Both terms mean something. Both are amorphous, change over time, and cast pretty large nets, but they serve as loose coordination points for many more specific ideas. That is a useful function that isn't about hiding the underlying more specific ideas.
I'm dabbling in crypto for a few months now, and I don't quite understand the focus on XR in the "corporate idea" of the metaverse.
To me, the main selling point of the metaverse seemed to be an alternative economical space based on tokens which are implemented in a decentralized matter. Everything else seems to be fluff.
Your friend doesn't have access to Zuck's thinking or any other thought leaders at Meta. So, your friend just because he works there doesn't have anything special, unless he himself thinks like OP (Ben)
They're both "make believe" in the sense that they're abstractions to move value around - except if you want a road or a hospital built, you use government currency, if you want to not get thrown in jail, you pay your taxes in government currency, both of those examples seem pretty not-make-believe to me.
It lacks imagination to think we've already discovered all the different ways to create shared spaces and inhabit them with today's internet and available media. I've no doubt there will one day be an iPhone moment for VR or AR, and therefore for 3D interfaces. But I don't believe it's this decade, however much money VCs throw at it. The 3D worlds bit of the metaverse just seems incredibly tedious to me, however flashy the demos. It all detracts from what could be genuinely interesting conversations about if and how we _actually_ want to weave the internet more tightly into our lives.
Do you think no one is having those conversations? I think many people are talking about the things you mention, but flashy 3d renders will stay very common in new media and blogs.
> (On the beginning of home, personal computers) Employers bought their employees computers because computers made them more productive; then, once consumers were used to using computers at work, an ever increasing number of them wanted to buy a computer for their home as well. And, as the number of home computers increased, so did the market opportunity for developers of non-work applications like games.
I think this is the nail on the head, and the drivers will be remote work + talent shortage.
Medium to longer term, this is going to drive more people to relocate out of high cost of living areas and questionable quality of life.
Once they're decamped to cheaper (and probably smaller) cities, the obvious question for both employee and employer is "How do I maximize the value of an employee?"
Some fusion of technologies with the outcome of persistence seems like a very compelling answer.
And, and I think this is underrated, suddenly you're buying productivity equipment and/or making home improvements. Which is a very different market, with a very different spending cap, than consumer gaming goods.
F.ex. If someone offered a full persistence, comfortable, efficient, effective technical solution for $100k, would it be worth it at that price?
What if it let you live in Boulder, CO (median home price $920k, high on liveable US city rankings) instead of SF, CA (median home price $1.5M)?
VR is also an excellent training tool for pre-defined tasks. The immersive part will make the learning more permanent, more kinesthetic and more real rather than reading a wall of text.
That $600k difference in home price is only $120k different if you're putting the standard 20% down-payment for a mortgage. Which is still a large delta, but still, slightly less. If we're talking about spending $100k for a efficient technical solution, we're down to a $20k difference (though if it's a $100k of the company's money vs $120k of mine, then that's a huge difference). Problem is, I don't see companies lining up to provide for new (or continuing) employee's moving costs, so the employee can move to a city where the company has little/no presence.
The best workplaces were already looking at developer productivity prior to the pandemic, and there are material gains to be had from the company spending real time/effort on things. But that easily costs (the company) way more than $100k.
Until we collectively - execs, management, ICs - gain enough experience with hybrid and all-remote work models (and even some post-pandemic all-in-person work models, which is different from pre-pandemic all-in-person work), we won't and can't know what maximizes the value of an employee (and anyone that tells you different is trying to sell you something - probably that remote work is unilaterally better, which it's not).
The Monty Hall problem says that moving is the optimal thing to do, but ignores the real practical difficulties of moving to a completely new city. I'd love to live in Boulder, CO, except for all the hassles of actually moving beyond the physical relocation of my stuff from point A to point B, which is trivially solved with money.
For me most of these Metaverses sound like Second Life on steroids. So the Metaverse bis just a software running on some companies servers.
Shouldn't it be about standards and protocols?
Each of them wants to own the walled garden and become The platform, that's why they're not basing it on the existing open standards, conflicting commercial interests get in the way (see XKCD #927).
* Portals - you can leave one grid and go to another with your avatar, if the destination grid will accept it. (The destination grid may not want spacesuits in their cowboy sim.)
Some of the browser-based virtual worlds already have this.
* Asset portability - you should be able to take your stuff from one grid to another, if the destination grid accepts it. This is what NFTs claim to do, but don't. This may already be a legal right in EU countries, per Article 20 of the GDPR, "Data Portability".
* Money portability - you should be able to spend and withdraw money on a grid without being locked into its payment system. Epic is currently fighting Apple over this.
("Grid" here means a virtual world or worlds under coordinated management. This term is used in Open Simulator, where there are grids run by various parties using the same software.)
> while also providing each user with an individual sense of “presence”
On the Internet I'm merely an observer, not a participant. Sure, I can contribute but that's like sitting on the bench screaming instead of actually playing the game.
You're on the internet right now, and participated by posting that comment. I don't agree with you (you feel how you feel, I'm just saying I don't feel that way), but it's certainly interesting and well articulated enough to spark consideration and further discussion.
The internet is one of the few places I can truly feel like a "fly on the wall" and just watch a conversation unfold without feeling pressured into participating (contrary to me, you know, participating here!).
I don't think a focus on "presence" in VR implicitly removes that ability, though. It depends on how it's implemented: I could easily see an app providing a "ghost" mode or something where you can interact with or just observe the world without being seen or using an avatar. However, I unfortunately don't see Facebook (or most of big tech trying to maximize network effects) allowing such a heinous feature.
All of the discussion around the metaverse as if it's something we should take seriously has me baffled. It's an ill defined concept and the effort is being led by a company that hardly anyone trusts or even likes.
As far as I can tell it's the internet but in VR with an avatar. Or in other words it's the internet but with extra steps in the way of obtaining the information or completing the transaction, not to mention the increased hardware costs (VR headsets are expensive) and bandwidth costs associated with this superfluous fluff.
I just don't understand how they aren't being laughed out of the room. This is fantasy level stuff and it's going to be an absolutely massive failure.
This to me is one of the sticking points I've been wondering about: Are VR/HR headsets just inherently too uncomfortable for mass adoption, or will we be willing to put up with them? Surely this depends on a lot of societal/economic factors (i.e. a "you do it or don't eat" job market, say) and the evolution of the form factor (size/weight/quality/individual ergonomic options).
Is it just a variant of "button-less on-screen keyboards?! we will never!" or is there something more fundamental?
I'm curious about the state of the art of serious research on this, if anyone has some good links/references.
>Surely this depends on a lot of societal/economic factors (i.e. a "you do it or don't eat" job market, say) and the evolution of the form factor (size/weight/quality/individual ergonomic options).
I think the former is a way bigger factor than the latter, here. Even on the old first-gen HTC Vive, I was entirely comfortable "working" 8+ hour days wearing one (coding, painting, and sometimes gaming). They've also improved massively since then in weight, weight distribution, softness, and heat management.
I'd say the biggest detractor is how they look (and some other smaller factors like not being able to feel "safe" cut off from your surroundings, but all major VR companies are working on that, too). However, how they look ends up not really mattering much if you're VRing from home, where no one can see you.
I use mine 30 hours a week, coding in ImmersedVR. You can make them comfortable. I feel like most commenters here haven't actually tried VR, or maybe had a bad experience.
Everyone already has a phone or desktop computer. Hardly anyone has a VR headset. VR headsets with good enough resolution for comfortably reading text is still very expensive, but even if the cost was cheap it's competing against something that everyone already has.
From an employer POV, a hypothetical equivalent $300 VR headset would be cheaper than two 4K 27" screens. Cost could even incentivize adoption, really.
It's certainly an interesting concept. I'm not an expert but from what I've come across, it's currently very expensive to match the resolution of a 27" 4K monitor that's 2 or 3 feet away from your eyes. This is because the headset would need a very high pixel density on the very small screens sitting a few inches from the user's eyes. I'm sure someone has done the calculation somewhere but I couldn't find it. This page says we're at 2,000 pixels per eye but we need 4,000 to get "Immersive VR" (not sure if that will fit this use case) https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/virtual-reality-desktops-save-...
So it might happen eventually. People are actually leveraging "Virtual Desktops" now, but accepting the inherent resolution issues.
Quest2 is $299, so actually on the scale of a very cheap phone.
Maybe some things are more tedious but some things are better. Ever more ubiquitous computing and contextual/spatial computing of AR is really interesting.
You don't get it but others find AR/VR compelling and Microsoft and FB smell money. It's worth talking about why these large companies are spending the effort.
* TechRadar: Under $500 with the lowest category Under $200
* CNET: Under $500
* AndroidAuthority: Under $500
* Wired: Under $500
Like you can personally decide that a budget phone should be under $200 or something but real life people looking to buy "cheap" phones are looking to pay ~<$500 for it.
True but you're looking at the US. Here in Spain a ton of people use Xiaomi phones between 100 and 200 euro.
It always surprises me how much of those I see in the metro. I don't see many flagships at all here, many people on the street also use wired headphones.
In the Netherlands it's a totally different picture. Lots of iPhones, S-class Samsung, airpods...
It really depends on the country and their average wages.
I mentioned that companies shouldn't decide what is budget for people, and your response is to list a lot more companies and what those companies consider budget?
>real life people looking to buy "cheap" phones are looking to pay ~<$500 for it.
A good portion of the world must not be "real life people" to you. I will hazard a guess and say that you must have lived a life without much financial difficulty.
> deliver a better than a regular desktop/laptop/smartphone user experience these days
the quest delivers an experience you can't really get with those devices, and it does it with just that hardware. The GPU inside it does what it needs to do (mostly).
Also, i bet an apple vr headset with apple silicon GPU would kick ass
> Also, i bet an apple vr headset with apple silicon GPU would kick ass
Oh it will. But it will cost almost 10x the price of a Quest 2. Apple doesn't get into something until they can do it really well and they make the most of the early adopter premium, only bringing prices down after a few generations.
It's not super great but I connected my Quest to my Macbook Pro 2015 and I can use it for work - multiple virtual monitors floating in space where I can edit code etc. The limiting factor is the resolution of the headset, not the GPU of the laptop.
> You don't get it but others find AR/VR compelling
One thing I rarely see mentioned or discussed is the "longevity" of VR interest amongst users. As a (former? I'm not sure yet) VR enthusiast and adopter on the high end of things I noticed that the novelty wore off really quickly, after ~1 year of owning my Index my usage went from somewhat regularly to barely anymore and for most titles with VR support I prefer playing them the regular way and the VR-first titles can't get me to set it up, or were "onetime" experiences (like HL Alyx, which is one of maybe ~3 VR games that really felt enriched and improved by the VR experience, in hindsight).
From friends and colleagues of mine I hear similar things, VR headsets collecting dust already.
While the Quest 2 headset is subsidized by Facebook it is still a mind blowing device for $299. For that price it is the most revolutionary gaming/vr experience in the last 50 years let alone 25.
This is actually one of the main points of the article. He doesn't believe gaming is going to be the killer app for the reasons you cite - it actually isn't that compelling, not nearly so much as people would think. But what has changed his mind is that other applications are compelling, in particular the potential for workspaces.
So we have a weird situation atm where huge numbers of people have generically written off VR because it didn't cut it for high end gaming with them, without ever even considering the alternatives. In my mind, these are fitness and professional use.
The fact is that I can go into VR to work today and its intolerable after a short period, but only because of factors I think will be solved within the space of a few years - the resolution is too low, the battery doesn't last long enough, it's too heavy and gets uncomfortable. These will all get solved. Once that happens, VR will be unambigously a better place to work for quite a wide cross section of activities. This is the "skating to where the puck will be" that tech companies need to focus on.
It might be sold for $299, but how much do they cost to manufacture?
Nothing else in the space with the same specs sells for anythimg near that.
And that makes me suspicious about how sustainable that price is.
I think for a lot of people FB is just part of the landscape, like paved roads or baseball caps. Things are the way they are and people don't ask questions. People use FB for the network effect, and because it's the status quo, not because it's technologically amazing or morally correct. Most people just don't think about it.
They've got a ton of money and billions of people more or less locked into their ecosystem. They're not being laughed out of the room because they've got a lot of what is considered a valuable resource today -- money and eyeballs / attention. In that way, they're a terrifying contender that will most likely win, even if them "winning" means creating a horrific reality for others.
I saw a local Baptist church sign that said "Streaming Sat/Sun at Facebook.com/..."
Never in my wildest 90s imagination would I have imagined any part of that coming to pass.
PS: And as to the value of eyeballs & attention, why does everyone think Chrome is the most used web browser now? Don't laugh at Facebook's ability to push things.
