"The Journal also found that Decentraland and The Sandbox, two well-known metaverse platforms emphasizing digital currencies, reportedly had fewer than 1,000 daily active users by late 2022."
Yeah, I read the article, I the X is dead thing rubs me the wrong way, but I'll concede it's a decent article and it's probably a peeve of mine. Also combined with it being about something that has a lot of open source, it seems like not only will it not die, it will keep marching forward because anyone can take an open source crypto project and try to improve it. So at worst it will be like Perl, which has improved since people started saying it was dead.
If I can plug myself in and be in the “matrix” - sure. But I just don’t see how someone expects people live in a virtual world with present day technology. I mean, I used to play MMORPGs for 16 hrs/day, but that’s for a very small minority.
Me too, but that worked because you were comfortable! Sitting in a chair, looking at a screen. You didn't have a heavy, sweaty headset on. There was no pretense of waving your hands around to use a sword. Like when reading a book, your mind can put you in the world, just like a book or a movie can.
This is the same reason 3D movies never work, the tech isn't there, and even if it was, I'm not convinced people would prefer it.
I’m old enough to think of the metaverse as like the one in Wild Palms[1], and so I don’t think we’ve seen it yet. I also really dont see Facebook/Meta being the company to crack it, I think it’s much more likely to be some kind of games company. Not a firm that sells ads.
I wonder if Epic/Fortnite have much exploration going in this area or if they're too limited by a fear of harming their cashcow? They have fantastic visuals/engine, a huge young audience, creative environments and established commercial relationships.
In my mind, the ambiguity of what "the metaverse" actually means allowed a bunch of people to sell it as panacea in different realms. When the smoke cleared and you were left with MMOs, video chat, and vr setups people don't buy or use, a lot of those castles start to fall over.
However, stuff like Fortnite or Roblox, which seemingly fulfill many of the Metaverse promises, continue to be reasonably successful. But they don't try to market themselves as "the metaverse," and while their have been brand tie ins, the product is marketed to players, not businesses.
I don't think MMOs belong to the blockchain enthusiasts, but they don't belong to the blockchain naysayers either. Anyone can use them to support their argument. I think MMOs can be used as examples of what blockchain powered Metaverse tech could achieve, if they figured it out. And Axie is an example of something that already has taken off, though in a very flawed way.
What's your definition of success here? People don't play Axie because they enjoy it, they pay people who mainly live in the Philippines to grind at it so that the account holder can cash out.
I used the phrase "taken off". That is the form of success I'm hinting at. I'm a bit undecided on Axie Infinity but it at least launched, a lot of projects don't.
This is my opinion. I think something like Metaverse must become a big thing, but current "Metaverse" implementations won't. I wish Meta continue investing this area (instead of boring apps). Maybe they should buy a big game develop company.
> the ambiguity of what "the metaverse" actually means
If you root cause on that you come back to, Zuckerberg made a big splash with his announcement and then followed up with .... nothing. As much as anything, these other things were filling a vacuum. Of course it got filled up with toxic garbage.
The inexplicable thing to me is purely that Meta has failed to deliver anything closely resembling an experience that represents their own advertised ambitions. Case in point, Horizon Worlds still even now hasn't even launched in my country (near to one of the top 10 economies in the world). How is it even possible that something the company put at existential level of importance hasn't even launched? It's either a massive fail of execution or they never really actually had their heart in it.
I do wonder if Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency", flattening of the org structure and refocusing on engineering leadership is in part borne from the reality check of basically failing to deliver on all this at a technical level.
Honestly, in my opinion, only Mark believes in the Zuckerverse. Everyone else at Meta is just trying to keep their job at this point. If you directly ask them about it, they'll hem and haw about the future of interaction changing and how business meetings will be conducted with headsets and all that. But do they really believe in it? I don't really think so.
I tried Decentraland and it was buggy (graphically), the games were awful & normally required substantial investment to join (for example an NFT to join Poker games), and everything was dead.
If you look at Facebook's original success then it was all down to being in the right place and the right time with the right product. It was one of those billion to one scenarios that Zuck and those other two brothers arrived at through pure luck. People were giving away data online which other companies lusted after. Now how do you repeat that? Well you don't but other lucky startups can be bought which Facebook has a history of doing. Buy anything which might have social aspects to it and the dartboard eventually gets the bullseye hit.
Now if you want to invest in your own product and make it a success then Facebook has no experience of doing that. It's why Metaverse is doomed to fail. Add in that users are leery of Facebook's motives and their perversions for spying on your every waking moment. Hopefully they will implode and die.
The "metaverse" was doomed is doomed to fail because it's not a real product, it's a dream. The tech just isn't there, it doesn't matter if Steve Jobs and Walt Disney rose from the dead to make it, it's not gonna happen. Stop trying to make it happen, Gretchen.
Exactly... they know they're slowly heading for irrelevance if they don't come up with the next big thing. So it's all they can do, find something that only someone with 100 billion dollars can do, and go for it. TBH I don't see anything else they might try that may actually be a better choice (and no one criticizing them ever mention anything either).
'Metaverse' is a stupid term anyway that had no value beyond referencing Snow Crash. Let 'Meta' sit on that stinker now and forever. When the tech is ready (for real this time!) we will know what it should be called (suggestion: Virtual Reality, or VR, for short).
I think some sort of "metaverse" outside of Meta Horizon Worlds could have been real, but I don't think anyone would have taken it seriously because it would have just ended up another Second Life, Garry's Mod, or VRChat.
That just doesn't sound like the next trillion dollar idea. It's barely a repeatable million dollar idea.
Is there a possibility for some sort of new protocol and client software where people navigate 3D spaces that can be viewed by virtual reality headsets?
Sure, I think so. But that too would be dominated by some sort of 3D GeoCities.
It's not like people are going to be rushing to create the next Scottsdale Fashion Square and Apple Store in VR.
There's vaguely this idea floating around that you could give a potentially cool thing to teenagers, and that thing being a VR third-space of sorts, but I think it would take someone with a meaningful vision to elucidate what that looks like, because it's not VR malls, and it's not Second-Life et al.
It's totally something else. Who knows. Maybe it's chilling in a forest with a campfire and playing music together and sharing memes in tree houses.
What happened to doing something cool first instead of focusing on the money? Everything that took off that I can think of was cool first, and the money came second, then it was milked to death until it wasn't cool anymore.
> I think some sort of "metaverse" outside of Meta Horizon Worlds could have been real, but I don't think anyone would have taken it seriously because it would have just ended up another Second Life, Garry's Mod, or VRChat.
A lot of Meta's Horizon Worlds efforts wind up reading like "those who forget the past [Second Life] wind up repeating it (poorly)".
> The same criticisms don’t apply to the technologies that underpin the metaverse
Interesting, so what tech are we talking about?
> As it turns out, people really like collaborative open worlds, as evidenced by Fortnite’s estimated 80 million monthly players
Ah, yes, 3D games. The metaverse killer app was hiding in plain virtual reality. But... this nagging doubt...
> metaverse companies attracted $120 billion in funding during the first half of 2022 alone
Which prompted me to prompt my trusted GPT-0 LLM: "cost to setup a game studio?". The answer was eloquent yet hallucination inducing:
In the United States, rough cost of setting up and running an MMO games dev studio for 12 months is almost $618,000 including federal withholding, social security, insurance and state tax and excluding variable costs such as Internet, electricity, heat, etc.
So by GPT-0's reckoning, you could use the metaverse funding of $240 bln per year to fund 240K (two-hundred forty thousand) game studios per year.
1. GPT-0 doesn't reckon, it generates text that looks like the corpus it was trained on.
2. You shouldn't trust this as even a ballpark estimate. It seems ridiculously low, unless you're talking about a 2 or 3 person studio. (And see #1 above.)
If I were GPT and asked how much it costs to start up a studio I would say 200K per employee per year. If you want to target mainstream successful multiplayer game I would set aside 3-4 years and about 50 people. The double that for marketing and hosting.
As a gamedev who is running his own (small, indie) studio.. That "cost of setting up and running an MMO gamedev studio for 12 months" is absurdly low; it's at least an order of magnitude off and possibly two depending on how big a studio we're talking about.
