're not defining your own simulation, you're just running another instance of some agreed-upon single simulation. At that point, those are the same simulation. So a person setting up a space has to be free to define the behaviors of the objects in that space, otherwise it's not really their simulation.
If you take an object from one simulation to another, and it does not behave the same way in the two simulations, they're still the same object.
> Objets are not just here to mean something, but also to do something.
The fact that they do something does not identify them as objects. A pickaxe in Minecraft doesn't truly break anything. It plays a sound and deletes a cube. If you're in creative mode in Minecraft, it doesn't even increment your inventory. You can also delete a cube in a voxel editor like Magica Voxel. Is the pickaxe in your Minecraft game the same object as the delete button in Magica Voxel? Is the pickaxe in your Minecraft game the same object as the pickaxe in my Minecraft game? Obviously no. They all do the same thing, but they're not the same object.
The only thing necessary to satisfy "moving an object from one simulation to another" is that they be provably of one distinct identity and not be duplicable.
> The only thing necessary to satisfy "moving an object from one simulation to another" is that they be provably of one distinct identity and not be duplicable.
That would mean that you don't have money. Many objects are fungible. If our two pickaxes have the same properties (same name, enchantements, durability, material), then they are the same. A big part of our experience in the world is fungible. Most of the time when I want a pen I only want to be able to write on paper. I don't care if it's your pen or my pen or anything like this.
Maybe, that is just what it should be. Maybe this is the way these things will actually work. The internet itself works, in big part, because it sides with federation over persistence.
Transferring objects from one world to another may not be desirable for a few reasons. This could lead to coupling of world economies where something that is meant to be - intentionally - scarce in one world now finds itself with an overabundance.
there's only one metaverse, and there's only one economy in the metaverse. I'm not advocating that you should be moving game objects between games, that's a distinct concept (and probably not a very useful one). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29086415
Yeah. The totally lawless environments that can be present in Minecraft servers are awesome- the best example of which being 2b2t, a vanilla gameserver running the same map since 2010 that is essentially the 4chan of Minecraft (it even originated there). Despite allowing users to hack to their hearts' content and having no rules, the creativity and sheer amount of media produced by such an environment is stunning.
And that is why the "metaverse" will succeed if it's decentralized.
I wouldn't touch a MC server that has no grief prevention. But you can have your 4chan and I can have my builder server and we're both happy. Because there's no central authority telling us how to run our pieces of "metaverse".
And it turns out it's been pwned for a couple years by people inserting a vulnerability into a dependency by masterful social engineering where the vuln was introduces as an obvious fix to another less exploitable bug.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadDoes Minecraft ban/cancel people like PewDiePie as Roblox did?
Aren't monthly active users (MAU) around 100M for each?
I think Roblox is eventually doomed to slowly fizzle like Second Life, etc. Internet history is littered with the corpses of dead closed systems. Remember Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL? Remember Myspace?
Microsoft might eventually, say, install mandatory AI inside Minecraft that forces all players to behaviorally conform to the social and political views of the most vocal group of Microsoft employees. Then some other immersive 3D world builder with more open rules of participation will send Minecraft to its grave.
For a while everything interesting was stuck on 1.7 so while Microsoft may have shipped 1.8, and 1.9 nobody of consequence played those in the modded scene.
Even today, the newer Minecraft versions are only used for very experimental packs. Something mainstream is on 1.12 while Microsoft have already begun shipping 1.19
Because of this, you have for many years been able to pick which version of Minecraft is started, new versions don't overwrite old ones.
I just read that Mojang added no opt-out telemetry to version 21w38a.[1]
How many Minecrafters are savvy enough to understand that this happened, and the long-term implications?
I initially tried to follow guides and "mods" to disable Win 10 telemetry but eventually gave up because MS changes how telemetry is disabled with every single update.
[1] https://github.com/kb-1000/no-telemetry
On Java Minecraft, which is the only way you can seriously modify the game - I haven't actually run the out-of-box experience for many years, but unless it changed you just pick the version you want from a GUI.
If you play modded more than a tiny "dip my toe in it" amount you run dedicated "launcher" software (I run MultiMC) and that takes responsibility for managing a whole bunch of exciting problems, each of your Mod packs probably expects to live in a separate Minecraft environment, with a specific version of the game, it needs to track whether the Java parameters are special (e.g. more heap, different garbage collection prefs) some people prefer to play some packs in a different screen resolution.
One of the very strange things for a few years was that Twitch (yes, that one) managed this stuff for a lot of players. You've got the Twitch.tv app, which people use to watch say, Ninja playing Fortnite, and there's a tab in there for mods, and then a tab inside that for Minecraft, and that's a valid modded Minecraft launcher. It made some sort of sense because one of the few long term audiences on Twitch is Minecraft, so while there may never be more Minecraft audiences than there are people watching this week's hot new game, by next year that game is irrelevant and the same audience is still watching Minecraft. The tie-in deal that caused this eventually went away though.
There are other ways. For a while, I played on a private Minecraft server which disabled authentication (for reasons; that server also had the mod which allows Bedrock players to connect to a Java server, which probably played a part). However, once you connected to that server, you had 30 seconds to type a command with a password, otherwise you'd be kicked out, and before entering that command, the player is frozen and has no access to the inventory. The closest analogue is IRC's NickServ.
That server also had a way to allow everyone to use their own user-selected player skins, even without authenticating to the skin servers, though I don't know the details on how that worked.
My only problem with Roblox is that it's not on the Switch and they all want better tablets and computers to play it now.
Until VR technology gets better I probably don't think kids will grow up on it because I can't imagine headsets being safe to use for extended periods of time if you're under 10 years old.
Oops. Well the only reason my kids play as much Roblox as they do is only because I don't let them play the Quest2 all day. They would if they could. (Especially the 8yo)
RecRoom is a really well done VR Roblox and my kids would live there if they could. I think we'll see a generation of kids with high interest and expectations of VR.