I don't think they will most likely win just because they have eyeballs and attention. It's necessary but not sufficient. Take Marketplaces for example. It worked because facebook had the eyeballs and attention to seed the buyer and seller side of the marketplace. But it was also just a way better experience. I could post my used iphone in 30 seconds vs. 5 mins at my computer on craigslist. The thing with metaverse is that the use case hasn't even been proven yet. We knew people bought/sold used stuff on craigslist. And we know facebook's implementation was better. We don't know people want the metaverse, and we don't know whether facebooks implementation will be better. However, if both are true, they have the eyeballs and attention to grow and succeed with it.
At the very least, Facebook is/will be throwing a lot of money at the development of the metaverse, and people naturally want to be on the other side of those transactions. Also, many believe Zuck is some super genius and whatever he devotes the majority of his time to will be worth several billion dollars in short order.
It's kinda true though... Oculus became a billions of dollars company almost overnight after Facebook acquired it.
I don't like FBs business model regarding privacy but they sure have put VR on the map. It's entirely possible it would have fizzled out without their involvement.
And this is really how the stock market works these days. It's more about belief and dreams than real-world financial results. If many people believe it's going to be big, it will be worth billions.
Yep, some people laugh at new ideas. They are also the same set of people who cry about Rich-getting-richer when they had the same set of opportunities as other new millionaires to invest in these laughable ideas.
Your post makes it sound like many new ideas succeed. This is certainly not the case, "new ideas" happen all the time, everywhere, spawned by both small and large companies and individuals. Most of them fail, and everyone wants to be "the new internet".
> they had the same set of opportunities as other new millionaires
This is not true for the majority of cases. If you take a look at millionaires and billionaires and their parents, most of them already started at what many would consider rich/wealthy (or very close to it). But the exceptions obviously make for better stories and headlines.
It's multiple things, it's cross platform 3d information, using your avatar from one platform in another etc.
It's future AR and VR tech.
It's placing things in the real world.
But mostly it's a land grab to be the platform everyone else wants to integrate with, based on the assumption that AR glasses will exist in the future.
Niantic's Lightship SDK is another attempt, be the platform everyone else builds their AR stuff on.
And if it's not, and like a smartphone it becomes a requirement for life in the modern world, this is the step where I say nope and go full Ted innawoods for good.
The only people I see excited for "web3" (which I believe has become a blanket term for the metaverse, NFTs, and other crypto schemes) are those carving out real estate there for themselves in order to become future landlords.
Yep. At some point, maybe after the 4.x or 5.x releases, someone will get fed up with point releases and push for an aggressive release schedule on new Webs and incrementing the whole version number each time.
I hope to be present at that meeting so I can deliver a swift Service Pack to his face.
The metaverse concept might make sense with perfect AR.
Things like QR codes on posters being highlighted, "hologram" store mascots that everyone walking by can see with AR glasses, answering an "AR" phone call while still being able to see around you (and not having to hold your phone up to your face as in video calling - early versions of this could use iOS Memoji before consumer face-scanning tech gets good), virtual computer screens to do programming or other work *anywhere* without monitors (while still being able to respond to external stimuli), etc. Maybe you could even portray yourself as a custom avatar (instead of your actual body) to those with AR glasses.
IMO an early prototype of the metaverse is already here: Ingress/Pokemon Go. These games don't use fantasy-land maps, they use the Earth and real-life locations. Data and user-interactions are layered on top of that.
On the other hand, any kind of VR metaverse will likely be a poor-man's Second Life, just prettier and with far more restrictions. I'm sure there's a market for that, but it's not really civilization-defining.
The AR part of ingress and Pokémon go is really just a gimmick IMO. Everyone turns it off after a while because it works simpler without it.
The idea of integration with real places is ok but just a gameplay mechanic and not really a compelling or fun one I think. I think most of the popularity of Pokémon go comes from it being Pokémon. It's really just Ingress with some Pokémon skin and a mini-game slapped on.
I think we shouldn't think of Niantic as a "leader" in the AR realm. What they're doing is not pushing the envelope. They're just exploring the fringe inside it.
> The AR part of ingress and Pokémon go is really just a gimmick IMO. Everyone turns it off after a while because it works simpler without it.
That isn't what I was referring to. Layering user interactions on real-life locations is more akin to the metaverse in my mind than any kind of VR derivative. Whether the game was fun or not is also irrelevant, the metaverse won't be a "game."
I was also clear I was speaking of a hypothetical future with perfect AR.
When I was a child I was in an "Odyssey of the Mind" group and in one competition we had to solve some problem and the plan my team came up with had a few steps, one of which was "Build a robot". We were all children and none of us had even the slightest idea of how to build a robot or any relevant technical experience or ability. But somehow, we never realized this deficit and came up with our plan and tried to execute it.
It wasn't until we had destructively disassembled a power tool that one of us had access to, on the theory that we could use whatever motor was inside of that tool to drive our robot, that we realized we had no idea what we were doing nor any conception of how to build a robot. I had a feeling of amazement that sticks with me today that we were able to articulate our plan to solve the problem, which depended on our robot helping us with some sub-task, but were completely unaware of the fact that the robot was far beyond our ability to construct. Our plan was like something that might have worked in a cartoon but not in reality.
That feeling comes back to me as a kind of "Build a robot" moment in cases like this. "In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!" Okay, but what you have is a screen that you can strap to your face and is nothing like a virtual reality metaverse and you have no idea how to get there.
Another way of thinking about it is taking the hardest part of the problem and hand waving it away to solve the easier parts and then forgetting that there is a big blank spot in your plan. It's easy and fun to think about all the stuff you can do in a compelling virtual reality metaverse, but you don't have one and aren't likely to get one any time too soon.
> In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!
I completely agree that this sort of marketing of metaverse entirely misses the reality of tech we have and expectations. I think its also a great analogy, and i had a similar experience when i myself did Odyssey of the mind :)
Based on the article, however, it seems clear that we could be around the corner from real use-cases for this tech that are actually an improved experience. I think VR tech could def improve "mise en place" tech use, where a user is focused on accomplishing one goal at a set time and place using tech. This could even be as vague as "do my remote job".
I think we are actually much closer to being able to "build the robot" than you seem to think.
The "Metaverse" is not necessarily anything more magical than HTTP serving 3d models rendered on the screens strapped to our faces (rather than 2d documents rendered on the screens strapped to our desk)
I think the bigger questions is, will people driving this shift try to keep it a part of the decentralized Internet or will they try to put up walls around their gardens?
I think that's why Facebook wants to own it so hard they made it the parent brand and are trying to steal what the word "metaverse" even means so that people expect to always mean Facebook's ideal of a walled garden they control.
> The "Metaverse" is not necessarily anything more magical than HTTP serving 3d models rendered on the screens strapped to our faces (rather than 2d documents rendered on the screens strapped to our desk)
But that's just it, isn't it? GP said:
> > That feeling comes back to me as a kind of "Build a robot" moment in cases like this. "In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!" Okay, but what you have is a screen that you can strap to your face and is nothing like a virtual reality metaverse and you have no idea how to get there.
Why would most people want "HTTP serving 3d models to a screen strapped on their face" to take the place of "attending concerts with one another"?
Without significant, ground-breaking advancements in freedom of movement/input and feedback/presence beyond the screen & headphones strapped to their face and maybe some shitty rumble from a playstation controller, this isn't "attending a concert with one another" in any meaningful sense, this is just "watch a concert from your couch while talking to your friend over discord", except with a more expensive screen fewer people own or seem inclined to buy, and clumsier input.
I feel like a lot of people who bring up “the concert use case” really need to think about it for more than two seconds.
Imagine jumping up and down headbanging to your favorite 2000’s pop-punk song, blasted off tequila and red bull, except you’re in your living room and wearing an expensive but loosely-fitting headset that obstructs your vision. This idea is gonna need a second draft.
I'm saying that we don't need "significant, ground breaking advancements".
Obviously for something like a concert or dance club (where half the point is to literally feel the music and the crowd) we aren't there yet.
But for something like a stage play or a comedy show the significant barrier is a low-friction way to connect the audience response back to the performer(s). That comes down to implementation and infrastructure rather than the underlying technology.
The technology is at a point where the next increment could be the one that makes a mass adoption feasible for something like "360 Facetime", "Street view but it's live/real-time", or "Portal but it's the entire room", It's not going to take a "significant ground breaking [technological] advancement".
I am pretty sure that Zuckerberg has already attended such a concert or similar in high-quality VR and knows that it is possible. It is expensive now, but that price will come down.
I have tried out some VR, and apart from the thick cable coming out of my gear, I was blown away by how cool it is. Not that cool that I would really want to use it currently, but hey, that will certainly improve.
It reminds me a bit of my sister. She was swearing that she will never need another phone than her Nokia more than a decade ago when I showed her my iPhone 3G. Yeah, right :-)
I bought a Vive when they first came out. I have a Quest 2. My first VR experience I was blown away - but that only lasted a few minutes for me before I got bored.
I hardly ever use the VR headsets even after trying a number of different games. The problem is that it's not so much virtual reality as it is strapping a screen to your face. You run into the limits of the system pretty fast.
One example, you can play poker in a VR casino. But, it doesn't feel at all like playing poker in a casino in reality. It feels like watching goofy cartoon characters play poker while you try to clumsily control one without proprioception. I enjoy playing in my browser much more than in VR.
Another example, I like VR boxing. It's probably my favorite VR game - but even in the best such game I've found (Thrill of the Fight) the limitations are obvious. The game can't really tell where your hands are, what they're doing, if you block or dodge, etc. I can flick my wrist, the way you might playing Wii Sports Tennis and smash the other guy in the face with an uppercut. Or, I can try to throw a real punch the game will decide it missed for some reason though my own sense of reality has me putting my elbow through the opponent's body.
On top of input and accuracy limitations there is the fundamental limitation that you cannot feel what's happening. Getting hit doesn't feel like anything. Sometimes you can't even tell if you are blocking or dodging a shot or getting hit by it - very different from real boxing. You likewise can't tell if you're hitting the opponent.
These things are called virtual reality but aren't there yet. I agree they're making progress and they are okay toys. I'll keep buying new versions because I want to help support the effort and I like such toys, but they aren't like reality. They're missing a part of it.
Missing physical feedback is a problem, of course. For example, you see a bench in VR space, but you cannot just go there and sit on it. So there certainly is a limit to what you can do. But just improving all other aspects will change the game already.
> That feeling comes back to me as a kind of "Build a robot" moment in cases like this. "In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!" Okay, but what you have is a screen that you can strap to your face and is nothing like a virtual reality metaverse and you have no idea how to get there.
I don't really agree.. We have amazing 3D and VR games. We have amazing highend headsets. We have great 2D collaboration software. Gesture recognition is improving rapidly, one year ago we didn't even have handtracking yet on the standard quests.
All the individual pieces are available. It's just a matter now of bringing them together and driving the prices down with scale.
Thank you for embodying the straw man we are trying to argue against.
I guess the issue is "we" here. Sure "humanity" as a "we" has all the tools. But humanity has all the tools to solve world hunger and perhaps reach net Zero green house gas emissions.
The metaverse is being sold as some sort of universal VR app, but it's being pursued through a capitalist system.
It won't work. "It" referring to whatever Facebook pumps out and calls the metaverse. It'll just be another game. In order to "work" or to realize its massive ambiguous vision it has to reach critical mass of adoption such that any competitor simply must build onto the Facebook controlled platform. I think we are years away from seeing that, and I don't think the people pursuing the metaverse right now are capable of building it.
The only company I see actually open sourcing the tech is Nvidia.
Nvidia is closer to building the metaverse than Facebook is, mark my words on that.
But either way, the metaverse is a bit of a joke. It's kinda like saying "VR chat, but like _really good_".
I think eventually maybe we get there, but it could be literal lifetimes away. I think the haters are afraid that the companies pursuing metaverse are just wasting human and financial capital that needs to be allocated towards potential existential crises, or barring that, just towards more important or more immediately useful things.
These capitalist companies want to be the platform owner of the metaverse, ala apple to the App Store. It's not a vision of the future that is powering them, it's a faint mirage of $ and power. It's envy of the app store. That's what I think powers the resentment of the metaverse that so many people feel.
It's not just Facebook though. Satya Nadella's keynote from Ignite was also talking a lot about Metaverse.
I agree it will take longer. And it'll probably be a capitalist invention, yes. I would also really love to see a truly open and decentralised approach but with the amount of money these companies are pumping into it, they are bound to want to own some of the IP in return.