Which means that the metaverse funding of $240 billion/year would actually only fund a mere 24,000 reasonably-sized MMO game studios per year.
Ha ha, I stand corrected (and informed). Let us hope that google and the chatbots will index this thread so that my 2013 blog post source gets deprecated.
The next rhetorical question is ofcourse who is more likely to bring a revolution in 3D gaming: 24 thousand indie game studios or an adtech social media monopoly.
Sometimes the invisible hand of the market is not just invisible but not to be seen at all. Truly missing in action.
For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong.
I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are testing it. It's a long way from feature complete, but the graphics part is working nicely. Users need a midrange gamer PC (NVidia 1060 or better, at least 6 CPUs). This is a reasonably difficult problem, but it's not impossible.
Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, says that the 600 million people using game virtual worlds should hold an online wake for the metaverse. He means Fortnite and Roblox users.
The metaverse is alive and well for gamers. But it's not headed for Facebook/Twitter scale.
So what went wrong? The NFT clown car, and Zuckerberg, went wrong.
The NFT guys are all Make Money Fast. Most of them never even shipped a virtual world.
That didn't stop them from collecting money from suckers. Slowly, at the rate of about one every few weeks, the SEC is bringing the hammer down on those guys.[1]
The ones who shipped something just slapped something together and called it a metaverse. If you haven't visited Decentraland, check it out. It's 1990s graphics quality. It's also empty; it runs about 260 concurrent users.
The whole Meta fiasco, and its motivations, has been covered elsewhere.
So what are the real problems?
First, the metaverse is boring. If you build a good virtual world, it's about as interesting as real life. Most forms of entertainment have an interesting event density about 10x to 100x that of real life. Metaverses don't. You have to make your own fun. Second Life has this problem. It's fun for people who
are into building, creating, and exploring. It's not fun for people who want to be passively entertained. This limits the market.
The game-derived metaverses, Fortnite and Roblox, are games with social areas on the side. Fortnite discovered that by accident. Their game has rounds of play, and you have to wait for the next cycle to start. So they have a "lobby". People hanging out in the lobby to socialize became a thing, and they built on that to allow users to have social spaces.
Second, there are technical problems. Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games. This is quite possible, but not on a $99 WalMart laptop or a phone. "Cloud rendering", as with
Google Stadia (closed), Vortex (closed), and NVidia GeForce Now (still around but the price keeps going up) is an option, but the economics don't work out. Nobody can do free to play with cloud rendering.
Metaverses on a current gamer PC can work quite well, but most people don't have those.
Third, there's the VR nausea problem. If you put people in a VR environment where they can move freely but the visual world is not rigidly locked to the real world at all times, about 5% - 15% of the population becomes nauseated. VRchat shows that there's a market for this anyway, but it's about 22,000 concurrent users. The only real stat in this business is how many people are logged on right now, measured from outside the system. All other numbers can be "adjusted".
Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse. These are game worlds. A branch of Sotheby's or Hermes does not make sense. Also, showing fashion items in worlds with crap graphics just devalues the brand.
So, it's a niche. Right now, there are seven games on Steam with over 100,000 users logged in.
That's probably the size of the metaverse market.
I don't know what's next either, but it seems like the things you describe are not terribly existential?
Technical problems and VR nausea will both be solved inevitably as hardware gets better and cheaper — which it always does, thanks to the magic of capitalism. There's also a lot of that magic happening in the world of GPUs right now.
The boringness seems like a game design problem. Someone will crack it sooner or later. I agree new mechanics are needed, and it'll surely take some time for something to emerge that takes off. This will also get easier as hardware gets better.
The "brands" thing seems the least concerning of all. Where the people go, the advertisers will follow. I think, in some way, this will also be solved by people figuring out good game mechanics for the Metaverse, too. Once there are incentive structures in place, advertising will find a way to slide in.
> There's also a lot of that magic happening in the world of GPUs right now.
I wish. It's not happening from NVidia.[1] NVidia will sell you an awesome GPU for an awesome price, but price/performance is advancing very slowly. NVidia's current entry level GPU card for desktops is $400. Also, NVidia's laptop GPUs that dissipate 130 watts are kind of a problem.
> The boringness seems like a game design problem.
Yes. We might see solutions from VR natives. See Phia's Virtual Reality Show.[1] Phia, in her early 20s and into VR for years, talks with insight about both gear and the social aspects of virtual worlds.[2] So far, though, no major breakthroughs.
The Yuga Labs / Otherside people
tried making their virtual world a very expensive and exclusive experience to get into, in hopes of getting a non-loser crowd. But that turned out to be a Make Money Fast scheme that didn't deliver. Now the SEC is after them.[3]
> which it always does, thanks to the magic of capitalism.
Just a general note: this isn't always the pattern the magic of capitalism gives us. There are as many examples of the reverse of that as supporting it.
As a quick example: toasters. The magic of capitalism has made sure that actually good toasters no longer exist in the consumer market.
> Once there are incentive structures in place, advertising will find a way to slide in.
> I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers.
That's cool, but...why would I want to use it? I think this is the fundamental problem that bullshitters like Zuckerberg can't actually solve. (And no, forcing employees to use it doesn't count.)
When gamers try Second Life, they complain that it's s-l-o-w. That's a fixable problem for people with gamer PCs. They have enough CPU and GPU to do this right. The classic clients are single-thread and OpenGL, so they can't use modern gamer hardware effectively.
If you get rid of the sluggishness, user acceptance improves considerably. Or so says the
literature on game design. You get flow. Performance and graphics quality alone are
not enough for a win, but not having them means a lose.
I don't have all the answers. But I've pushed things forward a bit.
Lots of people are now making noise about metaverses and AI. Unfortunately, most of the people
making noise are the same clowns that pushed NFTs. But there's some good work going on.
This has the potential to make metaverses less empty, and human users will have NPCs with which
to interact. It can definitely solve the emptyness problem.
NPCs are getting smarter. One of my NPCs in Second Life has a T-shirt that says on the back "Trainee - Someday we'll be in charge." That's less of a joke and more of a threat now.
At least for me the graphics and speed aren't the problem; the problem is that there is nothing for me to do in metaspace except maybe fly around and see other bored people flying around.
GTA V appears to be a very popular multiplayer game, so if a metaverse could have GTA V graphics and multiplayer performance then surely some GTA like activities could be implemented.
But there appear to be no real use cases other than gaming?
And that’s a narrow subset of a subset of just single market.
It seems that Facebook was aiming at something bigger than that but they actually couldn’t even offer a coherent argument on what VR could offer outsiders of gaming.
I mean, I don't play GTA, so there's that? And if I did play GTA I would... I don't know... play GTA, rather than playing a less interesting version of GTA.
Watch what people do in game lobbies like Fortnite, which are a bit of an open world: mindlessly destroy things, troll other people, show off superficial things like dance moves. A metaverse needs a bit more purpose, and constraints - a theme, or something that people strive for, or competition.
>Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse.
IMHO, this is a crucial and often overlooked point. In order to gain popularity, a metaverse platform needs the sort of offbeat creator trendsetters who tend to push boundaries. Without them, the platform feels sterile and business-y. With the sort of content they will produce, however, family-friendly advertisers will run for the hills.
As Neal Stephenson wrote in Snow Crash (1992):
>You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.
Have you seen how much it costs to get an endorsement from Giant Talking Penis? Having that level of social clout means most firms can only afford to advertise in meatspace, because of the huge good will and consumer loyalty she commands.
> With the sort of content they will produce, however, family-friendly advertisers will run for the hills.
I mean, honestly, this in itself is one of the big problems with how our current society and economy work. The idea that most of our world should be "family-friendly" in the sense of censoring many perfectly healthy parts of human interaction and experience is toxic.
The current implementation, that often lumps most queer topics in with those that are "not family-friendly", is orders of magnitude worse.
>about 5% - 15% of the population becomes nauseated.
That's just those who can use VR at all. Three members of my immediate family can't because of eyesight issues, including one who's blind in one eye. According to the Quest manual, I have a condition that means I should contact a doctor before using it.