Maybe it's always been here, perhaps it's just another abstraction or simulation of a perceived reality. One could say that MUD systems are metaverses(metaversi?)
What I would like to see are more decentralized simulation systems with extensive accessibility features
There's a concerted push to foist this buzzword on us either way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife
https://education.minecraft.net/en-us/discover/impact
This is the kind of product I hope for with the Metaverse but will probably never see.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D
I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in, and just sitting in the backyard and resting my eyes. And I don't even have children...
they are the freemium and mobile segment. dismissed by both the toxic gaming communities and themselves, but noticed by the companies who will change their whole trillion dollar business name to snag them further.
1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games. (The actual per-person-per-day numbers are very high compared to the average 2hr/week i watch tv but whatever). Most of TV and Video Games are about ignoring reality for entertainment in a fake world already. thats a few hours people can dedicate.
2) The metaverse can be more than traditional video game type entertainment. WFH has turned the office as a destination into a keyboard/monitor as a destination. You can use VR to have a much more immersive/focused work destination than either office or WFH desk. Thats 8+ hours a day you can spend in metaverse.
(I have tried the Oculus workrooms and if the virtual screen resolution was higher then i'd personally work in it.)
Watching TV or playing a game in an immersive, distraction-free VR environment sounds great, and will happen, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.
Working in a virtual home office has the potential to be extremely productive, ergonomic, and space-saving, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.
A metaverse involves some kind of shared space and shared experience across a networked medium. Not only is it more than just doing things in VR, a metaverse doesn't even require VR.
eg. maybe your vr home has digital art, but that art can also exist and be viewed in other mediums. Or you can all sit at home and watch VRTV with friends, but one friend just watches on their phone on the bus.
Or a virtaul office desk, that can have coworkers visiting. The office server can be hosted on your corp servers (or, the social networking, maybe you self host your personal office), but when you leave to go virtually home, you're now in your home, hosted by fb nee meta.
It does not matter because for the public and the media Zuckerberg is redefining the meaning of the word right in front of our eyes. Give it a few years and everybody will believe VR is an inherent feature of metaverse. Just like those of us who had been using the word "crypto" to mean "cryptography" for decades were trying to explain in vain what the word originally mean - but it made no sense as the new meaning was already popularized.
People are already dismissing this "metaverse" furor as just more VR hype with a stupider name and the company "Meta" is risking killing the entire term "metaverse" and any usefulness it might have had altogether.
Ironically, by owning Facebook "Meta" should be in one of the best positions to build/sell a 2D "metaverse plane" as well as just about anyone else possibly could. Tear down some of the garden walls, allow a bit more of the old MySpace and Blog anarchy of clashing styles and user control, be a better web citizen. They aren't likely to do that because they are using "metaverse" as attempt to make more Oculus money and risking the Facebook lock in and walled garden for a vision with actual guts and takes risks doesn't seem to be in their interest.
[1] https://www.highfidelity.com/backlog/requiem-for-the-hmd
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29069381
Have you seen the leaked Quest Pro design[1]? It's already close to being ski goggle size, and it's only a couple of generations away from something the size of sunglasses.
Displays are getting cheaper, better and higher resolution. UX is being improved, passthrough cameras already exist.
My estimate is that towards the end of this decade we'll see unprecedented adoption of VR/AR outside of the few niche use cases we see today.
Meta is jumping on the bandwagon early, making their brand synonymous with VR, and betting big that this will change how everyone uses computers today, and that it will be the tech to replace smartphones.
As much as I dislike that such a user hostile company is trying to popularize the metaverse/VR, I'm sure they did their research and are confident this will eventually sell like crazy. I think they're right.
[1]: https://nitter.eu/basti564/status/1452366495053488135
Whether or not they did their research, whether or not we are just a few iterative improvements away from mass adoption, there's still just too much feeling of "same hype cycle, different day" from the average consumer (which is the point of that article, and my implication that VR is dead right now but it was Facebook's lucky albatross so they're tying it around their necks in the hopes it is still lucky while dead [1]).
[1] Spoiler alert for a classic poem used as a metaphor here: in the poem things do not go well from here. I am pessimistic about this marketing play for "Meta".
They used to be open. Cambridge Analytica came along and congress made them decide open was a liability. Sure they were starting to close down before congress, but now they're sure as hell not opening up.
I don't care if the data is locked down or not, the social graph isn't the interesting part of a "metaverse" and in some ways it is probably better locked up and that can remain Facebook's lock in to keep them interested in the project. The kind of garden walls I was talking about are more federative: bringing external content in, but in ways that are true to the outside content; not just confined to Facebook looks and styles and components, not confined to a bare amount of customization of boring card styles, not embedded in a "Facebook way" but in a "web way" (whatever that means, and it doesn't really feel like it means much at all after the imagination and wilds of the 1990s).
I referenced the anarchy and chaos of blogs and MySpace, specifically: it's about user control to "do ugly things", to escape the gray walls and graffiti "their spaces". If Facebook is a "space" today, it's a building full of cubicles all alike. Sure, you can hang photos in the cubicles and they've got colorful stock ones, but your still constrained to just those cubicle walls and they mandate a lot about the allowed size and frame styles. That's almost directly the antithesis of a user owned "metaverse" whether 2D or 3D.
I'm sorry, I think if you want to broaden this term like this you're going to have to stipulate some new boundaries. Else, we've got the metaverse: it's just the internet, and metaverse is just the latest in a long line of silly names for it back to the "internet superhighway".
And when Di died or 9/11 happened I had a "shared experience across a networked medium" about them, for concrete examples.
Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember? So I'm not sure where this idea even comes from.
Yes, this is absolutely correct.