But I'm not presenting a strawman, I just thought you were speaking mainly about technological readiness. I agree we have bigger problems to solve as humanity though I think in the long term this can contribute. I've done some trials at work with VR meeting software (Spatial, Arthur, Immersed) and they really create a sense of 'togetherness' that Teams/Zoom don't. Of course meeting in person is better, but this is not very feasible now because of Corona and probably in the future because of emissions. So I think even a "really good" VRChat would help there a bit. Even tough these companies are not doing it to solve the world's problems obviously.
PS: Is Nvidia really that open? I haven't really been following it (my only PC that has a Nvidia card I use exclusively with Windows for gaming), but I heard they are not opening enough sourcecode to make Wayland work well, even. And that's only 2D stuff.
All of the discussion around the internet as if it's something we should take seriously has me baffled. It's an ill defined concept and the effort is being led by a government department that hardly anyone trusts or even likes.
As far as I can tell it's the telephone but on a screen with a typewriter. Or in other words it's the telephone but with extra steps in the way of obtaining the information or completing the transaction, not to mention the increased hardware costs (screens are expensive) and wiring costs associated with this superfluous fluff.
I just don't understand how they aren't being laughed out of the room. This is fantasy level stuff and it's going to be an absolutely massive failure.
On one hand, I am of the laughing crowd. On the other, I have to wonder if there is something I (we?) are missing if these highly paid marketers and engineers are going after it.
Surely it's not so shortsighted as to be about a few (<10) percent in investments? There has to be a longer term plan if not that. Maybe I am wrong.
At the end of the day, I'm standing back, wondering which fire will blow out first.
Engineers and marketers are all steered into that direction by C-level visionaries who bet on a very high-risk / high-reward idea. This idea dials up all kinds of biases in people.
For example, the article which started this thread criticizes Apple for moving into AR. This is despite AR being very feasible next step in having actual working tech applicable in real-life situations. Feasible and down to earth idea is being compared to a distant wild guess which has a high risk of never happening, yet somehow it loses this comparison.
There is a certain irony people call this Web 3.0 all over again. Web 3.0 was originally envisioned by influencers as heavily relying on semantic web and anthologies[1]. Despite all the visions, 14 years ago few of these things actually happened.
Could it be that people are just very bad at predicting the future? Could it be that we mis-invest into wild visions based on their popularity, instead of solving boring down to earth problems?
>and the effort is being led by a company that hardly anyone trusts or even likes.
This isn't true at all, Instagram and WhatsApp are hugely popular even with people who are anti-Facebook.
The rebrand makes a lot more sense when you realize just how diverse their product offering is and many people very vocally against FB still use IG and WhatsApp.
"The eminent, on the other hand, are almost forced to work on a large scale. Instead of garden sheds they must design huge art museums. One reason they work on big things is that they can: like our hypothetical novelist, they're flattered by such opportunities. They also know that big projects will by their sheer bulk impress the audience. A garden shed, however lovely, would be easy to ignore; a few might even snicker at it. You can't snicker at a giant museum, no matter how much you dislike it. And finally, there are all those people the eminent have working for them; they have to choose projects that can keep them all busy." -- Paul Graham, "The Power of the Marginal"
> I just don't understand how they aren't being laughed out of the room. This is fantasy level stuff and it's going to be an absolutely massive failure
I agree with your sentiment but there are many utterly ridiculous ideas that people take seriously, think NFTs for instance. From that perspective, the metaverse isn't that crazy. And something could get out of it even though it's not the original vision that you describe.
And there are seemingly unreasonable ideas that become huge success. I didn't foresee the smartphone revolution (i thought we couldn't get a proper UI from a small device). I also thought youtube would be a failure.
That being said, I wouldn't bet one penny on the metaverse.
The Meatverse is where the action is. It is estimated that by 2050, at least half of the world's population will be made of meat (mostly). Not only that - this has been true for as long as our species has been around.
The Meatverse is high-bandwidth, high-definition, and high-protein. The Meatverse is the future.
I think VR and metaverse concept so interesting right now is because it is the next "post-social network" evolution. Content and information become less relevant, but "internet" social standing, appearance and "existence" [1] becomes more important.
Yes because they want to package and sell to the public, a human harvesting farm, like in Matrix, where you get into a pod and you're harvested by Facebook.
They strech it and bend it in so many ways in their attept to sound legit, that they stop making sense.
You think Apple introduced low energy cpus for fun? I think they work on AR mixed reality glasses and in 10 years it will be standard. Carmack said that currently they are limited by thermals to make nice device.
But, what if they're serious about it and other companies will try to join into the fray? You can't just assume that this is some kind of fantasy-level stuff.
This has been said before, I'm sure, but the problem with "The Metaverse" is that it's trying to be controlled; to be captured and caged, by a select number of corporate/quasi governmental agencies who sell themselves as "an open platform, welcome to all".
If "The Metaverse" truly is to take off, it needs to be an open standard, like HTTPS or websockets, that any virtual device can connect to and let anyone with the compute power to create their own "virtual world". And, just like the internet, it will be pretty basic at the start, and there will be disgusting sites because there will be no gatekeepers.
High Fidelity tried to build this and failed. I think one of the issues they had was that the whole hosting thing was pretty tricky and created barriers to having worlds up all the time, this meant there were never as many places to explore as other more closed systems like VRChat. I'm not totally sure how you solve for that, maybe they should have hosted some sites themselves?
There are plenty of places that already solve this for game server hosting. You pay, they pull up a VPS on their preferred provider with the game server installed and running, and you get a dashboard to control it.
Having that sort of layman-can-do-it feature seems pretty vital.
As I understand it, that's exactly the plan. The metaverse will be an open, standards based network of VR environments, each analogous to a web site. Each could be based on different products, in the way that a web site can run on apache or nginx. The key to it will be a public set of standards for avatars, identity management, authentication and persistent assets which is potentially where a blockchain comes in as a public ledger for shared information. Imagine being in Minecraft, then walking your avatar through a portal that takes you into Roblox. Or more likely just hitting a button and being there.
This is exactly what Zuck is working on, plus of course a proprietary VR stack and suite of applications for his own implementation. there are other firms working on pieces of this too though and they are talking to each other. Here's another voice on this, independent of FB/Meta:
I'm a skeptic that it will be as big as they reckon, we're physical beings living in a real world and I think that will always be prime reality. Also mobile isn't going away, I'm still going to have my phone on me all the time, not so much a VR head set, but they do seem to have thought all of this through.
That lasted a few years and then was tossed away. It looks like, after a fairly huge backlash and a lot of technical issues, they've finally decoupled the Facebook account requirement.
Zuck wants to know where your eyes are pointed, in what order, and for how long. Whether he is showing you "user content" (user generated for free) or "sponsored content" (customer generated for free), they will build an adaptive attention model for you. Then they will show you what is most distracting/engaging. You have no control over where your eyes look. It is a gold standard in advertising. That attention model is likely worth more than even an extremely high end VR/AR/MR/XR setup.
Guess what high resolution low latency binocular video requires, eye tracking for foveal rendering. You can do the calculations for 2x120Hzx(100deg)^2x(60pix/deg)^2 and multiple gaming GPUs can't keep up, transport HDMI/DP can't keep up, and display (MIPI/lpDP) can't keep up. Foveal rendering allows ~10x reduction in bandwidth, which makes it possible on mobile/wireless.
"Sorry, honey, for all the billy goats in high heels... it was just a phase in college"
It seems to be against the fiduciary duty of Meta the company to encourage a truly open environment where it would be easy to escape their advertising and other modes of generating revenue. As usual, the corporation says one thing while intending to essentially do the opposite.
This argument for public comapanies needs to be de-bunked. This isn't a real thing, "fiduciary duty" means don't burn money and don't fraud your investors not don't do a slightly-less-shortterm business decision.
Also zuck owns a majority, so even if it was a real thing, if he approves, no other shareholder's opinion on duty matters.
"Imagine being in Minecraft, then walking your avatar through a portal that takes you into Roblox. Or more likely just hitting a button and being there."
Microsoft has actually been experimenting with this technology for a while - their implementation is quite sophisticated, and it's shipping in Windows now. You can actually try it out today: open Minecraft, then press the World Switcher hotkey combination (press the Tab key while holding Alt), press the Windows key, type "Roblox", and press Enter. If done correctly, your avatar will now be in Roblox!
It's pretty groundbreaking stuff, to be honest. Under the hood, the old universe is dynamically unloaded (possibly swapped out to disk) while the new one loads in. And, even better, if you press the World Switcher hotkeys again, you'll be right back in Minecraft - exactly where you left off.
...
Of course, I'm sure you meant that you'd somehow share information between Minecraft and Roblox- I'm sure you'd agree that arbitrary in-game items are unlikely to be transferable, but at least avatar appearance, surely? Well, hmmm, that'd make both games look worse, with awful art-style clash. Well, I guess you could store a few parameters and transfer those, and let each game interpret them to render an avatar that fits in the game's style?
... Ah, I've just made Miis again.
Okay, well, hm, if transferring avatar appearance isn't especially interesting, what about stuff that doesn't directly correlate to anything in-game? For example, the social graph, friends list, communications. Imagine being able to see what worlds your friends are in, talk to them while in your current one, and join their worlds with just a cli-
Right, Miis and Steam chat, but in VR and shared between services. I'm the wrong person to boost this stuff, I think it will work but I don't think it's the next big thing.
What you are describing is custom built individual partial integrations, many of which aren't even VR. They're the equivalent of Gopher while the Metaverse is the equivalent of HTTP web sites.
Right now you can't seamlessly transition your digital presence across thousands of virtual worlds and service, with a variety of independent services having integration points and presences in each other's virtual worlds and interoperating with a variety of VR equipment. That's what they're building.
> The metaverse will be an open, standards based network of VR environments, each analogous to a web site.
I think an important enabler of websites is the click-to-download nature of web surfing. You download the HTML site at read-time without worrying about installs. This makes it a lot easier to jump around.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion here on HackerNews, but I think that potential protocol is Ethereum. It will be the tool that enables all sorts of Metaverse type things to exist (via NFTs), but I don't think that's where it stops. The metaverse and the real world will eventually be one in the same and are going to become interlinked. In game items, Car titles, house deeds, and any sort of asset that requires proof of ownership are all going to be part of a future society/metaverse.
All fungible as well as Non-Fungible tokens will represent the value that the users bring to the platforms/systems and reward us for participating.
For example, imagine playing a video game where all in game items are built on the NFT standard. A super rare item in game might end up having some sort of real value that a user can then later extract for time spent in game. They could either sell the item via a decentralized market, or leverage that item and take a loan out on it by using it as collateral. And why shouldn't they be allowed to do that? If a user pours hundreds of hours into an online game, they are generating value for that game network by being someone that other users can play with.
Why would anyone want to play a game like that though? That sounds significantly less fun than playing a game where everyone is on an even playing ground. Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?
NTFs provide an elegant way to deal with this that an SQL database can't.
1) The ability to sell/trade items you've purchased is valuable and I don't believe is universally supported. NFTs make this trivial and supported on a number of marketplaces (like OpenSea) in a standard way.
2) Game makers could build resale revenue into the smart contracts of NFTs they sell through their games.
This is just one example where it's a win-win and improvement over what exists today.
People already play a lot of games where items are bought and sold for real money (not just gacha but e.g MMOs, Diablo etc.) so you can look through gaming forums to find what drives them.
>Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?
I also don't see that many benefits to be sure it's worth it but there are some in theory. One people mention is that games can easily share items - e.g. owners of a cool sword NFT for one game can use it in another or cryptopunks can have cryptopunk skins etc. Trading would be more streamlined.I guess another potential benefit is you can also have them listed forever like Xbox achievments that can be looked at by others even if after the game is no longer active.
> Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?
I think future game development in the metaverse actually will be mainly open source and community driven. Imagine if you will a DAO that players of the universe can interact with and basically vote on new features that will be added to the game world. Rather than waiting for a centralized developer to patch and update the game they want, players will pool assets together in a sort of tax that helps fund future game development. Pair that with a Retroactive funding and other cooperative mechanisms and you will be providing incentives for player themselves to build out the game that they want to see.
It would almost be like building a town in the real world, but this is in the digital world.
>I think future game development in the metaverse actually will be mainly open source and community driven.
Nope. The cost of generating these assets are insane, and assuming that some nebulous, non-existent community will build Rome for you is a recipe for disaster. We made the same gambit ~2010, and all we got was a lousy Github acquisition by Microsoft. The reality is that our socioeconomic disparities will be exacerbated in a digital world, particularly if the majority of content is owned and operated by private interests. We can hope that a vibrant open source community comes out the other side, but you can't build a metaverse on empty promises and vaporware.