If I worked for a company pushing this, I'd have a hard time believing any claims they made about supporting diversity in the workplace. Masses of people won't be able to take part in a society that depends on VR for communication and collaboration.
>family can't because of eyesight issues, including one who's blind in one eye
Eyesight issues don't stop you from using VR. In VR you will have the same eyesight issues as you do in real life. If you use glasses, then you can still wear glasses when you use VR.
What is your point. Your eyes have no way of detecting the origin of light. When using VR there is no way for your eyes to know that the screen is that close.
My point is that you don't have any clue how my eyes feel with two tiny TVs a couple of centimeters away from them vomiting direct light with high intensity into them, and wide open pupils.
Not a single clue, and if you think natural light is the same, I suggest a new posture to watch TV.
Distance doesn't matter for light. It just adds a delay that is the distance divided by the speed of light
>vomiting direct light with high intensity into them
Most VR headsets are only 100 nits. That's less intense than than the intensity of light by being in an indoor room. Going outside is many magnitudes more intense.
Your eyes physically bend to focus at different distances.
VR can simulate a specific distance, and your eye will focus on that, but the common current tech can't simulate different distances.
Your eye focus will be telling you it's a 12ft away screen or whatever, even when your binocular vision is telling you a flying tomato is right next to you.
The screens are usually moved to be from 1 to ~infinity meters away by the lenses. Unless you mean that glasses are hard to use with some headsets because there is not enough room to fit. Lens inserts are typically the solution for that.
No it doesn't work like that. I'm amblyopic. I only have like 10 or 20% visual capacity on my right eye. Using those devices suck even more than a 3D movie.
Even if you close an eye entirely VR still works. I don't understand what your point is. If your eye only has 10 to 20% clarity than VR headsets are already clear enough that your right eye can't see a difference in clarity between real life and VR.
Except the real world is experienced with more senses than the eyes. VR is currently still visual-only. In the real world, any visual defects are worked around by the brain using other sensory inputs. No such possibilities with visual-only VR.
Interestingly, even people who are blind in one eye can enjoy VR, including the perception of depth.
Binocular vision is only one of the ways we get 3D cues, and not even the main one. The main cue is motion parallax: how things move when we move our head (or body). This one still works even with a single eye.
I have read reports of people with one functioning eye enjoying VR. Just as in real life their eyes do not give a 3D image. Just as in real life, their brain can still infer 3D just fine.
Add another real problem:VR is just not that much better. My biggest takeaway from owning an Oculus Rift wasn't how incredible VR was, but how transporting not VR is. For experiences VR is super cool, but for playing games VR is worse in almost every way. Instead of instantly starting up and pausing if you get interrupted, you have to get the headset off and on. You can't pay attention, even slightly, to anything else while using a headset. That means no keeping an eye on children or animals. Using VR with a strong eye prescription is still a dilemma between a difficult adjustment or ordering very expensive custom lenses that also make it harder for anybody else to use the headset. Instead of just using an analog stick to move around and adjust where you're looking, you have to physically turn your head.
I might have agreed with you except... Half-life Alyx. I could be immersed in that one for hours at a time. No nausea or pain or anything and very well worth finding solutions for someone to watch the pets and kid for a few hours so you can play.
I haven't played a ton of titles, only own a Quest 1, but I found Superhot and Beat Saber to be distinctly unique and more enjoyable than non-VR counterparts in some ways.
On the other hand, I tried out some VR titles that just weren't very fun.
I think this is an issue of game design. Once the "wow" factor gets old, games still need to hold their own
What I love best about VR is that instead of puppeteering an avatar with a joystick, you get to do a lot of these visceral actions yourself. How this translates in real is that I no longer need to do a traditional cardio workout. I can now get the same work done while playing VR video games. I’ve lost about half 15 lbs so far
Of course for anyone who is not fond of moving or exercise due to health or other personal reasons, they’re not going to like the need to move for VR for now. I’ve seen some potential near term solutions though
As for the face bucket of isolation problem that you’ve cited, the latest gen VR devices have nearly solved this problem. Most AR focused devices like the nreal or meta quest pro are more open instead of enclosed. I have peripheral vision because it doesn’t hug my face. I’m guessing that Apple will also solve this problem within 1-2 years. Video games was just an afterthought for Apple Reality which is a good sign
> Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong. I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality... Users need a midrange gamer PC (NVidia 1060 or better, at least 6 CPUs).
Well yeah. Horizon Worlds runs directly on the Quest 2, not on a gaming PC.
Obviously anyone can achieve GTA V quality if you're powering it with a gaming PC, just by basing it on Unreal Engine.
It's a bit disingenuous to act like you've achieved something Meta couldn't. Now if you can get GTA V quality to run natively on Quest 2 hardware, then let's talk.
> Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games.
Where's your evidence for that? People happily play mobile games all day long that are nowhere near AAA, and they use social media too. There's zero indication at all that graphics quality is the problem. People adore Minecraft and that's not exactly known for its AAA graphics.
I agree. This is what the VR purists are missing: normal people are not going to spend about $2000 or more for a desktop gaming PC, and another $1000 for the VR headset and base stations. The setup even for techies isn’t easy and straightforward either. Wires are also no fun for VR
Regardless of how you feel about meta, it’s really impressive that they were able to ship a decent 6DOF, standalone, VR headset at $299 which is relatively easy to use for even normal people.
Going on a tangent, even after all this time people still don’t understand what the metaverse is. The metaverse is simply an AR / VR platform that has online access. That’s it. So this why Fortnite, voxels, and decentraland are NOT part of the metaverse, but Roblox, Minecraft, Rec Room, and Horizon are part because they all have VR support.
> Going on a tangent, even after all this time people still don’t understand what the metaverse is. The metaverse is simply an AR / VR platform that has online access. That’s it.
And that’s because Meta did a shitty job to tell people what it is! Have you heard or seen one of their ads? In Germany, they go like „the Metaverse will help doctors to do complicated surgery. It might be virtual, but the Metaverse will have a real impact“
It’s like pure essence of bullshit, on the level of those self-reordering fridges promised in the 90ies. If Meta would just release a single, convincing use case now, maybe things would look different. But they don’t, because they can’t, because there isn’t one. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
I'd like to highlight these parts again. Even as someone who has a desktop gaming pc and all: Base stations suck. Wired VR sucks.
Having wires get in your way while you are in VR is such a shit thing. I would never get back to it, not even for a generational leap in graphics quality.
And base stations automatically mean you need far more space (or "creative solutions"), something people living in e.g. flats don't have. Or don't want to have. Sure, I could probably rearrange half a room around it, but VR is not that great and probably never will be. Almost nothing would be.
The same is done for consoles with the expectation being they'll recoup their losses through software sales. The problem is that you need to offer a compelling experience first, which Meta has failed to deliver on.
> Obviously anyone can achieve GTA V quality if you're powering it with a gaming PC, just by basing it on Unreal Engine.
Unreal and Unity do much preprocessing and optimization of game content. All that takes place long before the game runs. Much of the smarts in Unreal Engine resides in Unreal Engine Editor, not the runtime. A metaverse client which displays dynamic user-created content from many creators doesn't have the benefit of that pre-optimization. There's not much instancing. Some content is badly optimized, has too much detail, oversized textures, or errors. You can't pre-bake lighting or shadows.
A metaverse client thus has most of the problems of an MMO client and some of the problems of a web client (browser).
Games are normally pre-tuned so that the client does not face these problems.
For a fully dynamic metaverse, content overload is the normal case, and frame rate has to be
maintained independent of content changes. Think of what happens when you doom-scroll a web page. It's like that, but in 3D.
(There's a class of limited metaverse which works like a game level loader. Users build a game level, the level is loaded during a long preload period, and then you can use it. Sinespace, Breakroom, High Fidelity, VRchat, and to some extent Decentraland are in that category. You build your parcel offline, then upload, but you can change some object transforms in world and move things around.
This allows some offline optimization. Clients for these systems are close to standard MMO clients.
Dynamic stuff is tied to the frame cycle.)