A "metaverse" exists in contrast to meatspace. In meatspace I walk down the street, I look through a shop window, I see you browsing inside, I spray some graffiti on the wall, you see the graffiti when you come out of the shop. We have a shared space with the qualities of presence (I passively saw you while you were browsing) and persistence (the graffiti will be there for anyone to see).
In the metaverse, I open some application on a computer, I look at some window or readout, I see that you're online (maybe I just see a light next to a username, or maybe I see your WoW character dancing shirtless outside of Goldshire), I leave something persistent (maybe a comment on a blog post, maybe a spray on the wall in an MMOFPS), which is available for you to see at some point. There are hundreds of metaverses (that's nearly the whole point; a metaverse is a virtual space that isn't bound by the rules and limits of physical space, so why not inhabit a few dozen?) of varying complexity (many websites, IRC, BBSes) and immersiveness (Minecraft, Second Life, PlayStation Home). VR isn't intrinsic to the idea of a metaverse, it's just one potential realization of the idea.
> Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember?
Stephenson depicted his metaverse as a virtual space for the sake of the reader's imagination, so that they could envision something real and familiar instead of just a bunch of people clacking away on keyboards. The "virtual street" metaphor used in Snow Crash was always just a convenient literary device, and not at all the point of the metaverse, which to reiterate is the idea of a virtual shared universe in which to exist that is unbound from the restrictions of the physical universe.
Its been around for longer than Second Life in pancake kvm forms but the latest iteration is based on Immersion or Embodied experience facilitated by the new hardware price/performance advances.
VR hardware is just about over the chasm and proper wide fov AR is on the horizon although semi AR/MR is possible today (e.g. Pokemon Go as a shared overlay of digital world space on to a shared real world space).
The Immersive Embodied Metaverse is available over the internet using open W3C WebXR standards today and this will get better as the space and infrastructure matures.
Virtual shopping malls where you would "walk" around by clicking around websites.
It’s clear from Facebook’s presentations for instance that they consider text messaging via WhatsApp to class as part of the metaverse.
It’s not anything new, but I think the metaverse strategy is basically Facebook saying “we want to own all communications, and push the boundaries of what owning communications even means”. That’s my take anyway, but I have found most people are focused on the VR aspect and have missed the more scary all-encompassing and broader definition.
So think that every user is an inhabitant, a citizen, a potential buyer in the virtual and the real world, but also a potential business owner in the virtual world. Business owners will be tax payers that must pay fees to operate on this city-state that will have internal laws that except for few cases (at most) will not be subject to government laws and constitutional protection, and if you are difficult or problematic the authority will be able to expatriate you without prior notice, regardless of time or money invested in the platform. Maybe, at most, they could offer arbitration with a company that knows that if they don't favor Meta the contract will not be renewed. So yeah. It is a good idea, if they can pull it.
There was a two dimensional interface called Flatland that worked like a CLI. Hiro used it to manipulate the virus without viewing it.
VR - Is a user interface. Metaverse is a network built for that user interface.
Historically, we had screen and keyboard based user interfaces, and with it text based gaming like Zork. Then we had screen and controller based user interfaces, and with it games like Pong. At a certain point we got the screen and mouse user interface, and with it FPS, RTS, like Warcraft and Doom. Touch screens were again a new user interface and with it came games like Fruit Ninja. VR now exists as a user interface (although still needs to be improved) and many people love playing Skyrim with it, or Beat Saber.
All of these were mostly local experiences with different (better?) user interfaces.
Meanwhile, each user interface had its own networks that were built on them. e.g. Email is a "first class network" built on the text based user interface. e.g. WWW is a "first class network" built on the mouse based user interface.
The metaverse isn't a new user interface. The metaverse is a "first class network" built on top of the VR based user interface.
The only thing linking metaverse and VR is basic buzzword bingo, they don’t gain anything from being linked.
Second Life is a tiny niche. Connecting Minecraft servers with portals has been possible for ages, and smooth connections seems like it wouldn't be terribly difficult, yet no one uses it because no one wants it.
And despite the huge increases in VR quality that has happened already, none of this has changed.
You suggest it's because the VR isn't good enough yet, but I think the evidence so far suggests VR is not the missing ingredient for people to want to live in a common virtual world.
While I agree with you on this; online dating was seen as something only desperate people would do, until it was for everyone.
I mean, yes I agree. There are some workarounds, i.e. you could jump, in VR it’s very fast to swivel your head, look around the people in front of you or look behind you.
That said, I very much agree, I wouldn’t want to play WOW in VR. The DBM style warning zones on the ground alone would kill the UX. Meanwhile, as a HPally, I played WOW primarily in 2D :)(specifically raid frames). I’m very certain I would continue to play VR WOW in 2D as well. Some sort of console attached to my arm or floating in front of me to 1. See who has my beacon/buffs/debuffs 2. Quickly chose targets to spot heal or cure.
However, I’m very excited to try the second big VR-first MMO (basically the WOW not the EverQuest) built exclusively for VR!!!
Maybe, it’s a lot more skill shots, maybe it’s more aoe heals. I can’t even imagine how spot heals or cures would be targeted. Maybe it would feel like being a QB and Id need to literally throw Madden style spirals to land my spot heals??? THAT COULD BE SICK (although that skill floor/cap might be too high to balance boss fights well).
I’m not smart enough to predict the actual implementation. But I know there is enough money to be made that someones will iteratively make it happen.
Give it a few years and every new VR headset will have facial expression sensors.
I'm sure some clever folks will find a way to build a MMO that works for VR. Maybe characters will have magical x-ray glasses that renders other characters semi-transparent, so they can look through the crowd? Perhaps VR MMO games will be grander in spatial scale with lots of small towns to limit players clumping together city centres. Maybe, trying to find something in a crowded marketplace with lots of distractions, could be a part of the quest?