> The reality is that our socioeconomic disparities will be exacerbated in a digital world, particularly if the majority of content is owned
I definitely agree with this sentiment, but if it's not centrally owned by a government or a corporation what are our other options? We sit around and moan about how centralized entities are ruining the world and how we don't have alternate ways of coordinating? Ethereum and projects like it are the only ones actually experimenting with changing up the formula and seeing if you can combine typically contradictory ideologies.
In my opinon, if we can't find a way to decentrally coordinate we are doomed as a race and will eventually destroy ourselves via capitalistic/corporate greed or by the tyranny of a government.
(HN, June 5th 2028): "Ask HN: I was phished in Meta Horizons and they stole my house deed NFT. They've already moved in, my wife is furious. How can I get my house back?"
I find this to be a null argument with the potential future development of smart contract wallets that help secure hot and cold assets and require multiple users to sign off on a transaction for cold assets. You can delegate sign off authority for transactions to multiple other wallets of users that you trust in the real world. That way there are multiple tiers of asset transfer authentication.
For example I wouldn't be able to transfer my house deed NFT without first getting a relative to sign off on the transaction via their wallet as well as maybe my best friend. The beauty of a smart contract wallet is that there can be multiple if/then statements that determine when cold assets are allowed to move, all of which are up to the discretion and preference of the end user.
An alternative solution is altering how we manage assets in general including the suggested Harberger tax from the Book Radical Markets. But I feel that's a deeper dive into more theoretical territory.
You have if/then statements that act as a clause allowing you to bypass that system for that specific person. Since all identity will be intrinsically built into the system, you can hypothetically initiate this bypass mechanism which would require multiple associated wallets to confirm that that particular wallets owner has become incapacitated and can't fu-fill their duty as an authenticator to your wallet.
I don't have any specifics on what that type of mechanism would look like (I'm just spitballing), but it's a something that definitely is interesting to think about. Maybe that mechanism randomly selects wallets that have no known correlation to your own and ask those individuals to confirm that the specified person is incapacitated. Since those people wouldn't have any stake in your transaction (allowing it to go through or preventing it from going through), they would be incentivized to be truthful.
Edit: to add to this last thought, maybe the wallet requesting the incapacitation confirmation is abstracted from the users confirming the incapacitation. The wallet essentially probes other active wallets and requests them to confirm that person is incapacitated without revealing who is requesting the information. this could help prevent collusion
This has been what every techno-optimist has said about every technology since the dawn of the commercial internet, and it's always been wrong. There will be open standards up to the layer the user actually interacts with, and that final layer will be proprietary. It's basic aggregation theory (to continue the Ben Thompson point). There's too much money to be made, and modularized systems are too complicated for most people.
Why did XMPP fail? Why is Discord more popular than Matrix? Why does Twitter still stomp Mastodon? Etc.
Hmm. The closest analogue to metaverse is probably the internet. And the way that played out is probably the most notable counterexample to your claim. It's not clear to me that it's a foregone conclusion how this will play out.
Well its true the internet's most valuable open layers are TCP/IP and worked up to the user interaction layer (HTML5), but then shifted to proprietary/locked experiences. I think the reason is the answer to this simple question: What creates a better experience for an individual user? more money invested into the platform? or agreement of a protocol? It's money. And thats a deleware c corp. Until incremental investment leads to only infinitesimal experience change, we will be operating in this mode.
HTTP + HTML was "pre commercial" or commercial-dawn. Adding JS was a pro-commerical act, and it enabled richer experiences.
We later got mobile-apps, which are often website-adjacent in function and UI. They're less common standards in how they're built (proprietary device api's, competing languages across brands, etc). We still have the ability to deep-link across apps, but its much less common than on web, and its not as easy to "extract" a deep link for sharing, its basically the developers choise.
I predict the commercial metaverse will be the same, we'll need deep-linking, and we'll get it. We need some standardized file formats (for things like 3d models, avatar clothes maybe), but mostly it'll be siloed experiences that are made for each platform. We're a little better off here than with phones because we already have game engines that allow some portability of rendering and UI logic. Is that enough to re-create the HTML-style free web? probably not.
XMPP failed only in the sense that Facebook and Google decided to stop participating in the federation. Other than that it's still alive and a good way to communicate.
What do money and modularization have to do with Twitter stomping Mastodon? IMO it would happen because Mastodon mostly looks like the same product to most people, just more complicated and it's not as easy to find and follow interesting people. My anecdata is that I joined out of curiosity and quit the same day, because it just looked like the same sarcasm and shitposters that made me drift away from Twitter.
The problem with the metaverse is that people don't actually want to live a virtual life in a virtual world for significant periods of time. I honestly think the only people who are interested by this are grifters.
Sooo many people already live a virtual life in a virtual world by using social media, netflix, youtube, etc for hours and hours every day. Imagine a VR platform where you could have a virtual living room and hang out with your friends while doing those same activities. Imagine the headset is so light as to be hardly noticeable and the resolution is indistinguishable from reality. You don't think people would want to use that?
Standards are not the issue. Content is. There is no metaverse; just a lot of empty rooms and walled gardens with not a lot of compelling stuff to do in them. All the content is where the people and the audience with money are, which is the walled gardens provided by Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc. Then there are various social platforms. News, games, etc. All vaguely connected and accessible via this thing called "the internet" which despite the fact that is half a century old at this point is still a surprisingly loosely defined something. Creating more standards just adds more empty rooms. It's the content problem that needs to be solved.
There's this notion that "the metaverse" is going to require special hardware, special software, etc. Of course many of us have been playing 3D games on 2D screens just fine for the last few decades. Adding goggles to the mix makes some of those games a bit more immersive of course but mostly they work fine without the goggles as well. It's not clear to me that the metaverse actually requires new hardware.
Which raises the question why we don't have it (whatever it is, which is a relevant thing that people seem to be asking). A lot of those games are multiplayer and basically involve people socializing for large amounts of time. I never really engaged with world of warcraft but I know multiple people that spend enormous amounts of time on that and other games. Is that "the metaverse"? Maybe. It's definitely an escape from reality for some. Is doing the same with some VR goggles going to be massively different? Some people probably already do that.
If you stop focusing on hardware and formfactor and just ask the question if having the same stuff that we have today (aka. the Internet), but with AR/VR goggles is actually worth having, the answer is probably going to be no. That's the problem. Either we have the meta verse already and it's a bit underwhelming or we don't really have it just yet because it hasn't actually been invented yet.
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is 30 years old now and actually predates much of what we now are used to. His recent books are also quite nice and features some updated musings on what the internet used to be and could become. E.g. "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", published three years ago or so, features blockchains, ar goggles, post truth society, people using bots to spread misinformation and drive political (and other) agendas, and a few other things. It paints a pretty dystopian near future (or even present day). But no Metaverse. A nice observation in that book is that "the internet" stopped being a special thing when multiple generations had grown up with it and mostly a term used by older generations that actually still remembered a world without it. That would be us.
My current impression of AR/VR is that is the new 3D TV: it is a futuristic-looking tech that big companies were pushing like crazy because its adoption would mean a whole new market and revenue stream to be created. Only that no one really wanted to adopt it.
The difference is that I never saw myself ever buying a 3D TV (and always hated 3D cinema), but I consider the possibility of being a late adopter of AR/VR several years from now.
People have been making this comparison since the Rift DK2 was released 5 or so years ago and it is still wrong. 3d TV never had broad buy in from enthusiasts, artists, developers or anyone else that VR has consistently maintained support from for half a decade with no sign is a drop off. I work in the arts and the level of enthusiasm and support is increasing if anything.
3D had a major problem that it never solved. I continually stated I’d be interested in 3D displays when they developed them using glasses-less technology.
I avoid going to 3D films specifically to avoid wearing the glasses.
But they never got that far. Beyond the gimmick of the 3DS screen, I’ve never seen glasses-less 3D.
Let’s say you’re a couple and you have two pairs of glasses. What happens when you have friends over?
Furthermore - the glasses were not interchangeable between brands of television sets, meaning it’s not like you could just bring a pair and expect them to work.
A VR headset costs $300, and offers a truly unique experience that excites me as a developer and is very interesting as a user.
A 3D TV cost more than a standard HDTV - and never really offered anything that made it worthwhile. IMHO it was DOA.
The existence of VR cafes and interactive installations has already made VR a real ‘thing’. The inexpensive nature of the Oculus Quest is helping that a lot, too.
LG 3D TVs used passive glasses (unlike the active glasses by Samsung). Basically pieces of colored plastic. You could get a pack of 6 for your friends very cheap, and reportedly even glasses from cinemas would work (I never personally tried that).
I actually was annoyed when they removed 3D from their TV lineups. It's not something I used very regularly, but I did enjoy it from time to time. And it was just software, no actual hardware cost added AFAIK. I get that most people didn't use it but at least they should have kept the choice.
One of the reasons I bought a Quest 1 was because it has apps that can connect to my Plex server and play 3D movies. It's neat, and nicely replicates the 3D theater experience including barely being able to see clearly through the grubby lenses. I only have a few 3D movies and don't bother watching them anymore.
I do still watch lots of 2D content using the Quest, though. I like the immersive feel of watching movies and TV on theater-sized screens with none of the visual distractions in my living room.
Ok, here we go - the metaverse is not a single 3D/VR social app or group of apps, vendor-locked to an specific platform and OS.
The metaverse is quite simply THE spatial successor to the internet, but more specifically the World Wide Web.
Because of protocols like HTTP, TCP/IP, and HTML, you can read and view text + photos + videos on webpages because of agreed upon standards.
The metaverse will most certainly utilize old standards, but it will also need entirely new ones built from the ground up. The way users currently navigate the web via hyperlinks will be mirrored in the metaverse, but instead of shareable URL's we will have portals instead, so as to not break immersion and to deliver a sense of seamless teleportation from one immersive destination to another.
We'll also need a universal SDK and API that every world can hook into in order to tie all of this together, so as to share data back and forth and to allow for true interchange of virtual goods. Blockchain will provide the base layer to enable this.
WebGPU will allow us to render using modern hardware, as the browser equivalent of Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX 12.
WebAssembly will allow for programs to be compiled to a universal bytecode.
WebXR brings all of this together, enabling a true sense of presence inside a webpage.
As more headsets by Meta, Valve (and Apple!) are sold and they become a part of our daily lives, it will become apparent that we need a way to link worlds together that are hardware and platform-agnostic. The web seems like the most straightforward, obvious solution to this problem.
Also, now that Facebook has soured the term "metaverse", a term originally termed in Snow Crash and now has connotations with a social media company... may I propose a new one? How about The Immersive Web?
My startup Wonder Interactive is working on building the immersive web, and our current focus is on bridging the gap between native game engines and the web. We're have UE4 support up and running, with WebGPU actively being worked on as well as WebXR. Our 2D web as we know it today has to evolve to become 3D-first and immersive. If you're interested in trying out our platform, you can register your intent here via our website or join our Discord below:
The metaverse is very much like the "Web 3.0" trend going around right now. Everyone has their own definition that they insist will be THE definition of what things will look like once it exists, but nobody knows for sure (and most people trying to say they do are just doing so from trying to build it themselves).
The reality is that most, if not all, of them will be wrong. And that, if either comes to "fruition", it'll probably be some amalgamation of pieces from every "this is what that is" post out there.
People have been envisioning virtual show rooms and virtual stores/malls forever... but I don't believe they serve an actual purpose. What function does it solve? Unless you have fully realistic graphics and fully simulated senses (touch), why would a virtual store ever be better then just browsing a webpage?
Things like "try your clothes on virtually", "buy furniture and upload your room schematics" have existed for decades, and have all been pretty much failures. I don't think most people care about a more "immersive" experience when it comes to commerce, a picture on amazon does the job. A product/review video on youtube does the job. I don't think people care about a more immersive meeting room, or a more immersive online event, because again those products have been tried for decades and have all failed.
It honestly seems to me like the only actual feature of the "metaverse" is to force people into a gated experience, and to try and get them to stay there for as long as possible. Then you can advertise to them, then you can hook them into addictive behaviors (games, casino), then you can sell them worthless "pieces of the metaverse". The only function of the metaverse that I can see is to hijack 100% of a persons attention. In that sense, it is the obvious evolution of social media, yet as an evolution of the Internet as a whole it completely misses the point.
Of course, I am likely completely wrong, and leaps in VR/AR could change everything, and what you are doing is very cool. It just seems like and updated VRML is just promising the things people 20 years ago said would exist. At the end of the day, there is still no Virtual Mega Mall, because amazon.com beats it in functionality by a long shot. Give me the best VR available, I still think amazon.com beats it by a long shot. The day I can't distinguish VR and real life, well maybe then you got something, but we are many moons from that sci-fi dream.