Unreal could probably make their system into a metaverse-in-a-box product, with some functions that now run in the editor running on servers or as background tasks in the client. So far, they haven't done that, although Sweeney has talked about it.
Sorry but you're not even answering the quoted part of the person you're replying to in your reply. Their point is that games on the Quest 2 standalone don't look like AAA PC titles because of the hardware limitations, not because of the missing technical chops of the programmers.
That may be the technical reason, but end users don’t care about the why, when they can get superior visuals on even last gen game consoles.
Sure, that’s not VR, but I would argue that VR actually needs better visuals to be compelling to avoid an uncanny valley-like effect, unless you go super stylised and cartoony, which may work fine for many entertainment virtual worlds/games but good luck with real world brands and business.
Personally, I don’t even want VR, for two reasons: 1. it shuts me out of the real world too much, I don’t want to be that disconnected for long periods of time because I have coworkers, family, deliveries, my cat, whatever other things around me that I need to be aware of, and 2. in its current form factor, it’s simply tiring. I was playing with a PSVR2 recently and it was cool, but after about 45 minutes my face just got tired of wearing a headset and I wanted to do something else, even though I would have happily kept playing the game itself.
I should have said: I don’t want VR for metaverse/virtual worlds, outside of pure entertainment. I don’t mind the negatives I mentioned for short bursts of entertainment, but for “serious” use, work/business and multiple hours per day — no thanks.
With respect to the metaverse being boring... I agree. Most VR experiences are lacking. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation (in my opinion only: I know how bearish HN is on anything VR). There aren't enough users to get enough investment in creating experiences, and not enough experiences to really get the users... There's the odd exception, like Alyx, but creating a whole metaverse is a much bigger challenge.
User creation is one option but you identify the limitations of this.
One thing that might change the situation is AI creation. Considering generative models can already create 3d models, creating VR worlds should be soon possible. Being able to produce large amounts of VR content quite easily could make something like a metaverse suddenly feasible.
It doesn't change your conclusion, but VRChat's Steam numbers are only about 40-50% of the entire population, however 50-60K peak per day is of course not massive, unless you are talking VR.
Even during the bussiest day of the year, new years, it is only close to around 100K total.
> I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers.
I certainly don't disagree with your NFT rant :-) but do disagree with the characterization of the nominal "metaverse."
Back in the late 90's early noughts it Dave Rosenthal did a research paper on what it would take to create a "stadium" with 50,000 people in it where a sporting event was held. And create the "environment" that one gets when you are actually at such a stadium.
One of the challenges is that physics does a lot of work for you, so people across the field from you talking aren't just as loud as the people behind you talking. What's more, everyone in such an event would want "good seats" but at a real event there are people all over the stadium.
You could select people in groups of 50 and put them into the same "box" of good seats, and if you built a spanning tree overlay different people "near" each other, but it is kind of like the 3 color map problem in that you're mapping 50,000 people (probably in two groups of 25,000 for "home" and "away" teams) where they can "hear" the people around them cheering/talking/Etc. Dave felt faces were impossible although these days you could train an AI model using a webcam and taking pictures of your upper body and face from different angles and have the model then generate your faces of the people "around" you.
Annunciation and site lines are pretty straight forward renders, but the actual event (assuming it was really being played by real people) would require a combination of rendering and motion capture from the real event.
The amount of network traffic going back and for in n^3 to the number of people "near" you as they form a neighbor volume.
And that is just an event where you are a passive spectator.
World of Warcraft instance servers would do dungeon raids of 40 players (in vanilla I don't know if they do that any more) and their challenge was data base updates for damage dealt, damage done, and environmental changes. Of course most of the play field is fixed for that very reason but a more realistic one that was deformable would require more physics again. We got that with the Phys-X engine and others in the early 2000's but they have yet to be able to spew what they are modelling to the other players so that everyone has the same view of what is going on around them.
All this misses the most important point; Nobody will pay $500 for a standalone high quality VR headset to experience a shitty VR "Stadium" ticket that should cost $30 if you go to a real damn stadium.
Nobody fantasizes about living a virtual life that emulates real life. They want to live a fantasy life. Plenty of people managed that with just mid 2000s era WoW. Metaverse has nothing to offer
"Nobody" is carrying a lot of weight there :-). Do you have any reasoning here for your point of view? (not criticizing it, just wondering how you got there given what we know.)
For example, a ticket for the 49ers on the 50 yard line is ~ $1200 - $1500 depending on how important it is as a game. Also, existing renderers for sports figures are quite good given the market for video games featuring them, so it isn't clear that the visual quality would not be "just as good." Finally, the ability to do SLAM for stadium events is so good they can paint graphics on a moving player in real time as it happens.
So this is how my reasoning about it goes; Let's say it costs you $1000 for super hi-def VR goggles.[1] And the NFL decides to charge you $200 to sit on the 50 yard line "virtually" [2]. Your initial investment is $1200 ($200 less than the actual seat). Presumably you and your buddies would be allowed to be "next to each other." So there you sit, as a group, in great seats watching the game how you want to watch it, and all your friends are chatting with you. Every time you do this you save another $1200 off the cost of doing it "for reals."
But how can we even know that something like this would even be fun? The answer lays in the enjoyability of watching a movie "together" in VR. I think this is something of a sleeper as it isn't "a thing" in many people's mind yet, but it is definitely better than "simulwatching" while you have discord running. I suspect "twitch watching parties" would also have a similar vibe.
Other than the sex in Second Life, just hanging out is a very popular reason for participating in a MMO type universe. Having your "idealized" avatar with your face morphed on to it with all of its expressions retained intact and I think that would be pretty powerful.
So that is why I think it could be a thing, but I'm interested in your take on it as well.
> Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games.
I'm sure this isn't true. We've built communities using email, IRC, MUDs and web forums with more lasting power than any AAA game.
The main problem for Meta et al is that they want to sell ads (or something) to companies, and to do that they created a virtual world. Why would anyone want to take part in a world like that? If you want to build a world, base it on the notion that most people want to connect with others who are like themselves and people they look up to, and they want to "own" their place in the world.
We don't want to be passive spectators in a dead, plastic world created by megacorps.
“Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games.”
Strange that this line has been misunderstood when ppl write that (of all thing) email has done fine in community building without looking great. I think it’s the perspective - metaverses expect us to be _inside_ looking around, not looking at it from the outside. Who hasn’t thought, while playing an AAA title game, “aw man, this would look so cool if I was IN THE GAME!” So with that perspective it makes sense that finally being offered the chance to “be inside the game” is disappointing when it looks terrible.
> Who hasn’t thought, while playing an AAA title game, “aw man, this would look so cool if I was IN THE GAME!”
I haven't, because every great game I've ever played has made me feel like I was in the game. Even games with primitive graphics or text-based games. The actual VR games I've played don't achieve that.
VR nausea wouldn't be an issue if they focused on making the thing accessible without a VR set to begin with. With the exception of a tiny minority of early adopters, people are not going to buy a VR headset nor even bother with the setup if they have no killer app to use it with.
Immersion is pretty much the point of VR, and until Elon's Neuralink gets their shit together (not holding my breath) VR headsets are the least bad option we have.
Pardon my ignorance .. but what exactly .. or technically .. is the metaverse? how does one go about building a client? Are there api docs to refer to? is there like an equivalent to the 3gpp documents defining the standard of 5G?
Mark going all-in on the metaverse to the extent of changing the company name has done wonders for my imposter syndrome. Call me a hater, but it is cathartic.
It’s such a win win scenario. Either it succeeds and we have cool new technology that other people can replicate for a fraction of the R&D price or Meta proceeds to light untold billions of dark dollars on fire that would have otherwise gone into investing in a much more 1984-esque future.
Maybe dystopia is not an inescapable black hole after all.
Or maybe it is but we have not crossed its event horizon yet.
But somehow entrusting our digital future to out-of-control oligopolists in the hope that they either crash and burn or their abilities get copied doesnt feel like an... optimal trajectory.
It seemed like the only people who could remotely have been considered excited about the concept was a very particular slice of the tech media echo chamber.
The Snow Crash Metaverse was kind of fun to think about. The Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse was DOA given the trashed reputation Facebook had by the time the pivot was announced.