A lot of home office workers never learned to touch type. How the heck are they supposed to do office work if they can't see their fingers on the keyboard? Voice recognition is no solution, it still sucks for text entry and is completely useless for anything like slide presentations or spreadsheets.
There is legitimate potential for workers doing 3D stuff like CAD, architecture, and data visualization but that's a tiny niche of the workforce.
I’ve switched out my keycaps for blanks recently to try to force myself to get better at working in VR but I’m still struggling a bit with all the symbols.
Good typing skills are a super-power in today's world.
These days in Teams it will tell you when someone's typing. It amazes me how long people need to type just to get a simple point across.
To clarify, when I say "tracking", I don't mean just being able to use your keyboard in VR. I mean being able to actually see your keyboard in VR, along with being able to see keycaps on the virtual representation of your keyboard.
0. https://uploadvr.com/immersed-real-keyboard-support/
1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/typing-in-vr-how-to-connect...
Also most CAD users would probably not want cludgy UI like VR has today, they want keyboard and mouse too.
I suggest looking at the demo/videos of Horizon Workspace (by meta). It works really well, although the resolution is too low for me tooday.
Then there is this guy that was on HN recently:
https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385
I have seen a video, IIRC it was from SimulaVR, in which the user had a virtual window which showed a camera view facing the real-world keyboard. So this is easy to solve: these people who need to see their fingers on the keyboard (and probably everyone else when doing a real-world action like getting a cup with a drink) would open a window with an external camera view.
When smartphones were launched there was a simple description - "oh cool, it's a traditional phone but it has a computer running inside of it? makes sense"
To quote (some) of Larry Ellisons famous statements about it:
"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. … The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion."
"Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
The point of "the cloud" was the concept of users not needing to think where their device is communicating. The device might as well be talking to "the cloud" in the sky.
The point of "the cloud" was the occlusion to the end user.
I don't see much value in the phrase as it doesn't help me know what is going on in any way.
It took a decade from the first smartphones until iPhone/Android like devices with a mostly uniform appearance and UI had decisively won, though. There was a lot of rapid exploration of design space first.
As for VR/metaverse, there's been constant exploration of this space for decades. The VR boom in the 90s was killed by cost and primitive hardware, but we still have surviving persistent 3d worlds that came out of that wave.
We've also seen a lot of non-VR exploration. Aside from Minecraft, we have Roblox, which while a lot more limited in some ways is also a lot more meta: you have an identity that persists across worlds, with a social layer across that. Minecraft looks to be slowly moving in that direction.
We'll see people exploring a lot of other variants, and most will fail. But in the process we'll start to learn what will work.
I doubt Facebook, or Minecraft/Microsoft, or Apple, or Google will turn out to be the winner though.
Maybe they'll manage to buy the winner.
So all the interesting parts of the metaverse going forward are all the VR aspects which is why the discussions are focused on that.
Sure, if you pay me to work in the metaverse I'll be happy to hang out there. Otherwise I'm not interested.
In practice, excluding resolution, wearing a headset for hours on end seems even more straining both for the neck and eyes than the alternative real life workstation.
The VR-sickness persisted for hours until I realized that the solution was to try and reset my system by walking outside and gazing at the horizon (which also works on seasickness to a point).
Therefore the metaverse isn’t a replacement for a video games or TV. You would simply watch TV or play a video game while in the metaverse.
The metaverse in that regard isn’t a new concept, because VR spaces have existed for a long time now. I’ve watched movies in Minecraft more recently, for example. I’ve seen every idea in the metaverse attempted in some game or application already.
The reason these VR spaces have not taken off, however, is because the medium to access these VR spaces have been pretty disappointing.
It’s the reason why the Internet took a long time to take off: using the Internet on a desktop computer sucks. When smartphones took off, so did the Internet.
Facebook has not fixed the medium problem as I see it. I have never gotten motion sickness, but I do not want to put on a VR headset for more than a few hours. I don’t even want to put on a VR headset to be honest. I’ve owned one for two years and it just sits in a drawer. I can’t imagine that many people want to put on a VR headset either if they could just watch TV while sitting on the couch, grabbing real drinks on their real table, and texting their friends.
What?
I was listening to a podcast on Flat Earthers and the host basically traced the explosion of True Believers to the advent of the smartphone circa 2008 onwards; suddenly hundreds of millions more people were spending hours a day online.
Not Zuckerberg.
I think the issue with winning it with adult content will remain unchanged, at least for a while. Porn is so classic, that it cannot tunnel through this potential barrier.
People use their Apple devices for porn, controlling sex toys, and much more.
Amazon sells lube, sex toys, lingerie, and a whole host of other totally NSFW products.
Netflix has a ton of shows with nude actors bearing their breasts. Their show "Sex/Life" shows penises in a very sexual way.
Twitter, though admittedly not FAMNGA, notoriously allows and supports porn. They're very much the opposite of Tumblr, which died the moment they banned it.
Patreon thrives on porn.
This is not true, the Internet took off in the U.S. in the mid-90s: https://ourworldindata.org/internet
The driving force was the WWW, not smartphones.
Personally, I would say exactly the opposite, the only advantage a smartphone has over a desktop computer for Internet usage is portability, otherwise the experience is worse in every way.
I could attribute the little use of internet pre-1994 to lack of ISP services, or the fact that people preferred html and modern search engines to the old protocols (ftp, archie, gopher), etc. But 2008, seriously?
I spent lots of hours in internet in college (pre-www) and later paid for CompuServe. By then www was already becoming known. Again, 2008. In what country do you live?
And you should try consuming internet in a desktop or laptop. Even a Chromebook works ok (but a gaming PC is better). Most apps offer a limited experience in mobile, or tablet (it sucks) and seriously, sites render much faster on a fast PC. I can right-click 10 links on the browser, send them to open in the background, consume each tab a close what doesn't work. It is so much nice and faster experience.