"This makes not an epsilon of (meta)sense, but I am paid to try to find logic and determinism in the highly idiosyncratic and inbred Siliconia and that's what I am about to do"
> there remains a huge opportunity long squandered by Google: to be the enterprise platform that competes with Microsoft’s integrated offering by effectively tying together best-of-breed independent SaaS offerings into a cohesive whole.
I understand what he is saying, but AWS is already there. Azure may be on the rise but no platform comes close to AWS in the SaaS space as of now.
Amazon have a history of physical products, from the ill-fated fire phone to all of their Alexa products, kindles, and fire stick. They own a significant gaming division which recently launched the MMORPG New Worlds.
It seems the only thing they currently lack is their own VR headset. But they have their hooks in enterprise already, a massive computing infrastructure, experience in almost every related tech and an army of independent devs familiar with their offerings.
I enjoyed the article.
I do disagree with the belief that VR will succeed before AR, and that for that reason Apple is at a disadvantage. From what I see colleagues who work in this space doing, I think AR is going to be more impactful in business and industrial settings.
As for the metaverse being the next stage of the internet, I certainly hope that is the case, and that it is based upon open protocols. Does anyone have pointers to articles about the open metaverse? I'd like to get up to speed.
The Internet is not the metaverse. The Internet is primarily a distribution system for static documents, with extensions for interactive document exchange (most websites), and support for other media - music, video, etc.
Key point - the other media are not interactive. You can select your experience, but you can't change it. This is because of content ownership traditions, not because of the technology.
In other words, the Internet is a kind of automated bureaucracy. It has ads and clicky clicky things that pop up, but when you're buying a flight or shopping from a catalog or writing emails you're still doing something that would have involved paper or possibly people, but on a screen. Usually with lots of text. Which you're either reading or writing.
The transaction friction has been lowered, and transactions that used to be local are now global (and sometimes vice versa). But the type of transaction hasn't changed. You're still selecting, ordering, buying, selling, communicating.
This OP's vision of the Metaverse seems to be one where you start from this, but you're forced to follow the documents and become part of the bureaucracy.
Does it reduce friction? No, it increases it. Does it change the nature of the transactions? Not particularly. The idea is still to do the same things, but somehow the VR version is "better."
Well - more pixel area might certainly help in some situations. But balancing that against the permanent impression that you have become an animated emoji trapped forever in a corporate work space is - I think - going to be a very tough sell.
Second Life turned into an absolute shit show, with virtual porn, virtual gambling, and virtual rent seeking everywhere, because the fundamental truth is that this is what interests a lot of the population.
I can see VR/AR following a similar trajectory. That's far more likely to be the killer app for it than the bizarre idea that it's somehow better than Zoom for meetings - which no one really wants to be in anyway.
> Apple’s iPhone-centricity could be a liability, much as Microsoft’s Windows-centricity was a liability once mobile came along.
The iPhone and wireless connection to it could make the glasses a lot lighter, basically a mobile server. Apple is rollling out a wearable system, they distribute the platform across their wireless earphones, watch and phone, maybe even using their computers to power the glasses when you're at home. They already got a large part of it deployed and used by people..
So much talk about VR. In the end of the day the question is how good the tech can be in the next decade. I don't question the value that VR can bring to enterprise and consumer, but these things usually don't succeed until the tech is really good. I'm happy a company like Meta is going all in on it.
I'm going to be honest, it's really hard to read this with a straight face when our current notion of a Metaverse is nothing more than Roblox and some telepresence apps. Hell, those examples don't even fulfill Matthew Ball's Metaverse definition that they referenced earlier on: both of them lack persistence, data interop, and have hard caps on how many people can inhabit their digital space, K8-scaling be damned.
The biggest issue is that none of the companies investing in the Metaverse truly care about the fundamentals. We're rushing in to buy McRib NFTs on blockchains that may-or-may-not exist in 10 years, and McDonalds is happy to turn a quick buck for selling nothing. Similarly, the companies who see this concept as collectible trinkets are entirely missing the point: NFTs are not a social service, they're a digital one. I've seen a lot of people claim that NFTs solve an issue that doesn't exist, and I frankly disagree. The concept of decentralized digital ownership is a huge conversation that stands to upend our current concepts of DRM and online possessions. The issue? There's a ton of money to be made in preventing you from accessing the stuff you want. Rights holders exist almost exclusively to prevent as many people as possible from attaining persistent ownership of their intellectual property. So long as capitalism is the driving force behind the so-called "Metaverse", you can safely assume that the only meta thing about it is how it's hellish reality exacerbates the issues corporations pose to us in the real world.
I think honest NFT fans would do well to find a way to separate the digital-goods aspect from the "here's a digital signature attesting that you own a hash corresponding to the Mona Lisa" aspect, the former being a real technical problem worth solving and the latter being pure grift.
I think there's a big gender and culture gap in the VR/AR debate.
People who place significant value in their physical appearance (eg most young women) are not in a rush to replace their bodies with an avatar. And we know that men go where the young women are....
Now, can Facebook or Microsoft succeed by serving the fantasies of nerds like us who read sci-fi as a kid? Of course. But Apple is still in pole position given that they are targeting the mass consumer market, not a niche.
There's actually a current trend called "vtubing" where streamers use a virtual avatar, typically in anime style. Afaict, it's entirely dominated by women streamers (which is the opposite of the regular streaming, where the top earning streamers are all men). See https://playboard.co/en/youtube-ranking/most-superchatted-al...
Interesting, and news to me, thanks. Is this a business for these streamers, a way to make money from male fans? Or are girls using an anime avatar just to hang out with their friends?
It's fairly big business, at least for the larger agencies like hololive. It's somewhere in between streamers and Idols. There's character goods and YouTube ad revenue but I think most of their income is through Twitch subscriptions and the like.
A "perfectly shaped avatar" could be used by a young woman, or by an old man. So, in a way it's leveling. But that's also what makes it worse for people who are physically attractive.
And what's more, having a "perfectly shaped avatar" means that the avatar designer made a beautiful design. But what many people want is to feel beautiful.
Personally, I'm a rather fashion conscious male, and I have no interest in buying virtual clothes because I like to wear nice clothes, not just be seen in them.
It's the difference between experiencing something and having a reputation for it.
Relying on Microsoft software for collaboration has created some of the worst engineering disasters and waste of resources I've ever seen.
The company's motto seems to be that every customer is unique, and has different needs - meanwhile, all the places I've seen had very similar core problems that were amplified by relying on all the different Microsoft solutions used across their teams, and across organizations they had to collaborate with.
Not only that, but colleagues were always unhappy because they were forced to use poorly designed inconsistent tools that are user unfriendly and encouraged mistakes and apathy.
Yes - that's the elephant in the room that really spoils his point. Teams is so horrifically bad that we are actively paying for Zoom and Slack even while a free Teams subscription is sitting almost idle.
The deeper question is how did Microsoft engineer something so bad when they were literally just cloning other products. What does that say about their forward looking prospects?
Let's not get too ahead of ourselves; a general AI and better brain-computer interfacing first. Then we'll see where we are at. Everything else is just snapchat/tiktok/minecraft/roblox, HTTP/HTML, and cryptography.
There are two types of technologies: those which give the user leverage in the real world; and games.
Which is Meta? Ben Thompson tries to make the case that it's the former, but I have my doubts. Thinking about my current 95% remote work life, with very frequent calls, I think of the following frustrations:
1. Platform heterogeneity. Some people use phones, mobile, chat, Meets, Hangouts, Zoom, etc. Just trying to work out what platform (?) people use feels silly.
2. Bad hardware. I'm constantly having Bluetooth and wifi issues and so is everyone else.
3. Lack of engagement. Lots of people outside my org are just not as engaged as they were pre-pandemic. Customer service has become terrible.
4. Lack of space. My fiancé and I have to plan for an extra room if/when we move because of the WFH situation. Since we are unlikely to have a glut of spare bedrooms in London any time soon, this is likely to be a systemic problem.
I can't see Meta or virtual presence/VR solving any of these problems, except incidentally (for instance, everyone loves Meta so much that everyone switches over to their perfect hardware and platform overnight). What I do see are a lot of drawbacks, such as
1. Nausea. It's well known that not everyone can tolerate VR
2. Compatibility. Can you still interact with people using other services?
3. Bandwidth. Do all your employees live somewhere with good enough internet service?
4. General creepiness. Usually the unease from new tech creeps up on you slowly (everyone normal saw iPhones and computers and even TVs as an unalloyed good from the start. Nobody seems to like the Metaverse). I think we might be on the cusp of a techno-reactionary Luddite movement.
I could be wrong, but to me this feels too much like a case of companies and techies wanting something far more than customers having actual problems that this can solve.
It's good to see someone countering all the dismissive voices around the Metaverse pitch from Facebook(Meta). We are in an interesting phase where large parts of the technerati are having to somewhat rethink their dogma of having written off VR as a failed tech the mid-2010's based on both Facebook's determination here but also the undeniable breakthrough in price / value / performance / ergonomics that the Quest2 brings. This thing is absolutely affordable to the masses and absolutely has a value proposition justifying that level of purchase. We are definitely close to if not over the tipping point where this thing could explode in popularity and Facebook is currently the only game in town.
With Facebook backing it to the hilt there's a real prospect it will leave not just a lot of journalists having to rewrite their viewpoints but many of the major tech companies revisiting their investment in the sector in catchup mode.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadTo me, the main selling point of the metaverse seemed to be an alternative economical space based on tokens which are implemented in a decentralized matter. Everything else seems to be fluff.
Source: a friend working on such matters there.
Tim Cook can never think like Steve Jobs.
Bassy can never think like Bezos.
Even sons/daughters of great people inherit the kind of thinking the original GOAT did.
Yeah, it's a natural phenomenon, not assumptions.
But besides being government issued, tokens and the currency you talk about are both "make believe".
I mean, people valued stamps, paintings, and tulips rather high too.
I don't know how things will go, but at least these tokens seem to get quite some gobal interest lately.
Perhaps cryptocurrency will force some change in international commerce, but I can't help but feel regulations will simply catch up.
I think this is the nail on the head, and the drivers will be remote work + talent shortage.
Medium to longer term, this is going to drive more people to relocate out of high cost of living areas and questionable quality of life.
Once they're decamped to cheaper (and probably smaller) cities, the obvious question for both employee and employer is "How do I maximize the value of an employee?"
Some fusion of technologies with the outcome of persistence seems like a very compelling answer.
And, and I think this is underrated, suddenly you're buying productivity equipment and/or making home improvements. Which is a very different market, with a very different spending cap, than consumer gaming goods.
F.ex. If someone offered a full persistence, comfortable, efficient, effective technical solution for $100k, would it be worth it at that price?
What if it let you live in Boulder, CO (median home price $920k, high on liveable US city rankings) instead of SF, CA (median home price $1.5M)?
The best workplaces were already looking at developer productivity prior to the pandemic, and there are material gains to be had from the company spending real time/effort on things. But that easily costs (the company) way more than $100k.
Until we collectively - execs, management, ICs - gain enough experience with hybrid and all-remote work models (and even some post-pandemic all-in-person work models, which is different from pre-pandemic all-in-person work), we won't and can't know what maximizes the value of an employee (and anyone that tells you different is trying to sell you something - probably that remote work is unilaterally better, which it's not).
The Monty Hall problem says that moving is the optimal thing to do, but ignores the real practical difficulties of moving to a completely new city. I'd love to live in Boulder, CO, except for all the hassles of actually moving beyond the physical relocation of my stuff from point A to point B, which is trivially solved with money.
But I don't really know what companies like Meta or Microsoft have in mind for it.
You can say the same about Smartphones, but Apple has created a $2T value using the open internet
* Portals - you can leave one grid and go to another with your avatar, if the destination grid will accept it. (The destination grid may not want spacesuits in their cowboy sim.) Some of the browser-based virtual worlds already have this.
* Asset portability - you should be able to take your stuff from one grid to another, if the destination grid accepts it. This is what NFTs claim to do, but don't. This may already be a legal right in EU countries, per Article 20 of the GDPR, "Data Portability".
* Money portability - you should be able to spend and withdraw money on a grid without being locked into its payment system. Epic is currently fighting Apple over this.
("Grid" here means a virtual world or worlds under coordinated management. This term is used in Open Simulator, where there are grids run by various parties using the same software.)
On the Internet I'm merely an observer, not a participant. Sure, I can contribute but that's like sitting on the bench screaming instead of actually playing the game.
I don't think a focus on "presence" in VR implicitly removes that ability, though. It depends on how it's implemented: I could easily see an app providing a "ghost" mode or something where you can interact with or just observe the world without being seen or using an avatar. However, I unfortunately don't see Facebook (or most of big tech trying to maximize network effects) allowing such a heinous feature.