A VR MMO social software is bound to be soulless if it is designed and operated by a company whose customers are advertisers that want to minimise risks and have the broadest possible audience.
Advertising is cancer, marketing is a blight upon every facet of humanity.
It should be no surprise a medium designed to facilitate marketing first, and "be barely engaging enough to ensure most people can visit and be exposed to marketing without having a strikingly negative impression" is going to be soulless.
Even in real life, businesses and stores are built where there is already demand. stores do not create demand. The commercial-first approach to a metaverse is akin to building a shopping mall deep in the Sahara desert and expecting people to move next to it and found a town. At most you'll get a town of the mall's employees.
The Internet was successful because it didn't start out as what it is today. It was about people and their creations first. I hypothesise if e-commerce was indeed the first feature of the Internet, vastly less people would be engaging with the Internet nowadays. Why go to a store with the most unrelenting salesman ever by your side, on a medium you have absolutely zero idea how to use and interpret?
It’s a different kind of viewport for interacting with people and content. The better the content, the more people. Content will differentiate itself via the traditional mechanisms (effective storytelling, using the new capabilities of the hardware, etc.).
There has been a crack in a wall in Gorilla Tag for two years. My son has been telling me they are releasing an update that lets you go in the crack and explore. It has been really interesting to contrast the flailing of Meta attempting to coherently describe their vision of the metaverse with the ability of the Gorilla Tag developers to build a community around their game.
At a very rudimentary level, I feel like Roblox is the closest thing to the concept of a metaverse as displayed in Ready Player One.
You have an avatar, that can traverse in and out of thousands of shared player made experiences, and you take your things with you. Is there much more to the concept?
Roblox is owned by a single company. Only Roblox can host Roblox servers and if Roblox goes out of business it disappears. For the web to disappear every single site has to stop functioning.
for the web to disappear, the companies that hold the infrastructures that power internet have to go out of business, the websites are mere content creators
I don't see how you can divorce from technilogical factors. There was a "there" there for smart phones and yet we didn't get them until a host of technical factors made them reach a certain form factor that was acceptable.
Folding Ideas (Dan Olson) did a pretty fantastic takedown of the Metaverse/Decentra failure nexus a little while ago, "The Future is a Dead Mall: Decentraland and the Metaverse". Like all things Dan, long as hell be he makes it very much worth it.
The Meta VR headsets, if I am not mistaken, had eye tracking, and a way to read your face gestures. Why would you let an ad company acquire that information?
sorta remarkable how meta blows $10+ billion on this failed initiative and the stock recovers much of the losses like nothing. goes to show how strong its core ad-powered business is.
What I really don't understand is, how are these ads so lucrative, I can honestly say I've never bought a single thing because of Instagram or FB advertising, I ask people around me and they either don't even use the platforms anymore or feel the same. Maybe it's getting me subconsciously and my whole life is a product of Instagram algorithms ? What is going ?
I'll admin my partner has promoted products on Instagram before so I guess there is her answer, but honestly, she found it pretty much useless in conversions and ultimately found much better success via other channels.
Why these companies valuations are so high I have no idea, but I kind of thing in a more just world, they'd go bust.
I’m hoping the concept of the “metaverse” can come and go before I ever care to learn what it actually means. Seems like just more made up nonsense NFT people are trying to shill.
the metaverse exists for 2 decades in second life. It's where people go to enter 'the world' and live an alternate life. It doesn't matter if it's not VR because the important thing is to trick the brain.
There is the open source version of it, OpenSimulator with a few thousands of diehard users having all sorts of fun in their own self-hosted simulators (https://opensimworld.com) .
Ironically these worlds will live long after zuckerberg's
and cryptobros' failed creations. More ironically, nobody invested a single dollar in those. Instead, 'the metaverse' became a testament to how money can dazzle and blind people's judgement.
One thing I can never get over is the fact that despite all their claims of going all in, Meta never seemed to actually be invested in the Metaverse themselves.
If they really believed in it, the first priority of the company would have been to make it so that every non hardware unit of their physical offices was shut down and people were told to go work from the metaverse within the spaces of their homes, beach houses, coffee shops or wherever they physically were. Every meeting would have been held in the metaverse. Every all-hands, in the metaverse. Every employee in charge of people would have been working with the product and engineering to create experiences for the team to bond and share time in within the Metaverse. Meta should have lived and breathed as a company within the metaverse. Pre layoffs that would have been more than 86,000 concurrent users who would have a daily direct impact on the product.
Instead, Mark wanted people to come back to the office.
The Metaverse by Meta died when their people touted it as the future of work and play but then did absolutely nothing to use it that way themselves.
This seems to be a common thing in "disruptive technology". The companies see it like "OMG we build this amazing environment, we can't wait for you to use it" but company policies see little to no value in actually adopting it themselves.
Sometimes this works if some niche will adopt it and let the system grow with them but it's very rare
Yeah. There’s a story I heard from the launch of Zelda: Breath of the wild (the last one). After what I assume was a flurry of work and crazy deadlines, they sent everyone on the development team home for 2 weeks to rest, and maybe just enjoy playing the game they had made with their family before it launched. After coming back in to the office, needless to say everyone had little things they personally wanted to tidy up or fix before the launch. So they did.
This seems like an obvious thing to do, but I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it. If your game is amazing, why isn’t your team taking the time to enjoy playing it?
some game developers do want to do this. i've gone out of my way in the past, even as a junior, to make efforts in offices to encourage developers to play their own game, and preferably with audio on and for more than 2 seconds at a time... and on the target platform instead of your turbocharged dev pc.
this can be as simple as a high score competition (imagine making a game with scoring mechanisms and no leaderboards, yes thats you Codemasters!)
i am still absolutely dumbfounded when i meet devs who do not play their own games, let alone play them thoroughly.
modern game development is mostly pretty brain dead, and nintendo and their first party studios tend to be exceptional, some of the very best out there.
The answer to your question, I'm afraid, is "time". Zelda was heavily pre-ordered, and they had a deadline to hit.
The fact that they could take two weeks off and still hit the window is a testament to their good planning. (And the fact that they had already announced a delay a year earlier.) But software is notoriously hard to plan, and a lot of things could easily have turned that two week time off into two weeks of 100-hour crunch time.
It sounds as if they planned a generous schedule, which is another great thing. Triple-A game studios are notorious for doing the Silicon Valley thing: make optimistic announcements and insist that everybody work unpaid overtime to make it happen. Artists, QA, and other "little people" often take the brunt of the hit there, and sure don't get rich off of it.
Taking the time to develop a product well, without killing your team, seems anathema to a lot of CEOs.
I worked in a small software development team within a large engineering (not software) company for quite a long time. We had an occasional change of manager, and I always remember one manager coming in; in his introductory meeting he said that in his opinion if any of his team were having to work overtime then he wasn't doing his job properly. That is the sort of management I like!
Not only for disruptive technologies. Or even "new" things, but the main product. I've seen far too many companies which produce something and then you look at their own processes and not only do they not use it, whatever they use is clearly inferior, but .. it's just there. And no one will pull the switch and say "okay, that's it. We now use our own things. End of story."
I agree with this at least for the Reality Labs group it would have been a way to eat your own cooking. Like normal remote work, a lot depends on roles and the ratio of sync to async in your schedule. Much can be done async within a time window if you build suitable workflows. Spending the hour or two insync time as an Avatar in a 360 6DOF 3D meeting room floating out at sea with your team would have its advantages over zoom squares.
I also think there are actual individual work needs that can be significantly improved by using 3D affordances but this is probably not most people's definition of anything Metaverse; it's more like applying game engine animation and realistic physics to real things we are doing now in a 2D WIMP Pancakeland.
> Spending the hour or two insync time as an Avatar in a 360 6DOF 3D meeting room floating out at sea with your team would have its advantages over zoom squares.
I never had the feeling they went "all in". Just that by their announcement they were priming the market, getting startups and vendors excited and creating stuff. Then only to wait, bide their time, see what sticks, and buy some promising innovations.