Thats the point. The answer to "when do I have time to use the meta verse" is "you have time to watch tv/entertainment, so yo have time to meta verse". Because people think of this as _something added_ to their life, not something augmented.
But that hasn't happened. I'm thinking the problem isn't lack of good VR, it's that a truly shared metaverse isn't really something we want.
We want our own spaces. We want to have the option to just "watch", to be invisible to the world we're exploring (or to lurk, in forum/chat terms).
When even better VR comes, I think it will be used for far more solitary activities than social ones. We do see some hints of a dose-response relationship there, with reasonably popular VR games like Half Life Alyx.
I hope he plans to be spending 8 hours a day in "metaverse" but I'm sure as fuck not going to be.
With this metaverse stuff you have to wear the stupid goggles. You can't just have it on in the background and glance up if something interesting comes on. This is why 3D TVs failed in the market. The technology worked fine but most regular people didn't want to wear the goggles just to watch a movie.
I can't be the only one who feels this way?
Also you should get 8 hours of sleep, buy food at the farmers market, spend time with your familly, meditate, get this GTD rolling, and learn a new skill for your carreer.
But honestly, the truth is, as soon as VR is cheap and comfy, I think people will rush to it anyway for one reason: porn. So the metaverse can grow, if like in second life, it allows for porn to develop. But since FB tend to want a family friendly experience, I think we got a betamax vs VHS situation here.
There was a side dish of turn of the century real estate hucksterism. Buy because everyone else is buying. Buy high sell low as retail always does LOL.
And pr0n as you mention.
Also 3d modelers and CAD folks built elaborate structures that were always empty but impressive to admire. The supply of skilled draftsmen and architects willing to work for free VASTLY exceeds the demand.
The most interesting meta activity on second life was stuff that doesn't require second life or 3d or any of that, it was just a fancy screen saver behind people doing simple IRC texting, etc. The philosophy club meetup sounded fun but it was basically walk to a virtual campfire then watch people too high to think, try to instant message philosophical stuff to sound wittier than the next guy. Like karma farming with people too high to succeed but its OK because the platform doesn't have karma LOL. Didn't go many of those LOL.
Second life had a weird attitude toward real life where it was not allowed to use your real name. To prevent "funny names" they gave a huge list of first and last names and let you pick. I found Turbo Pascal and thought it witty because I used that once rather expensive ($250 for a pascal compiler used to be a bargain compared to what D.E.C. charged...) software package 20 yrs previously (now more like 40 yrs) and unfortunately the only reactions I got were confusion and "hey did you know your name is an actual program my dad used?" so it wasn't so fun. I'd rather have used my name.
But that was it, those five things and the rest was empty. I was there, that's how I remember it.
Some people are just not going to want to spend 8 hours a day interacting with people to go home and interact with other real people in a reality-like medium.
I've never tried VR. Games always put me in a weird mood. I once got 300 Halo 3's at a bankruptcy sale. I couldn't get out of the first room. I tried a few more games, and just didn't get it.
My hope for VR is not being lonely, and bringing more people into my life. And even then--it just sounds awful unless I was in a good mood.
None of that I can do when fully immersed in VR. Which is probably why Facebook cares about it. Ads on TV are time to get up, in VR they can fully measure you engagement. Fully engaged in game and hungry, food delivery is one button press away.
1) I'm definitely willing to believe that most adults spend a lot of time vegging out, even if I/we don't. Does this mean that one goal of the metaverse is to suck cash out of those folks? "People already waste a lot of time. The metaverse is great because it makes money off of that." I could also interpret this one in a lighter way. Perhaps the metaverse is somehow better than regular vegging out; gives you exercise or something.
2) My take here is similar to some sibling comments. This just sounds like a VR application, and I'm not sure where the "metaverse" comes in. Unless by "metaverse" we mean "internet", which already exists and is (thankfully) not run by Facebook. And even then, I don't see where the internet comes in either! I can dev/create offline, can't I?
Isn't that still about <25 and > 60, or those without kids? I hardly can find a calm 30-60 mins per day to just sit and read, sometimes play for 30 mins (2 kids) just before sleep.
I don't really want "Meta" to own all of that largely because what made the internet successful was having no gatekeeper and a very low barrier to entry. Not that that's true anymore, but having no initial gatekeeper let people do crazy things for 30 years while the current gatekeepers were establishing themselves.
It's an even better experience when there's a modpack on the server with a near-infinite number of things to do, too.
I've been having a great time going the other way - Skyblock! Start with very little, build up from there.
Metaverse would also wrap itself around a lot of the things people do already, like watch movies or concerts, coupled with games of any size and type. So as opposed to a stereotypical 6-hour WoW raid lifestyle, you could, for example, watch a virtual concert with friends, then afterwards jump onto a couple rounds of some Fortnite game variant, similar to how we do it today but just within the 'verse. But you could also immerse yourself for longer if you want to.
Honestly Metaverse seems more to me like a digital version of a big shopping mall with a bowling alley, arcade, and movie theater. You can hang out all day there or just drop in to get something from a store, or just get dinner and a movie.
Go outside, people. Talk to your friends in reality if possible. Experience the place you live in; participate in something physical to improve it materially. There's no end of socialization and minigames in reality, the graphics are better, and it's free.
But I don't think that's really the point. People use those 6 hours in a bunch of different ways. Some of those hours might be replaced by a metaverse experience entirely (as in, "I used to do play video games on my console, but I can get the same experience, but better, playing games in the metaverse"), and other activities might get nudged out because they aren't as (subjectively) enjoyable as the metaverse to some people. And other people will just not do the metaverse thing, because other activities are more fun to them. FB is betting on the user group being very large, and I don't know that I'd disagree with them.