As far as I can tell it's the internet but in VR with an avatar. Or in other words it's the internet but with extra steps in the way of obtaining the information or completing the transaction, not to mention the increased hardware costs (VR headsets are expensive) and bandwidth costs associated with this superfluous fluff.
I just don't understand how they aren't being laughed out of the room. This is fantasy level stuff and it's going to be an absolutely massive failure.
Is it just a variant of "button-less on-screen keyboards?! we will never!" or is there something more fundamental?
I'm curious about the state of the art of serious research on this, if anyone has some good links/references.
I think the former is a way bigger factor than the latter, here. Even on the old first-gen HTC Vive, I was entirely comfortable "working" 8+ hour days wearing one (coding, painting, and sometimes gaming). They've also improved massively since then in weight, weight distribution, softness, and heat management.
I'd say the biggest detractor is how they look (and some other smaller factors like not being able to feel "safe" cut off from your surroundings, but all major VR companies are working on that, too). However, how they look ends up not really mattering much if you're VRing from home, where no one can see you.
Would you have a visual of your keyboard or were you just touch typing?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678041
So it might happen eventually. People are actually leveraging "Virtual Desktops" now, but accepting the inherent resolution issues.
thankfully (?) we have forced-obsolescence and improvements in tech so over time, as things improve, they may make different decisions.
> Everyone already has a phone
Also i doubt the VR/AR headset would compete with a phone.
Quest2 is $299, so actually on the scale of a very cheap phone.
Maybe some things are more tedious but some things are better. Ever more ubiquitous computing and contextual/spatial computing of AR is really interesting.
You don't get it but others find AR/VR compelling and Microsoft and FB smell money. It's worth talking about why these large companies are spending the effort.
$299 is not a "very cheap" phone.
EDIT: while you're implying they have $1500 to put down on a phone what is much more likely is that
a)They're gifted said phone
b)They're buying a used one off of ebay, facebook marketplace or similar for much much less money
c)They're using a "lifeline" phone that they've bought at a discount from their "lifeline" provider.
In none of these cases -particularly if they're getting a government subsidy ("lifeline") is it likely that they're paying >$250/mo
A VR headset is something normal people are just not used to. I guess that will be that way for quite a bit time.
* Toms: Under $400
* Verge Under $500
* TechRadar: Under $500 with the lowest category Under $200
* CNET: Under $500
* AndroidAuthority: Under $500
* Wired: Under $500
Like you can personally decide that a budget phone should be under $200 or something but real life people looking to buy "cheap" phones are looking to pay ~<$500 for it.
It always surprises me how much of those I see in the metro. I don't see many flagships at all here, many people on the street also use wired headphones.
In the Netherlands it's a totally different picture. Lots of iPhones, S-class Samsung, airpods...
It really depends on the country and their average wages.
>real life people looking to buy "cheap" phones are looking to pay ~<$500 for it.
A good portion of the world must not be "real life people" to you. I will hazard a guess and say that you must have lived a life without much financial difficulty.
The Quest2 is $299, but how much is a GPU good enough to deliver a better than a regular desktop/laptop/smartphone user experience these days?
the quest delivers an experience you can't really get with those devices, and it does it with just that hardware. The GPU inside it does what it needs to do (mostly).
Also, i bet an apple vr headset with apple silicon GPU would kick ass
Oh it will. But it will cost almost 10x the price of a Quest 2. Apple doesn't get into something until they can do it really well and they make the most of the early adopter premium, only bringing prices down after a few generations.
One thing I rarely see mentioned or discussed is the "longevity" of VR interest amongst users. As a (former? I'm not sure yet) VR enthusiast and adopter on the high end of things I noticed that the novelty wore off really quickly, after ~1 year of owning my Index my usage went from somewhat regularly to barely anymore and for most titles with VR support I prefer playing them the regular way and the VR-first titles can't get me to set it up, or were "onetime" experiences (like HL Alyx, which is one of maybe ~3 VR games that really felt enriched and improved by the VR experience, in hindsight).
From friends and colleagues of mine I hear similar things, VR headsets collecting dust already.
If you view VR as a spectrum between ViewMaster 3-D and a holodeck, we're very much still on the ViewMaster 3-D end of things.
You're not in a sensory goo tank or anything but for starters you can't even lift up a virtual boy.
"There are no lapsed mobile users, essentially... but there are, right now, a whole lot of people that are lapsed VR users...."
So we have a weird situation atm where huge numbers of people have generically written off VR because it didn't cut it for high end gaming with them, without ever even considering the alternatives. In my mind, these are fitness and professional use.
The fact is that I can go into VR to work today and its intolerable after a short period, but only because of factors I think will be solved within the space of a few years - the resolution is too low, the battery doesn't last long enough, it's too heavy and gets uncomfortable. These will all get solved. Once that happens, VR will be unambigously a better place to work for quite a wide cross section of activities. This is the "skating to where the puck will be" that tech companies need to focus on.
Many of us don't get it, because we have seen the sales pitch come back every couple of years.
They've got a ton of money and billions of people more or less locked into their ecosystem. They're not being laughed out of the room because they've got a lot of what is considered a valuable resource today -- money and eyeballs / attention. In that way, they're a terrifying contender that will most likely win, even if them "winning" means creating a horrific reality for others.
Never in my wildest 90s imagination would I have imagined any part of that coming to pass.
PS: And as to the value of eyeballs & attention, why does everyone think Chrome is the most used web browser now? Don't laugh at Facebook's ability to push things.
She enjoyed getting her pick via streaming during the lockdowns. Could attend mass from many different churches virtually.
I don't like FBs business model regarding privacy but they sure have put VR on the map. It's entirely possible it would have fizzled out without their involvement.
And this is really how the stock market works these days. It's more about belief and dreams than real-world financial results. If many people believe it's going to be big, it will be worth billions.
Your post makes it sound like many new ideas succeed. This is certainly not the case, "new ideas" happen all the time, everywhere, spawned by both small and large companies and individuals. Most of them fail, and everyone wants to be "the new internet".
> they had the same set of opportunities as other new millionaires
This is not true for the majority of cases. If you take a look at millionaires and billionaires and their parents, most of them already started at what many would consider rich/wealthy (or very close to it). But the exceptions obviously make for better stories and headlines.
It's future AR and VR tech.
It's placing things in the real world.
But mostly it's a land grab to be the platform everyone else wants to integrate with, based on the assumption that AR glasses will exist in the future.
Niantic's Lightship SDK is another attempt, be the platform everyone else builds their AR stuff on.
And if it's not, and like a smartphone it becomes a requirement for life in the modern world, this is the step where I say nope and go full Ted innawoods for good.
I hope to be present at that meeting so I can deliver a swift Service Pack to his face.
Things like QR codes on posters being highlighted, "hologram" store mascots that everyone walking by can see with AR glasses, answering an "AR" phone call while still being able to see around you (and not having to hold your phone up to your face as in video calling - early versions of this could use iOS Memoji before consumer face-scanning tech gets good), virtual computer screens to do programming or other work *anywhere* without monitors (while still being able to respond to external stimuli), etc. Maybe you could even portray yourself as a custom avatar (instead of your actual body) to those with AR glasses.
IMO an early prototype of the metaverse is already here: Ingress/Pokemon Go. These games don't use fantasy-land maps, they use the Earth and real-life locations. Data and user-interactions are layered on top of that.
On the other hand, any kind of VR metaverse will likely be a poor-man's Second Life, just prettier and with far more restrictions. I'm sure there's a market for that, but it's not really civilization-defining.
But hardware has to come first. None of this is possible while we're still in the "magic window" step having to look through our phone screens.
The idea of integration with real places is ok but just a gameplay mechanic and not really a compelling or fun one I think. I think most of the popularity of Pokémon go comes from it being Pokémon. It's really just Ingress with some Pokémon skin and a mini-game slapped on.
I think we shouldn't think of Niantic as a "leader" in the AR realm. What they're doing is not pushing the envelope. They're just exploring the fringe inside it.
That isn't what I was referring to. Layering user interactions on real-life locations is more akin to the metaverse in my mind than any kind of VR derivative. Whether the game was fun or not is also irrelevant, the metaverse won't be a "game."
I was also clear I was speaking of a hypothetical future with perfect AR.
To add: it's an orchestrated effort to distract people from realities of the world (including FB's own troubles).
Nothing in this metanonsense helps people to be more productive in solving real world problems.
And that's exactly what people want. Escape. Just like with games, movies, sports, arts, etc.
Unless you read the shared article where the author describes using this tech successfully to be more productive at work.
It wasn't until we had destructively disassembled a power tool that one of us had access to, on the theory that we could use whatever motor was inside of that tool to drive our robot, that we realized we had no idea what we were doing nor any conception of how to build a robot. I had a feeling of amazement that sticks with me today that we were able to articulate our plan to solve the problem, which depended on our robot helping us with some sub-task, but were completely unaware of the fact that the robot was far beyond our ability to construct. Our plan was like something that might have worked in a cartoon but not in reality.
That feeling comes back to me as a kind of "Build a robot" moment in cases like this. "In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!" Okay, but what you have is a screen that you can strap to your face and is nothing like a virtual reality metaverse and you have no idea how to get there.
Another way of thinking about it is taking the hardest part of the problem and hand waving it away to solve the easier parts and then forgetting that there is a big blank spot in your plan. It's easy and fun to think about all the stuff you can do in a compelling virtual reality metaverse, but you don't have one and aren't likely to get one any time too soon.
I completely agree that this sort of marketing of metaverse entirely misses the reality of tech we have and expectations. I think its also a great analogy, and i had a similar experience when i myself did Odyssey of the mind :)
Based on the article, however, it seems clear that we could be around the corner from real use-cases for this tech that are actually an improved experience. I think VR tech could def improve "mise en place" tech use, where a user is focused on accomplishing one goal at a set time and place using tech. This could even be as vague as "do my remote job".
The "Metaverse" is not necessarily anything more magical than HTTP serving 3d models rendered on the screens strapped to our faces (rather than 2d documents rendered on the screens strapped to our desk)
I think the bigger questions is, will people driving this shift try to keep it a part of the decentralized Internet or will they try to put up walls around their gardens?
But that's just it, isn't it? GP said:
> > That feeling comes back to me as a kind of "Build a robot" moment in cases like this. "In our virtual reality metaverse people will be able to attend concerts with one another and save the tickets as NFTs!" Okay, but what you have is a screen that you can strap to your face and is nothing like a virtual reality metaverse and you have no idea how to get there.
Why would most people want "HTTP serving 3d models to a screen strapped on their face" to take the place of "attending concerts with one another"?
Without significant, ground-breaking advancements in freedom of movement/input and feedback/presence beyond the screen & headphones strapped to their face and maybe some shitty rumble from a playstation controller, this isn't "attending a concert with one another" in any meaningful sense, this is just "watch a concert from your couch while talking to your friend over discord", except with a more expensive screen fewer people own or seem inclined to buy, and clumsier input.
Imagine jumping up and down headbanging to your favorite 2000’s pop-punk song, blasted off tequila and red bull, except you’re in your living room and wearing an expensive but loosely-fitting headset that obstructs your vision. This idea is gonna need a second draft.
Eventually I guess people will have more movable furniture.
Obviously for something like a concert or dance club (where half the point is to literally feel the music and the crowd) we aren't there yet.
But for something like a stage play or a comedy show the significant barrier is a low-friction way to connect the audience response back to the performer(s). That comes down to implementation and infrastructure rather than the underlying technology.
The technology is at a point where the next increment could be the one that makes a mass adoption feasible for something like "360 Facetime", "Street view but it's live/real-time", or "Portal but it's the entire room", It's not going to take a "significant ground breaking [technological] advancement".
I have tried out some VR, and apart from the thick cable coming out of my gear, I was blown away by how cool it is. Not that cool that I would really want to use it currently, but hey, that will certainly improve.
It reminds me a bit of my sister. She was swearing that she will never need another phone than her Nokia more than a decade ago when I showed her my iPhone 3G. Yeah, right :-)
I hardly ever use the VR headsets even after trying a number of different games. The problem is that it's not so much virtual reality as it is strapping a screen to your face. You run into the limits of the system pretty fast.
One example, you can play poker in a VR casino. But, it doesn't feel at all like playing poker in a casino in reality. It feels like watching goofy cartoon characters play poker while you try to clumsily control one without proprioception. I enjoy playing in my browser much more than in VR.