This is less unusual than you think. I remember talking to a Slack engineer about how poorly Slack was handling spotty/unstable connections (commonly known as "lie-fi", i.e. you have a good connection, it may even be fast, but connections to outside services will randomly fail left and right) and how frustrating it was because messages would simply time out rather than being automatically retried. He gave me a look of pure confusion as neither he nor anyone on his team were familiar with this experience as they were all "dog-fooding" Slack in the equivalent of office environments with wired high-speed connections.
How can you dogfood a product if the product itself isn’t ready for production use yet but its idea changes the fundamentals of how you work and hence develop.
It would be similar to criticizing the first ever bridge builders that they don’t use their own yet under-construction bridge for constructing that bridge, and instead transport their construction materials on water.
Meta gave everyone free Oculuses and encouraged Metaverse meetings back when I worked there.
Almost nobody used it because the product required a lot of setup, was downright ugly, and was completely inferior to the usual Zoom / Workplace Chat meetings in every way.
The whole thing had a very top-down feeling, with directors trying to convince managers to make their teams use the Metaverse while nobody in the company really knew what the Metaverse even was. It's great that Meta was still mildly engineer-driven and didn't force employees to use it, because in that case they would have ended with a Microsoft Teams situation.
It’s incredibly hard (read: impossible) to make top-down dogfood pushes across a massive company like Meta.
You have three options:
1) Create an team to internally sell it
2) Make it an ultimatum, and fire people if they don’t agree
3) Hope your marketing is good enough that you get grassroots adoption
Option 1 is a waste of money - your best sales folks should be making money, not doing internal processes.
Option 2 is terrible for moral and retention.
Option 3 is ineffective.
I’m sure Zuck would have loved to have the whole company on the metaverse if he could.
I think the metaverse would kill morale regardless of how it was implemented or who's idea it is.
I mean, just thinking about it kills most people's morale instantly.
It will be great for disabled people who can't do these things in the real world, but at the moment the tech is not good enough to complete with anything that has a real life equivalent already.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] thread> Now that the market noise has died down, maybe the metaverse can get a real chance at life.
That should have been “maybe the metaverse will get a second life.”
I thought it was cautious, nuanced but essentially positive.
This is the same reason 3D movies never work, the tech isn't there, and even if it was, I'm not convinced people would prefer it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Palms
However, stuff like Fortnite or Roblox, which seemingly fulfill many of the Metaverse promises, continue to be reasonably successful. But they don't try to market themselves as "the metaverse," and while their have been brand tie ins, the product is marketed to players, not businesses.
I don't think MMOs belong to the blockchain enthusiasts, but they don't belong to the blockchain naysayers either. Anyone can use them to support their argument. I think MMOs can be used as examples of what blockchain powered Metaverse tech could achieve, if they figured it out. And Axie is an example of something that already has taken off, though in a very flawed way.
AXS token: peaked at $176 in 2021, now around $7.
SLP token, the one players win: peaked at $0.37 in 2021, now around $0.002.
If you root cause on that you come back to, Zuckerberg made a big splash with his announcement and then followed up with .... nothing. As much as anything, these other things were filling a vacuum. Of course it got filled up with toxic garbage.
The inexplicable thing to me is purely that Meta has failed to deliver anything closely resembling an experience that represents their own advertised ambitions. Case in point, Horizon Worlds still even now hasn't even launched in my country (near to one of the top 10 economies in the world). How is it even possible that something the company put at existential level of importance hasn't even launched? It's either a massive fail of execution or they never really actually had their heart in it.
I do wonder if Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency", flattening of the org structure and refocusing on engineering leadership is in part borne from the reality check of basically failing to deliver on all this at a technical level.
Now if you want to invest in your own product and make it a success then Facebook has no experience of doing that. It's why Metaverse is doomed to fail. Add in that users are leery of Facebook's motives and their perversions for spying on your every waking moment. Hopefully they will implode and die.
Maybe in 10-20 years.
That just doesn't sound like the next trillion dollar idea. It's barely a repeatable million dollar idea.
Is there a possibility for some sort of new protocol and client software where people navigate 3D spaces that can be viewed by virtual reality headsets?
Sure, I think so. But that too would be dominated by some sort of 3D GeoCities.
It's not like people are going to be rushing to create the next Scottsdale Fashion Square and Apple Store in VR.
There's vaguely this idea floating around that you could give a potentially cool thing to teenagers, and that thing being a VR third-space of sorts, but I think it would take someone with a meaningful vision to elucidate what that looks like, because it's not VR malls, and it's not Second-Life et al.
It's totally something else. Who knows. Maybe it's chilling in a forest with a campfire and playing music together and sharing memes in tree houses.
What happened to doing something cool first instead of focusing on the money? Everything that took off that I can think of was cool first, and the money came second, then it was milked to death until it wasn't cool anymore.
Meta went straight to the end.
It is certainly not "mainstream", but it is where you find enthusiasm for VR and the cutting edge of hardware in use.
A lot of Meta's Horizon Worlds efforts wind up reading like "those who forget the past [Second Life] wind up repeating it (poorly)".
Interesting, so what tech are we talking about?
> As it turns out, people really like collaborative open worlds, as evidenced by Fortnite’s estimated 80 million monthly players
Ah, yes, 3D games. The metaverse killer app was hiding in plain virtual reality. But... this nagging doubt...
> metaverse companies attracted $120 billion in funding during the first half of 2022 alone
Which prompted me to prompt my trusted GPT-0 LLM: "cost to setup a game studio?". The answer was eloquent yet hallucination inducing:
In the United States, rough cost of setting up and running an MMO games dev studio for 12 months is almost $618,000 including federal withholding, social security, insurance and state tax and excluding variable costs such as Internet, electricity, heat, etc.
So by GPT-0's reckoning, you could use the metaverse funding of $240 bln per year to fund 240K (two-hundred forty thousand) game studios per year.
Put that in your meta-pipe and smoke it.
2. You shouldn't trust this as even a ballpark estimate. It seems ridiculously low, unless you're talking about a 2 or 3 person studio. (And see #1 above.)
Yes this is the low end. But keep in mind you could also buy outright four Activisions with that annual spending.
Which means that the metaverse funding of $240 billion/year would actually only fund a mere 24,000 reasonably-sized MMO game studios per year.
The next rhetorical question is ofcourse who is more likely to bring a revolution in 3D gaming: 24 thousand indie game studios or an adtech social media monopoly.
Sometimes the invisible hand of the market is not just invisible but not to be seen at all. Truly missing in action.
I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are testing it. It's a long way from feature complete, but the graphics part is working nicely. Users need a midrange gamer PC (NVidia 1060 or better, at least 6 CPUs). This is a reasonably difficult problem, but it's not impossible.
Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, says that the 600 million people using game virtual worlds should hold an online wake for the metaverse. He means Fortnite and Roblox users. The metaverse is alive and well for gamers. But it's not headed for Facebook/Twitter scale.
So what went wrong? The NFT clown car, and Zuckerberg, went wrong.
The NFT guys are all Make Money Fast. Most of them never even shipped a virtual world. That didn't stop them from collecting money from suckers. Slowly, at the rate of about one every few weeks, the SEC is bringing the hammer down on those guys.[1] The ones who shipped something just slapped something together and called it a metaverse. If you haven't visited Decentraland, check it out. It's 1990s graphics quality. It's also empty; it runs about 260 concurrent users.
The whole Meta fiasco, and its motivations, has been covered elsewhere.
So what are the real problems?
First, the metaverse is boring. If you build a good virtual world, it's about as interesting as real life. Most forms of entertainment have an interesting event density about 10x to 100x that of real life. Metaverses don't. You have to make your own fun. Second Life has this problem. It's fun for people who are into building, creating, and exploring. It's not fun for people who want to be passively entertained. This limits the market.
The game-derived metaverses, Fortnite and Roblox, are games with social areas on the side. Fortnite discovered that by accident. Their game has rounds of play, and you have to wait for the next cycle to start. So they have a "lobby". People hanging out in the lobby to socialize became a thing, and they built on that to allow users to have social spaces.