And the same thing will always happen: people will continue to kick themselves for not finishing that book, or getting that extra workout in. That will continue to be the case with or without the metaverse.
Also consider that something like a metaverse could become the standard way for remote knowledge workers to get in a "room" together to collaborate. That alone seems like a large user base.
My kids bounce between a multitude of shared digital spaces (games, chat, social, videos etc) and they would be right at home at some kind of metaverse that would bridge them all (if that's even possible).
In every single age group, the average person spends over 4 hours per day on leisure and sports activities, the majority of which is watching TV (and very little of which is exercise or reading).
This is true even for people with children, with the exception of those with a child under 6 years of age. They spend an average of 3.86 hours/day on leisure and sports activities, 1.91 hours/day of which is watching TV.
It seems as though there is plenty of time for the metaverse.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf
Kidding. Kinda.
Obligatory Futurama:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6eRqMiAxQ0
Two years ago I have built a base on 2b2t[1], located millions of blocks away from spawn, it took many hours of travelling through nether highways to get there. Before starting the journey, I had to escape spawn (a very dangerous area since 2b2t is an anarchy server) and I had to find valuable items from scavenging abandoned bases. After I finished my base, I made friends on the server, I have also helped building one of the highways, using a hacked Minecraft client that includes tools to build tunnels automatically[2].
There is also another server that I have visited regularly, MinecraftOnline[3], I built a house there and I made some friends, this one has rules and moderators unlike 2b2t which is an anarchy server. On both servers there is a rich community, a subculture specific to the server, and even specific activities that stem from each server's subculture[4][5]
Based on my experience, I have to agree with the article, Minecraft is an amazing and diverse metaverse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2b2t
[2] Highway Tools demonstration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwkDk_Xn2Y4
[3] https://minecraftonline.com/
[4] https://minecraftonline.com/wiki/Pigchinko_(Game)
[5] Guide to Crystal PvP on 2b2t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOImrm9ldTY
I don't play much but I do like spending a few hours on occasion spending time with friends, playing a game we started to when we were teens.
My recommendation to anyone who wants to play something creative, get on a voice call and get with your friends.
The metaverse is the result of instrumenting the real world to capture and interact with the data the real world provides. Think "Digital Twin" of the world that refreshes at 100Hz.
It's not a place you go, it becomes the landscape you live in, because everything becomes a data source.
pack up bed. unfold desk. eat breakfast. put on headset. take off headset. eat dinner. pack up desk. set up bed. go to sleep.
There are other people who very much don't care. To them, progress might be watching the next episode of a show, or grinding in some game they love.
I'm fine with either type of person, really. It does explain why what seems like an impossible use of time to us is actually very appealing to others. Why would we be in there when there's a book to read, a concept to learn, people we don't see often enough, etc? And yet, why wouldn't they?
I think the metaverse aims to appeal to us as well eventually; imagine interactive classes on X or Y to help you learn faster with tools that are currently impossible? What if we could save time by seeing loved ones more easily in the metaverse, making more time for those things we want to make progress on? I'm not bullish on that, though. It sounds creepy. I want to hug the people I love, hear them laugh in person, make them nice food. I'm not interested in expediting that facet of my life.
Even now, despite growing up with webcams around I still find FaceTime fairly impersonal and uninteresting. I use it only when I really need to.
I wonder if anyone has run remote team meetings or virtual classrooms in Minecraft as I imagine it would be a lot less fatiguing than Zoom style teleconferencing. The fact that in MC you can easily see where other players are looking adds a lot to the experience.
Also it does sound like you're mixing your run of the mill grindy MMO with Minecraft. Your MC world will still be there if you don't touch it for a week. Even on a server.
Okay, it may depend on the culture of said server, but that's exactly the point of the article.
I play MC on an 18+ server that's building oriented. That means everyone has a job and other interests. We just show up and place our blocks when we feel like it. I just logged in yesterday after a 2 week break. People disappear for months. Nobody sees a problem with it.
If HN was on metaverse where I have to get an immersive headset on to use it... Yeah, I wouldn't be using it nearly as often as I do.
As you get older, the best feature of our existing 'metaverse' is its ability to integrate with the 'meat-a-verse' seamlessly. The higher the barrier of moving between the *verses, the harder it is to use the one in which we can't actually keep our meat fit and fed.
But what do I know (old man yelling at clouds).
For example, let's say you're playing a game of Checkers. That's separate from real life. You can't buy a captured Checkers pieces on eBay and then in your next game of Checkers, start with more pieces than your opponent. Being able to do those things would cause the game to break down, because the game would no longer be a contest of your wits in Checkers, it would be a contest of your existing wealth. You can't purchase points in a basketball game, you can't purchase mulligans in golf, etc. A lot of people in the blockchain/NFT space seem to be of the position that games don't currently let you purchase things with real money or sell them to other players for real money because they lack the technical capabilities, but that is not and has never been the problem. There's also the "trading an item in one game for an item in another game" but that's equally useless, it's the same thing but with a barter system, and the barter system would eventually just give way to money anyway. The problem is that introducing those mechanics causes the magic circle to break down.
By contrast a metaverse is a metaverse because the things happening in it are not in a separate, isolated space. Both games and metaverses are virtual in nature, but what makes something a metaverse is the lack of a magic circle, while what makes something a game is the presence of a magic circle. The metaverse is a virtual facet of reality; games' whole thing is that they are not reality.
A metaverse can contain a game, but not vice versa. Plus WoW is entirely owned and operated by one entity; a metaverse is pretty definitionally a situation in which any party can create their own space without needing the permission of another party, kinda like anyone can create a website without needing the permission of any party. Well, of course, you need an IP address and if you want people to be able to reach it, a DNS record and if you want SSL some certificates, so that's not a perfect analogy, but the web isn't really decentralized anyway (for these specific reasons).
the dependencies are all entangled and circularly dependent, like Facebook's data center ;)
I don't envision a future of mega skyscrapers and bullet trains, nor do I envision a world of Oculus clad employees driving a virtual forklift.