Another example, I like VR boxing. It's probably my favorite VR game - but even in the best such game I've found (Thrill of the Fight) the limitations are obvious. The game can't really tell where your hands are, what they're doing, if you block or dodge, etc. I can flick my wrist, the way you might playing Wii Sports Tennis and smash the other guy in the face with an uppercut. Or, I can try to throw a real punch the game will decide it missed for some reason though my own sense of reality has me putting my elbow through the opponent's body.
On top of input and accuracy limitations there is the fundamental limitation that you cannot feel what's happening. Getting hit doesn't feel like anything. Sometimes you can't even tell if you are blocking or dodging a shot or getting hit by it - very different from real boxing. You likewise can't tell if you're hitting the opponent.
These things are called virtual reality but aren't there yet. I agree they're making progress and they are okay toys. I'll keep buying new versions because I want to help support the effort and I like such toys, but they aren't like reality. They're missing a part of it.
I don't really agree.. We have amazing 3D and VR games. We have amazing highend headsets. We have great 2D collaboration software. Gesture recognition is improving rapidly, one year ago we didn't even have handtracking yet on the standard quests.
All the individual pieces are available. It's just a matter now of bringing them together and driving the prices down with scale.
I guess the issue is "we" here. Sure "humanity" as a "we" has all the tools. But humanity has all the tools to solve world hunger and perhaps reach net Zero green house gas emissions.
The metaverse is being sold as some sort of universal VR app, but it's being pursued through a capitalist system.
It won't work. "It" referring to whatever Facebook pumps out and calls the metaverse. It'll just be another game. In order to "work" or to realize its massive ambiguous vision it has to reach critical mass of adoption such that any competitor simply must build onto the Facebook controlled platform. I think we are years away from seeing that, and I don't think the people pursuing the metaverse right now are capable of building it.
The only company I see actually open sourcing the tech is Nvidia.
Nvidia is closer to building the metaverse than Facebook is, mark my words on that.
But either way, the metaverse is a bit of a joke. It's kinda like saying "VR chat, but like _really good_".
I think eventually maybe we get there, but it could be literal lifetimes away. I think the haters are afraid that the companies pursuing metaverse are just wasting human and financial capital that needs to be allocated towards potential existential crises, or barring that, just towards more important or more immediately useful things.
These capitalist companies want to be the platform owner of the metaverse, ala apple to the App Store. It's not a vision of the future that is powering them, it's a faint mirage of $ and power. It's envy of the app store. That's what I think powers the resentment of the metaverse that so many people feel.
I agree it will take longer. And it'll probably be a capitalist invention, yes. I would also really love to see a truly open and decentralised approach but with the amount of money these companies are pumping into it, they are bound to want to own some of the IP in return.
But I'm not presenting a strawman, I just thought you were speaking mainly about technological readiness. I agree we have bigger problems to solve as humanity though I think in the long term this can contribute. I've done some trials at work with VR meeting software (Spatial, Arthur, Immersed) and they really create a sense of 'togetherness' that Teams/Zoom don't. Of course meeting in person is better, but this is not very feasible now because of Corona and probably in the future because of emissions. So I think even a "really good" VRChat would help there a bit. Even tough these companies are not doing it to solve the world's problems obviously.
PS: Is Nvidia really that open? I haven't really been following it (my only PC that has a Nvidia card I use exclusively with Windows for gaming), but I heard they are not opening enough sourcecode to make Wayland work well, even. And that's only 2D stuff.
As far as I can tell it's the telephone but on a screen with a typewriter. Or in other words it's the telephone but with extra steps in the way of obtaining the information or completing the transaction, not to mention the increased hardware costs (screens are expensive) and wiring costs associated with this superfluous fluff.
I just don't understand how they aren't being laughed out of the room. This is fantasy level stuff and it's going to be an absolutely massive failure.
- People of the 80's
Surely it's not so shortsighted as to be about a few (<10) percent in investments? There has to be a longer term plan if not that. Maybe I am wrong.
At the end of the day, I'm standing back, wondering which fire will blow out first.
For example, the article which started this thread criticizes Apple for moving into AR. This is despite AR being very feasible next step in having actual working tech applicable in real-life situations. Feasible and down to earth idea is being compared to a distant wild guess which has a high risk of never happening, yet somehow it loses this comparison.
There is a certain irony people call this Web 3.0 all over again. Web 3.0 was originally envisioned by influencers as heavily relying on semantic web and anthologies[1]. Despite all the visions, 14 years ago few of these things actually happened.
Could it be that people are just very bad at predicting the future? Could it be that we mis-invest into wild visions based on their popularity, instead of solving boring down to earth problems?
“Ah shit, here we go again.”
[1] http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/web-30-semantic-we...
This isn't true at all, Instagram and WhatsApp are hugely popular even with people who are anti-Facebook.
The rebrand makes a lot more sense when you realize just how diverse their product offering is and many people very vocally against FB still use IG and WhatsApp.
I agree with your sentiment but there are many utterly ridiculous ideas that people take seriously, think NFTs for instance. From that perspective, the metaverse isn't that crazy. And something could get out of it even though it's not the original vision that you describe.
And there are seemingly unreasonable ideas that become huge success. I didn't foresee the smartphone revolution (i thought we couldn't get a proper UI from a small device). I also thought youtube would be a failure.
That being said, I wouldn't bet one penny on the metaverse.
The Meatverse is high-bandwidth, high-definition, and high-protein. The Meatverse is the future.
What's why NFTs are so popular right now.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_precedes_essence
They strech it and bend it in so many ways in their attept to sound legit, that they stop making sense.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
If "The Metaverse" truly is to take off, it needs to be an open standard, like HTTPS or websockets, that any virtual device can connect to and let anyone with the compute power to create their own "virtual world". And, just like the internet, it will be pretty basic at the start, and there will be disgusting sites because there will be no gatekeepers.
Having that sort of layman-can-do-it feature seems pretty vital.
This is exactly what Zuck is working on, plus of course a proprietary VR stack and suite of applications for his own implementation. there are other firms working on pieces of this too though and they are talking to each other. Here's another voice on this, independent of FB/Meta:
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/11/02/herman-na...
I'm a skeptic that it will be as big as they reckon, we're physical beings living in a real world and I think that will always be prime reality. Also mobile isn't going away, I'm still going to have my phone on me all the time, not so much a VR head set, but they do seem to have thought all of this through.
https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-why-facebook-boug...
That lasted a few years and then was tossed away. It looks like, after a fairly huge backlash and a lot of technical issues, they've finally decoupled the Facebook account requirement.
Guess what high resolution low latency binocular video requires, eye tracking for foveal rendering. You can do the calculations for 2x120Hzx(100deg)^2x(60pix/deg)^2 and multiple gaming GPUs can't keep up, transport HDMI/DP can't keep up, and display (MIPI/lpDP) can't keep up. Foveal rendering allows ~10x reduction in bandwidth, which makes it possible on mobile/wireless.
"Sorry, honey, for all the billy goats in high heels... it was just a phase in college"
This argument for public comapanies needs to be de-bunked. This isn't a real thing, "fiduciary duty" means don't burn money and don't fraud your investors not don't do a slightly-less-shortterm business decision.
Also zuck owns a majority, so even if it was a real thing, if he approves, no other shareholder's opinion on duty matters.
Microsoft has actually been experimenting with this technology for a while - their implementation is quite sophisticated, and it's shipping in Windows now. You can actually try it out today: open Minecraft, then press the World Switcher hotkey combination (press the Tab key while holding Alt), press the Windows key, type "Roblox", and press Enter. If done correctly, your avatar will now be in Roblox!
It's pretty groundbreaking stuff, to be honest. Under the hood, the old universe is dynamically unloaded (possibly swapped out to disk) while the new one loads in. And, even better, if you press the World Switcher hotkeys again, you'll be right back in Minecraft - exactly where you left off.
...
Of course, I'm sure you meant that you'd somehow share information between Minecraft and Roblox- I'm sure you'd agree that arbitrary in-game items are unlikely to be transferable, but at least avatar appearance, surely? Well, hmmm, that'd make both games look worse, with awful art-style clash. Well, I guess you could store a few parameters and transfer those, and let each game interpret them to render an avatar that fits in the game's style?
... Ah, I've just made Miis again.
Okay, well, hm, if transferring avatar appearance isn't especially interesting, what about stuff that doesn't directly correlate to anything in-game? For example, the social graph, friends list, communications. Imagine being able to see what worlds your friends are in, talk to them while in your current one, and join their worlds with just a cli-
... oh, that's just Steam and Discord.
So... what's new, here?
What you are describing is custom built individual partial integrations, many of which aren't even VR. They're the equivalent of Gopher while the Metaverse is the equivalent of HTTP web sites.
Right now you can't seamlessly transition your digital presence across thousands of virtual worlds and service, with a variety of independent services having integration points and presences in each other's virtual worlds and interoperating with a variety of VR equipment. That's what they're building.
I think an important enabler of websites is the click-to-download nature of web surfing. You download the HTML site at read-time without worrying about installs. This makes it a lot easier to jump around.
All fungible as well as Non-Fungible tokens will represent the value that the users bring to the platforms/systems and reward us for participating.
For example, imagine playing a video game where all in game items are built on the NFT standard. A super rare item in game might end up having some sort of real value that a user can then later extract for time spent in game. They could either sell the item via a decentralized market, or leverage that item and take a loan out on it by using it as collateral. And why shouldn't they be allowed to do that? If a user pours hundreds of hours into an online game, they are generating value for that game network by being someone that other users can play with.
1) The ability to sell/trade items you've purchased is valuable and I don't believe is universally supported. NFTs make this trivial and supported on a number of marketplaces (like OpenSea) in a standard way.
2) Game makers could build resale revenue into the smart contracts of NFTs they sell through their games.
This is just one example where it's a win-win and improvement over what exists today.
>Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?
I also don't see that many benefits to be sure it's worth it but there are some in theory. One people mention is that games can easily share items - e.g. owners of a cool sword NFT for one game can use it in another or cryptopunks can have cryptopunk skins etc. Trading would be more streamlined.I guess another potential benefit is you can also have them listed forever like Xbox achievments that can be looked at by others even if after the game is no longer active.
I think future game development in the metaverse actually will be mainly open source and community driven. Imagine if you will a DAO that players of the universe can interact with and basically vote on new features that will be added to the game world. Rather than waiting for a centralized developer to patch and update the game they want, players will pool assets together in a sort of tax that helps fund future game development. Pair that with a Retroactive funding and other cooperative mechanisms and you will be providing incentives for player themselves to build out the game that they want to see.
It would almost be like building a town in the real world, but this is in the digital world.
Nope. The cost of generating these assets are insane, and assuming that some nebulous, non-existent community will build Rome for you is a recipe for disaster. We made the same gambit ~2010, and all we got was a lousy Github acquisition by Microsoft. The reality is that our socioeconomic disparities will be exacerbated in a digital world, particularly if the majority of content is owned and operated by private interests. We can hope that a vibrant open source community comes out the other side, but you can't build a metaverse on empty promises and vaporware.
I definitely agree with this sentiment, but if it's not centrally owned by a government or a corporation what are our other options? We sit around and moan about how centralized entities are ruining the world and how we don't have alternate ways of coordinating? Ethereum and projects like it are the only ones actually experimenting with changing up the formula and seeing if you can combine typically contradictory ideologies.
In my opinon, if we can't find a way to decentrally coordinate we are doomed as a race and will eventually destroy ourselves via capitalistic/corporate greed or by the tyranny of a government.
(HN, June 5th 2028): "Ask HN: I was phished in Meta Horizons and they stole my house deed NFT. They've already moved in, my wife is furious. How can I get my house back?"
For example I wouldn't be able to transfer my house deed NFT without first getting a relative to sign off on the transaction via their wallet as well as maybe my best friend. The beauty of a smart contract wallet is that there can be multiple if/then statements that determine when cold assets are allowed to move, all of which are up to the discretion and preference of the end user.
An alternative solution is altering how we manage assets in general including the suggested Harberger tax from the Book Radical Markets. But I feel that's a deeper dive into more theoretical territory.
I don't have any specifics on what that type of mechanism would look like (I'm just spitballing), but it's a something that definitely is interesting to think about. Maybe that mechanism randomly selects wallets that have no known correlation to your own and ask those individuals to confirm that the specified person is incapacitated. Since those people wouldn't have any stake in your transaction (allowing it to go through or preventing it from going through), they would be incentivized to be truthful.
Edit: to add to this last thought, maybe the wallet requesting the incapacitation confirmation is abstracted from the users confirming the incapacitation. The wallet essentially probes other active wallets and requests them to confirm that person is incapacitated without revealing who is requesting the information. this could help prevent collusion
Why did XMPP fail? Why is Discord more popular than Matrix? Why does Twitter still stomp Mastodon? Etc.
