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

> Meta-not-Facebook

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

Nailed it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>Friends, you can meet privately

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

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

This sounds like Krugman's fax machine prediction

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

I think that immersiveness would be great for programming.

Stacking windows with a z axis may give you a sense of how nested an abstraction is. You could follow a function in a class to it's base definition a lot easier, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The relevance to Wave is mostly that Wave was sort of the 2D content version of Second Life. It went all-in on very hard computer science problems, and did so in a web browser, on the assumption that they'd just figure out how to make it performant later. But they never did. Moreover the flexibility of the tool meant it was often confusing to figure out and quickly developed a perception that it was half baked, buggy and required a mastery of the tool to use. For something explicitly about collaborati...

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

t. Worked more than 16 years in ad tech.

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

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

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

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

> There is no goal to achieve for the user

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

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

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

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

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

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

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