Second, there are technical problems. Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games. This is quite possible, but not on a $99 WalMart laptop or a phone. "Cloud rendering", as with Google Stadia (closed), Vortex (closed), and NVidia GeForce Now (still around but the price keeps going up) is an option, but the economics don't work out. Nobody can do free to play with cloud rendering. Metaverses on a current gamer PC can work quite well, but most people don't have those.
Third, there's the VR nausea problem. If you put people in a VR environment where they can move freely but the visual world is not rigidly locked to the real world at all times, about 5% - 15% of the population becomes nauseated. VRchat shows that there's a market for this anyway, but it's about 22,000 concurrent users. The only real stat in this business is how many people are logged on right now, measured from outside the system. All other numbers can be "adjusted".
Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse. These are game worlds. A branch of Sotheby's or Hermes does not make sense. Also, showing fashion items in worlds with crap graphics just devalues the brand.
So, it's a niche. Right now, there are seven games on Steam with over 100,000 users logged in. That's probably the size of the metaverse market.
[1] https:/&#...
Technical problems and VR nausea will both be solved inevitably as hardware gets better and cheaper — which it always does, thanks to the magic of capitalism. There's also a lot of that magic happening in the world of GPUs right now.
The boringness seems like a game design problem. Someone will crack it sooner or later. I agree new mechanics are needed, and it'll surely take some time for something to emerge that takes off. This will also get easier as hardware gets better.
The "brands" thing seems the least concerning of all. Where the people go, the advertisers will follow. I think, in some way, this will also be solved by people figuring out good game mechanics for the Metaverse, too. Once there are incentive structures in place, advertising will find a way to slide in.
I wish. It's not happening from NVidia.[1] NVidia will sell you an awesome GPU for an awesome price, but price/performance is advancing very slowly. NVidia's current entry level GPU card for desktops is $400. Also, NVidia's laptop GPUs that dissipate 130 watts are kind of a problem.
> The boringness seems like a game design problem.
Yes. We might see solutions from VR natives. See Phia's Virtual Reality Show.[1] Phia, in her early 20s and into VR for years, talks with insight about both gear and the social aspects of virtual worlds.[2] So far, though, no major breakthroughs.
The Yuga Labs / Otherside people tried making their virtual world a very expensive and exclusive experience to get into, in hopes of getting a non-loser crowd. But that turned out to be a Make Money Fast scheme that didn't deliver. Now the SEC is after them.[3]
[1] https://www.techspot.com/review/2206-geforce-rtx-3070-laptop...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg_XB8It240
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-11/bored-ape...
Just a general note: this isn't always the pattern the magic of capitalism gives us. There are as many examples of the reverse of that as supporting it.
As a quick example: toasters. The magic of capitalism has made sure that actually good toasters no longer exist in the consumer market.
> Once there are incentive structures in place, advertising will find a way to slide in.
Which, in the end, is what will keep me out.
That's cool, but...why would I want to use it? I think this is the fundamental problem that bullshitters like Zuckerberg can't actually solve. (And no, forcing employees to use it doesn't count.)
When gamers try Second Life, they complain that it's s-l-o-w. That's a fixable problem for people with gamer PCs. They have enough CPU and GPU to do this right. The classic clients are single-thread and OpenGL, so they can't use modern gamer hardware effectively.
If you get rid of the sluggishness, user acceptance improves considerably. Or so says the literature on game design. You get flow. Performance and graphics quality alone are not enough for a win, but not having them means a lose.
I don't have all the answers. But I've pushed things forward a bit.
Lots of people are now making noise about metaverses and AI. Unfortunately, most of the people making noise are the same clowns that pushed NFTs. But there's some good work going on. This has the potential to make metaverses less empty, and human users will have NPCs with which to interact. It can definitely solve the emptyness problem.
NPCs are getting smarter. One of my NPCs in Second Life has a T-shirt that says on the back "Trainee - Someday we'll be in charge." That's less of a joke and more of a threat now.
And that’s a narrow subset of a subset of just single market.
It seems that Facebook was aiming at something bigger than that but they actually couldn’t even offer a coherent argument on what VR could offer outsiders of gaming.
Running over people in cars? Who would be the players to volunteering to being ran over?
IMHO, this is a crucial and often overlooked point. In order to gain popularity, a metaverse platform needs the sort of offbeat creator trendsetters who tend to push boundaries. Without them, the platform feels sterile and business-y. With the sort of content they will produce, however, family-friendly advertisers will run for the hills.
As Neal Stephenson wrote in Snow Crash (1992):
>You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.
I mean, honestly, this in itself is one of the big problems with how our current society and economy work. The idea that most of our world should be "family-friendly" in the sense of censoring many perfectly healthy parts of human interaction and experience is toxic.
The current implementation, that often lumps most queer topics in with those that are "not family-friendly", is orders of magnitude worse.
That's just those who can use VR at all. Three members of my immediate family can't because of eyesight issues, including one who's blind in one eye. According to the Quest manual, I have a condition that means I should contact a doctor before using it.
If I worked for a company pushing this, I'd have a hard time believing any claims they made about supporting diversity in the workplace. Masses of people won't be able to take part in a society that depends on VR for communication and collaboration.
Eyesight issues don't stop you from using VR. In VR you will have the same eyesight issues as you do in real life. If you use glasses, then you can still wear glasses when you use VR.
No problem! Just strap this blurry contraption over your existing issue to make it BETTER™.
Are you trying to suggest that prescription glasses don't actually improve people's eyesight?
Not a single clue, and if you think natural light is the same, I suggest a new posture to watch TV.
Maybe you will learn something, maybe not.
Distance doesn't matter for light. It just adds a delay that is the distance divided by the speed of light
>vomiting direct light with high intensity into them
Most VR headsets are only 100 nits. That's less intense than than the intensity of light by being in an indoor room. Going outside is many magnitudes more intense.
>natural light is the same
What is "natural light"?
VR can simulate a specific distance, and your eye will focus on that, but the common current tech can't simulate different distances.
Your eye focus will be telling you it's a 12ft away screen or whatever, even when your binocular vision is telling you a flying tomato is right next to you.
Did you miss that I said one of them is blind in one eye? What glasses fix this?
One with a strong prescription. If you are fully blind in one eye you can still use VR. You will just see monoscopic just as you do outside of VR.
Interestingly, even people who are blind in one eye can enjoy VR, including the perception of depth.
Binocular vision is only one of the ways we get 3D cues, and not even the main one. The main cue is motion parallax: how things move when we move our head (or body). This one still works even with a single eye.
I have read reports of people with one functioning eye enjoying VR. Just as in real life their eyes do not give a 3D image. Just as in real life, their brain can still infer 3D just fine.
Frankly my TV is just a better gaming experience.
On the other hand, I tried out some VR titles that just weren't very fun.
I think this is an issue of game design. Once the "wow" factor gets old, games still need to hold their own
Of course for anyone who is not fond of moving or exercise due to health or other personal reasons, they’re not going to like the need to move for VR for now. I’ve seen some potential near term solutions though
As for the face bucket of isolation problem that you’ve cited, the latest gen VR devices have nearly solved this problem. Most AR focused devices like the nreal or meta quest pro are more open instead of enclosed. I have peripheral vision because it doesn’t hug my face. I’m guessing that Apple will also solve this problem within 1-2 years. Video games was just an afterthought for Apple Reality which is a good sign
Well yeah. Horizon Worlds runs directly on the Quest 2, not on a gaming PC.
Obviously anyone can achieve GTA V quality if you're powering it with a gaming PC, just by basing it on Unreal Engine.
It's a bit disingenuous to act like you've achieved something Meta couldn't. Now if you can get GTA V quality to run natively on Quest 2 hardware, then let's talk.
> Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games.
Where's your evidence for that? People happily play mobile games all day long that are nowhere near AAA, and they use social media too. There's zero indication at all that graphics quality is the problem. People adore Minecraft and that's not exactly known for its AAA graphics.
Regardless of how you feel about meta, it’s really impressive that they were able to ship a decent 6DOF, standalone, VR headset at $299 which is relatively easy to use for even normal people.