HTTP + HTML was "pre commercial" or commercial-dawn. Adding JS was a pro-commerical act, and it enabled richer experiences.
We later got mobile-apps, which are often website-adjacent in function and UI. They're less common standards in how they're built (proprietary device api's, competing languages across brands, etc). We still have the ability to deep-link across apps, but its much less common than on web, and its not as easy to "extract" a deep link for sharing, its basically the developers choise.
I predict the commercial metaverse will be the same, we'll need deep-linking, and we'll get it. We need some standardized file formats (for things like 3d models, avatar clothes maybe), but mostly it'll be siloed experiences that are made for each platform. We're a little better off here than with phones because we already have game engines that allow some portability of rendering and UI logic. Is that enough to re-create the HTML-style free web? probably not.
There's this notion that "the metaverse" is going to require special hardware, special software, etc. Of course many of us have been playing 3D games on 2D screens just fine for the last few decades. Adding goggles to the mix makes some of those games a bit more immersive of course but mostly they work fine without the goggles as well. It's not clear to me that the metaverse actually requires new hardware.
Which raises the question why we don't have it (whatever it is, which is a relevant thing that people seem to be asking). A lot of those games are multiplayer and basically involve people socializing for large amounts of time. I never really engaged with world of warcraft but I know multiple people that spend enormous amounts of time on that and other games. Is that "the metaverse"? Maybe. It's definitely an escape from reality for some. Is doing the same with some VR goggles going to be massively different? Some people probably already do that.
If you stop focusing on hardware and formfactor and just ask the question if having the same stuff that we have today (aka. the Internet), but with AR/VR goggles is actually worth having, the answer is probably going to be no. That's the problem. Either we have the meta verse already and it's a bit underwhelming or we don't really have it just yet because it hasn't actually been invented yet.
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is 30 years old now and actually predates much of what we now are used to. His recent books are also quite nice and features some updated musings on what the internet used to be and could become. E.g. "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", published three years ago or so, features blockchains, ar goggles, post truth society, people using bots to spread misinformation and drive political (and other) agendas, and a few other things. It paints a pretty dystopian near future (or even present day). But no Metaverse. A nice observation in that book is that "the internet" stopped being a special thing when multiple generations had grown up with it and mostly a term used by older generations that actually still remembered a world without it. That would be us.
The difference is that I never saw myself ever buying a 3D TV (and always hated 3D cinema), but I consider the possibility of being a late adopter of AR/VR several years from now.
I avoid going to 3D films specifically to avoid wearing the glasses.
But they never got that far. Beyond the gimmick of the 3DS screen, I’ve never seen glasses-less 3D.
Let’s say you’re a couple and you have two pairs of glasses. What happens when you have friends over?
Furthermore - the glasses were not interchangeable between brands of television sets, meaning it’s not like you could just bring a pair and expect them to work.
A VR headset costs $300, and offers a truly unique experience that excites me as a developer and is very interesting as a user.
A 3D TV cost more than a standard HDTV - and never really offered anything that made it worthwhile. IMHO it was DOA.
The existence of VR cafes and interactive installations has already made VR a real ‘thing’. The inexpensive nature of the Oculus Quest is helping that a lot, too.
I actually was annoyed when they removed 3D from their TV lineups. It's not something I used very regularly, but I did enjoy it from time to time. And it was just software, no actual hardware cost added AFAIK. I get that most people didn't use it but at least they should have kept the choice.
I do still watch lots of 2D content using the Quest, though. I like the immersive feel of watching movies and TV on theater-sized screens with none of the visual distractions in my living room.
The metaverse is quite simply THE spatial successor to the internet, but more specifically the World Wide Web.
Because of protocols like HTTP, TCP/IP, and HTML, you can read and view text + photos + videos on webpages because of agreed upon standards.
The metaverse will most certainly utilize old standards, but it will also need entirely new ones built from the ground up. The way users currently navigate the web via hyperlinks will be mirrored in the metaverse, but instead of shareable URL's we will have portals instead, so as to not break immersion and to deliver a sense of seamless teleportation from one immersive destination to another.
We'll also need a universal SDK and API that every world can hook into in order to tie all of this together, so as to share data back and forth and to allow for true interchange of virtual goods. Blockchain will provide the base layer to enable this.
WebGPU will allow us to render using modern hardware, as the browser equivalent of Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX 12.
WebAssembly will allow for programs to be compiled to a universal bytecode.
WebXR brings all of this together, enabling a true sense of presence inside a webpage.
As more headsets by Meta, Valve (and Apple!) are sold and they become a part of our daily lives, it will become apparent that we need a way to link worlds together that are hardware and platform-agnostic. The web seems like the most straightforward, obvious solution to this problem.
Also, now that Facebook has soured the term "metaverse", a term originally termed in Snow Crash and now has connotations with a social media company... may I propose a new one? How about The Immersive Web?
My startup Wonder Interactive is working on building the immersive web, and our current focus is on bridging the gap between native game engines and the web. We're have UE4 support up and running, with WebGPU actively being worked on as well as WebXR. Our 2D web as we know it today has to evolve to become 3D-first and immersive. If you're interested in trying out our platform, you can register your intent here via our website or join our Discord below:
Website: https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8
The reality is that most, if not all, of them will be wrong. And that, if either comes to "fruition", it'll probably be some amalgamation of pieces from every "this is what that is" post out there.
Things like "try your clothes on virtually", "buy furniture and upload your room schematics" have existed for decades, and have all been pretty much failures. I don't think most people care about a more "immersive" experience when it comes to commerce, a picture on amazon does the job. A product/review video on youtube does the job. I don't think people care about a more immersive meeting room, or a more immersive online event, because again those products have been tried for decades and have all failed.
It honestly seems to me like the only actual feature of the "metaverse" is to force people into a gated experience, and to try and get them to stay there for as long as possible. Then you can advertise to them, then you can hook them into addictive behaviors (games, casino), then you can sell them worthless "pieces of the metaverse". The only function of the metaverse that I can see is to hijack 100% of a persons attention. In that sense, it is the obvious evolution of social media, yet as an evolution of the Internet as a whole it completely misses the point.
Of course, I am likely completely wrong, and leaps in VR/AR could change everything, and what you are doing is very cool. It just seems like and updated VRML is just promising the things people 20 years ago said would exist. At the end of the day, there is still no Virtual Mega Mall, because amazon.com beats it in functionality by a long shot. Give me the best VR available, I still think amazon.com beats it by a long shot. The day I can't distinguish VR and real life, well maybe then you got something, but we are many moons from that sci-fi dream.
> there remains a huge opportunity long squandered by Google: to be the enterprise platform that competes with Microsoft’s integrated offering by effectively tying together best-of-breed independent SaaS offerings into a cohesive whole.
I understand what he is saying, but AWS is already there. Azure may be on the rise but no platform comes close to AWS in the SaaS space as of now.
Amazon have a history of physical products, from the ill-fated fire phone to all of their Alexa products, kindles, and fire stick. They own a significant gaming division which recently launched the MMORPG New Worlds.
It seems the only thing they currently lack is their own VR headset. But they have their hooks in enterprise already, a massive computing infrastructure, experience in almost every related tech and an army of independent devs familiar with their offerings.
As for the metaverse being the next stage of the internet, I certainly hope that is the case, and that it is based upon open protocols. Does anyone have pointers to articles about the open metaverse? I'd like to get up to speed.
Key point - the other media are not interactive. You can select your experience, but you can't change it. This is because of content ownership traditions, not because of the technology.
In other words, the Internet is a kind of automated bureaucracy. It has ads and clicky clicky things that pop up, but when you're buying a flight or shopping from a catalog or writing emails you're still doing something that would have involved paper or possibly people, but on a screen. Usually with lots of text. Which you're either reading or writing.
The transaction friction has been lowered, and transactions that used to be local are now global (and sometimes vice versa). But the type of transaction hasn't changed. You're still selecting, ordering, buying, selling, communicating.
This OP's vision of the Metaverse seems to be one where you start from this, but you're forced to follow the documents and become part of the bureaucracy.
Does it reduce friction? No, it increases it. Does it change the nature of the transactions? Not particularly. The idea is still to do the same things, but somehow the VR version is "better."
Well - more pixel area might certainly help in some situations. But balancing that against the permanent impression that you have become an animated emoji trapped forever in a corporate work space is - I think - going to be a very tough sell.
Second Life turned into an absolute shit show, with virtual porn, virtual gambling, and virtual rent seeking everywhere, because the fundamental truth is that this is what interests a lot of the population.
I can see VR/AR following a similar trajectory. That's far more likely to be the killer app for it than the bizarre idea that it's somehow better than Zoom for meetings - which no one really wants to be in anyway.
Literally the emperor's clothes.
The iPhone and wireless connection to it could make the glasses a lot lighter, basically a mobile server. Apple is rollling out a wearable system, they distribute the platform across their wireless earphones, watch and phone, maybe even using their computers to power the glasses when you're at home. They already got a large part of it deployed and used by people..
The biggest issue is that none of the companies investing in the Metaverse truly care about the fundamentals. We're rushing in to buy McRib NFTs on blockchains that may-or-may-not exist in 10 years, and McDonalds is happy to turn a quick buck for selling nothing. Similarly, the companies who see this concept as collectible trinkets are entirely missing the point: NFTs are not a social service, they're a digital one. I've seen a lot of people claim that NFTs solve an issue that doesn't exist, and I frankly disagree. The concept of decentralized digital ownership is a huge conversation that stands to upend our current concepts of DRM and online possessions. The issue? There's a ton of money to be made in preventing you from accessing the stuff you want. Rights holders exist almost exclusively to prevent as many people as possible from attaining persistent ownership of their intellectual property. So long as capitalism is the driving force behind the so-called "Metaverse", you can safely assume that the only meta thing about it is how it's hellish reality exacerbates the issues corporations pose to us in the real world.
People who place significant value in their physical appearance (eg most young women) are not in a rush to replace their bodies with an avatar. And we know that men go where the young women are....
Now, can Facebook or Microsoft succeed by serving the fantasies of nerds like us who read sci-fi as a kid? Of course. But Apple is still in pole position given that they are targeting the mass consumer market, not a niche.
VRChat is the place for that.
This seems backwards. Wouldn't being image conscious make you more likely to want to replace your real-life self with a perfectly shaped avatar?
And what's more, having a "perfectly shaped avatar" means that the avatar designer made a beautiful design. But what many people want is to feel beautiful.
Personally, I'm a rather fashion conscious male, and I have no interest in buying virtual clothes because I like to wear nice clothes, not just be seen in them.
It's the difference between experiencing something and having a reputation for it.
The company's motto seems to be that every customer is unique, and has different needs - meanwhile, all the places I've seen had very similar core problems that were amplified by relying on all the different Microsoft solutions used across their teams, and across organizations they had to collaborate with.
Not only that, but colleagues were always unhappy because they were forced to use poorly designed inconsistent tools that are user unfriendly and encouraged mistakes and apathy.
The deeper question is how did Microsoft engineer something so bad when they were literally just cloning other products. What does that say about their forward looking prospects?
Which is Meta? Ben Thompson tries to make the case that it's the former, but I have my doubts. Thinking about my current 95% remote work life, with very frequent calls, I think of the following frustrations:
1. Platform heterogeneity. Some people use phones, mobile, chat, Meets, Hangouts, Zoom, etc. Just trying to work out what platform (?) people use feels silly. 2. Bad hardware. I'm constantly having Bluetooth and wifi issues and so is everyone else. 3. Lack of engagement. Lots of people outside my org are just not as engaged as they were pre-pandemic. Customer service has become terrible. 4. Lack of space. My fiancé and I have to plan for an extra room if/when we move because of the WFH situation. Since we are unlikely to have a glut of spare bedrooms in London any time soon, this is likely to be a systemic problem.
I can't see Meta or virtual presence/VR solving any of these problems, except incidentally (for instance, everyone loves Meta so much that everyone switches over to their perfect hardware and platform overnight). What I do see are a lot of drawbacks, such as
1. Nausea. It's well known that not everyone can tolerate VR 2. Compatibility. Can you still interact with people using other services? 3. Bandwidth. Do all your employees live somewhere with good enough internet service? 4. General creepiness. Usually the unease from new tech creeps up on you slowly (everyone normal saw iPhones and computers and even TVs as an unalloyed good from the start. Nobody seems to like the Metaverse). I think we might be on the cusp of a techno-reactionary Luddite movement.
I could be wrong, but to me this feels too much like a case of companies and techies wanting something far more than customers having actual problems that this can solve.
With Facebook backing it to the hilt there's a real prospect it will leave not just a lot of journalists having to rewrite their viewpoints but many of the major tech companies revisiting their investment in the sector in catchup mode.