Rather I view the world continuing to exist as we currently have it: forklift driver is prompted by his UI to go to the next location to physically grab an item.
I'd argue that scifi examples (like Ready Player One) show that it can be proprietary.
I'm not saying it's good to be controlled by one org. Just that the number of orgs controlling the infra has nothing to do with being the metaverse or not.
Facebook itself would be a better example to your point as it's the largest social network.
I've been seeing a lot of ads lately for an iOS game (an awful looking game, but that's beside the point) whose major claim to fame in their ads is that you can earn Roblox's Robux by playing. They probably aren't using any sort of federated Roblox "metaverse ecommerce platform" today, they are probably just laundering Robux gift certificates. (I'm not entirely sure, it's not a game I have reason to download as awful and creepy as it appears.)
So there are at least some game spaces they don't own. (Whether or not you agree those are worthwhile game spaces.)
Definitely a lesson for any would be "metaverse" to keep in mind.
Right now the talking heads are trying to sell us a metaverse on the idea that one account could have a persistent inventory between Minecraft and Valheim and Terraria, but anyone who's ever played a game can tell you immediately that this makes no mechanical sense whatsoever (cross-game promotions are common, and welcome (e.g. an Aloy costume in Monster Hunter World for PS4 owners, or Nintendo Amiibo giving you random rewards in various games), but don't involve literally round-tripping your character between games of potentially wildly disparate genres), and anyone who's ever written a piece of software can tell you immediately that this would be an infeasible logistical nightmare to implement.
not really, we just have to get into some semiotics here and consider the difference between the signifier and the signified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier). In semiotics, a signifier is a physical artifact; the manifestation of something. A physical stop sign, for example. The signified is the concept embodied by a signifier. All of the stop signs in the world correspond to (roughly) the same concept of stopping, but they are separate instances of that concept. Separate signifiers (instances of "stop sign"), all with the same thing signified (the idea that you should stop).
Now in games, we have the notion of the signifier and the signified, too. Let's take an example item from WoW. I'm using this as an example because it's a game I'm familiar with. An item like Staff of Westfall (https://classic.wowhead.com/item=2042/staff-of-westfall) expresses several things. The first thing that it expresses is that it's a weapon so it uses your weapon slot to equip it, and the stat bonus of +5 intellect that gives you additional mana and +11 spirit that gives you mana regeneration. Great, that's nice. Those things can be taken to be the content of the item: its in-simulation properties and effects. But what does the existence of this item signify? The Staff of Westfall can only be obtained by each player exactly once, cannot be traded between players, and can only be obtained by going to The Deadmines, a particular dungeon, and defeating the final boss. Equipping the Staff of Westfall has the effect that it gives you mana and mana regen, but it also communicates something non-mechanical: that the player carrying the Staff of Westfall has gone to the Deadmines and fought and beaten Edwin VanCleef.
Now, can the Staff of Westfall be transferred to another simulation? Yes and no. The signifier, the physical (virtual?) staff can be transferred to another game in some sense. The 3D model can be transferred, the physical appearance of the item can be transferred. But that was always on your computer all along; it's not particularly meaningful. The effects of the item may or may not be transferable; if a game is not the exact simulation that WoW is, what does +5 intellect and +11 spirit mean? The game operator may elect to translate that to some other concept in their game, or they may not. I think this notion of "transfer" is what you're eluding to: the transfer of the signifier. This concept is probably very useless. It's also the concept that people are generally talking about when they talk about the transfer of items between games. I think it has no merit at all.
But there's something else that can be transferred: the thing that ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies: the concept that the person holding that item has slayed Edwin VanCleef (in WoW). Transferring the Staff of Westfall may not mean transferring the physical model or its attributes, but it may mean something more along the lines of transferring the meaning of what the player has accomplished. Admittedly, I'm not sure why this would be useful or what the applications of such a system would be; what I'm getting at instead is the idea that transferring an asset may mean many things, and that transferring an asset from one simulation to another is not necessarily the opposite.
> But there's something else that can be transferred: the thing that ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies: the concept that the person holding that item has slayed Edwin VanCleef (in WoW). Transferring the Staff of Westfall may not mean transferring the physical model or its attributes, but it may mean something more along the lines of transferring the meaning of what the player has accomplished. Admittedly, I'm not sure why this would be useful or what the applications of such a system would be; what I'm getting at instead is the idea that transferring an asset may mean many things, and that transferring an asset from one simulation to another is not necessarily the opposite.
What the "ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies" is a relatively easy problem to solve. In a way, it's a list of achievements. So the only thing you need to do is to link that list of achievements (or facts if you want to be more general) to a centralized or federated identity. That's easy to do. The 3D object is already harder: not all engines render 3D objects the same way. Maybe there's a "3D object standard" like SVG and you could use that. That's maybe not easy, but not the hardest.
You're hinting at the hard part when saying "it's a weapon so it uses your weapon slot to equip it, and the stat bonus of +5 intellect that gives you additional mana and +11 spirit that gives you mana regeneration". If we remove that part, the "usefulness" of the item, the only thing that's left is appearance and signaling. There's no substance. What's a pen without the ability to write? What's a computer without the ability to run programs? What's a car without the ability of moving? This is why I say that taking an object from one simulation to another is not compatible (at the same effort level) with having different simulations.
> "Yes, everything is possible with enough engineering time. My point is that you can easily do horizontal integration (lots of simulations, mostly cosmetic, almost no behavior) or vertical integration (lots of behavior, few simulation). Both of those have a small surface. But if you want the two at the same time, your surface begins to grow rapidly. You have to implement N behaviours for M simulations. That's not impossible of course. But it's hard."
but the more I think about it, the more I think it's wrong. It's not hard, it is impossible, depending on your definition of different simulations.
For example, what would the Staff of Westfall be in a virtual coworking space? Could you beat up people with it? That would make sense, although I'm not sure it would be suited to a virtual coworking space. Let's just hope your colleague doesn't play shooters. Would it make you "smarter" in a way, by increasing the speed of your computer for example? That is starting to be a bit weird. You could have a badge, or title to say that you've slain the boss, this could work. But how about all the generic equipment? The consumable? How would you express a mana potion in your coworking space? Stimulants maybe? But what would they do? WoW is a game where you (can) try to make your virtual character stronger than the others players/NPC. But that's not really how real life works. That's not how a virtual coworking space would work. "mana" doesn't even exists in your virtual coworking space.
And if your solution to that is to establish some base rules that all simulations follow (physics, capable of executing code contained in an object), then at this point all simulations start becoming the same.
A good analogy for that: how would you reconcile the world in people's dream and the real world? The more you want to bring things from one to the other, the more they lose their distinction. I think the key point here is that a "simulation" is not a name you give to something, but a bag of behaviours, expectations, things. When you bring those things from one simulation to the other, they start being the same. Thus my initial point, having diverse simulations and bringing objects between them are two opposing wishes.
You go in a lot of detail about the "Staff of Westfall" topic which rises some very hard problems, but not all of them need to be solved for a "minimum viable metaverse" (and perhaps not all of them should be solved - likely the optimal spot is somewhere in the middle between those two opposing wishes) - however, there's nothing metaverse-like until we do at least the basics of such connections e.g. ability to link and/or transfers of users, names/identities/aliases and at least some aspects of avatars; and in the case if two simulations are sufficiently similar and want to interoperate, then developing common standards to enable that avatar/item transfer.
Like, it's okay for a particular simulation to have a rule "custom hats are okay, but magic staffs have to stay outside" - but then it needs a protocol that allows them to separate different "accessories" of incoming avatars. And it's okay for a particular simulation (e.g. a virtual conference setup) to have a rule "magic staffs are only decorative items here", but then it needs a technical process to obtain the visual aspects of that staff so that it can properly display it with the new avatar - the simulation might be very different (VR, different styles of 3d vs 2d environment vs perhaps textual representation), so such standards are nontrivial but necessary to have a connected metaverse. (If we want to have it. Myself, I'm not so sure, but some people definitely do)
And if a simulation wants to allow the items inside but have a transformation to fit their specific mechanics - or even transform meaningful items to fit their theme (e.g. a space opera rpg representing the "Staff of Westfall" as a lightsaber) then there should be a standard for that "receiving simulation" to obtain the relevant attributes of that staff so that it can make that transformation, then they should not have to implement a different technical integration for every other simulation, that should be part of the metaverse standards.
You’re still limiting the question to the plane of content: the object’s physical (virtual) characteristics.
Consider the staff as it exists in the plane of expression: what is the person expressing by displaying the item? It would express that you play WoW, are an Alliance player, and play a caster of some sort. That might be a valuable ice breaker or conversation starter; a thing that helps people identify a shared experience or facet of their shared identity.
You have to see through the object’s simulated characteristics and into what the object’s existence means for it to have value. If the object doesn’t mean anything, then there’s not much point in moving it from space to space.
Again, that's if you consider that the only value that exists is showing and signaling. That's, in my opinion, a really limited view of things. Objets are not just here to mean something, but also to do something. In fact, that's the main point of most objects. If your objects are only here because they mean something, they could very well just be a list of facts. Linking a list of facts to your identity, even if it's decentralized, is trivial. But it's not the everything you can do. I have a pickaxe in Minecraft. If I could use it to break rock in <cool metaverse stuff>, that would be great. If I can just show a pickaxe, what's the point of the pickaxe?
The only way you can have separate simulations is if a person can define their own simulation. If you can't define "I won't let you bonk your coworkers on the head with a stick" then you're not in control of your simulation; you're not defining your own simulation, you're just running another instance of some agreed-upon single simulation. At that point, those are the same simulation. So a person setting up a space has to be free to define the behaviors of the objects in that space, otherwise it's not really their simulation.
If you take an object from one simulation to another, and it does not behave the same way in the two simulations, they're still the same object.
> Objets are not just here to mean something, but also to do something.
The fact that they do something does not identify them as objects. A pickaxe in Minecraft doesn't truly break anything. It plays a sound and deletes a cube. If you're in creative mode in Minecraft, it doesn't even increment your inventory. You can also delete a cube in a voxel editor like Magica Voxel. Is the pickaxe in your Minecraft game the same object as the delete button in Magica Voxel? Is the pickaxe in your Minecraft game the same object as the pickaxe in my Minecraft game? Obviously no. They all do the same thing, but they're not the same object.
The only thing necessary to satisfy "moving an object from one simulation to another" is that they be provably of one distinct identity and not be duplicable.
That would mean that you don't have money. Many objects are fungible. If our two pickaxes have the same properties (same name, enchantements, durability, material), then they are the same. A big part of our experience in the world is fungible. Most of the time when I want a pen I only want to be able to write on paper. I don't care if it's your pen or my pen or anything like this.
Play Rec-room in VR and tell me this isn't the future of gaming and online interactions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys_OgK2YB4E
Here is a comic series that was made based on the server, and a neat video animation someone created: http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEg5UPKPY70
The comic series is legendary, but I don't think people can make something out of the animation video without context.
I wouldn't touch a MC server that has no grief prevention. But you can have your 4chan and I can have my builder server and we're both happy. Because there's no central authority telling us how to run our pieces of "metaverse".