Going on a tangent, even after all this time people still don’t understand what the metaverse is. The metaverse is simply an AR / VR platform that has online access. That’s it. So this why Fortnite, voxels, and decentraland are NOT part of the metaverse, but Roblox, Minecraft, Rec Room, and Horizon are part because they all have VR support.
And that’s because Meta did a shitty job to tell people what it is! Have you heard or seen one of their ads? In Germany, they go like „the Metaverse will help doctors to do complicated surgery. It might be virtual, but the Metaverse will have a real impact“
It’s like pure essence of bullshit, on the level of those self-reordering fridges promised in the 90ies. If Meta would just release a single, convincing use case now, maybe things would look different. But they don’t, because they can’t, because there isn’t one. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
I'd like to highlight these parts again. Even as someone who has a desktop gaming pc and all: Base stations suck. Wired VR sucks.
Having wires get in your way while you are in VR is such a shit thing. I would never get back to it, not even for a generational leap in graphics quality.
And base stations automatically mean you need far more space (or "creative solutions"), something people living in e.g. flats don't have. Or don't want to have. Sure, I could probably rearrange half a room around it, but VR is not that great and probably never will be. Almost nothing would be.
Wasn't Facebook losing money on each headset sold, though?
Unreal and Unity do much preprocessing and optimization of game content. All that takes place long before the game runs. Much of the smarts in Unreal Engine resides in Unreal Engine Editor, not the runtime. A metaverse client which displays dynamic user-created content from many creators doesn't have the benefit of that pre-optimization. There's not much instancing. Some content is badly optimized, has too much detail, oversized textures, or errors. You can't pre-bake lighting or shadows.
A metaverse client thus has most of the problems of an MMO client and some of the problems of a web client (browser). Games are normally pre-tuned so that the client does not face these problems. For a fully dynamic metaverse, content overload is the normal case, and frame rate has to be maintained independent of content changes. Think of what happens when you doom-scroll a web page. It's like that, but in 3D.
(There's a class of limited metaverse which works like a game level loader. Users build a game level, the level is loaded during a long preload period, and then you can use it. Sinespace, Breakroom, High Fidelity, VRchat, and to some extent Decentraland are in that category. You build your parcel offline, then upload, but you can change some object transforms in world and move things around. This allows some offline optimization. Clients for these systems are close to standard MMO clients. Dynamic stuff is tied to the frame cycle.)
Unreal could probably make their system into a metaverse-in-a-box product, with some functions that now run in the editor running on servers or as background tasks in the client. So far, they haven't done that, although Sweeney has talked about it.
I'm part of the organization that picked up the old High Fidelity codebase.
Sure, that’s not VR, but I would argue that VR actually needs better visuals to be compelling to avoid an uncanny valley-like effect, unless you go super stylised and cartoony, which may work fine for many entertainment virtual worlds/games but good luck with real world brands and business.
Personally, I don’t even want VR, for two reasons: 1. it shuts me out of the real world too much, I don’t want to be that disconnected for long periods of time because I have coworkers, family, deliveries, my cat, whatever other things around me that I need to be aware of, and 2. in its current form factor, it’s simply tiring. I was playing with a PSVR2 recently and it was cool, but after about 45 minutes my face just got tired of wearing a headset and I wanted to do something else, even though I would have happily kept playing the game itself.
User creation is one option but you identify the limitations of this.
One thing that might change the situation is AI creation. Considering generative models can already create 3d models, creating VR worlds should be soon possible. Being able to produce large amounts of VR content quite easily could make something like a metaverse suddenly feasible.
https://developer.nvidia.com/omniverse/simready-assets
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/omniverse
*edit: Rapidly Generate 3D Assets for Virtual Worlds with Generative AI https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/rapidly-generate-3d-assets...
Even during the bussiest day of the year, new years, it is only close to around 100K total.
That's interesting, is that public?
Is there Linux support?
Email info@animats.com
> Is there Linux support?
Yes.
Back in the late 90's early noughts it Dave Rosenthal did a research paper on what it would take to create a "stadium" with 50,000 people in it where a sporting event was held. And create the "environment" that one gets when you are actually at such a stadium.
One of the challenges is that physics does a lot of work for you, so people across the field from you talking aren't just as loud as the people behind you talking. What's more, everyone in such an event would want "good seats" but at a real event there are people all over the stadium.
You could select people in groups of 50 and put them into the same "box" of good seats, and if you built a spanning tree overlay different people "near" each other, but it is kind of like the 3 color map problem in that you're mapping 50,000 people (probably in two groups of 25,000 for "home" and "away" teams) where they can "hear" the people around them cheering/talking/Etc. Dave felt faces were impossible although these days you could train an AI model using a webcam and taking pictures of your upper body and face from different angles and have the model then generate your faces of the people "around" you.
Annunciation and site lines are pretty straight forward renders, but the actual event (assuming it was really being played by real people) would require a combination of rendering and motion capture from the real event.
The amount of network traffic going back and for in n^3 to the number of people "near" you as they form a neighbor volume.
And that is just an event where you are a passive spectator.
World of Warcraft instance servers would do dungeon raids of 40 players (in vanilla I don't know if they do that any more) and their challenge was data base updates for damage dealt, damage done, and environmental changes. Of course most of the play field is fixed for that very reason but a more realistic one that was deformable would require more physics again. We got that with the Phys-X engine and others in the early 2000's but they have yet to be able to spew what they are modelling to the other players so that everyone has the same view of what is going on around them.
Nobody fantasizes about living a virtual life that emulates real life. They want to live a fantasy life. Plenty of people managed that with just mid 2000s era WoW. Metaverse has nothing to offer
For example, a ticket for the 49ers on the 50 yard line is ~ $1200 - $1500 depending on how important it is as a game. Also, existing renderers for sports figures are quite good given the market for video games featuring them, so it isn't clear that the visual quality would not be "just as good." Finally, the ability to do SLAM for stadium events is so good they can paint graphics on a moving player in real time as it happens.
So this is how my reasoning about it goes; Let's say it costs you $1000 for super hi-def VR goggles.[1] And the NFL decides to charge you $200 to sit on the 50 yard line "virtually" [2]. Your initial investment is $1200 ($200 less than the actual seat). Presumably you and your buddies would be allowed to be "next to each other." So there you sit, as a group, in great seats watching the game how you want to watch it, and all your friends are chatting with you. Every time you do this you save another $1200 off the cost of doing it "for reals."
But how can we even know that something like this would even be fun? The answer lays in the enjoyability of watching a movie "together" in VR. I think this is something of a sleeper as it isn't "a thing" in many people's mind yet, but it is definitely better than "simulwatching" while you have discord running. I suspect "twitch watching parties" would also have a similar vibe.
Other than the sex in Second Life, just hanging out is a very popular reason for participating in a MMO type universe. Having your "idealized" avatar with your face morphed on to it with all of its expressions retained intact and I think that would be pretty powerful.
So that is why I think it could be a thing, but I'm interested in your take on it as well.
[1] https://store.bigscreenvr.com/products/bigscreen-beyond
[2] https://theathletic.com/4522408/2023/05/16/nfl-average-ticke...
I'm sure this isn't true. We've built communities using email, IRC, MUDs and web forums with more lasting power than any AAA game.
The main problem for Meta et al is that they want to sell ads (or something) to companies, and to do that they created a virtual world. Why would anyone want to take part in a world like that? If you want to build a world, base it on the notion that most people want to connect with others who are like themselves and people they look up to, and they want to "own" their place in the world.
We don't want to be passive spectators in a dead, plastic world created by megacorps.
Strange that this line has been misunderstood when ppl write that (of all thing) email has done fine in community building without looking great. I think it’s the perspective - metaverses expect us to be _inside_ looking around, not looking at it from the outside. Who hasn’t thought, while playing an AAA title game, “aw man, this would look so cool if I was IN THE GAME!” So with that perspective it makes sense that finally being offered the chance to “be inside the game” is disappointing when it looks terrible.
I haven't, because every great game I've ever played has made me feel like I was in the game. Even games with primitive graphics or text-based games. The actual VR games I've played don't achieve that.
VR nausea wouldn't be an issue if they focused on making the thing accessible without a VR set to begin with. With the exception of a tiny minority of early adopters, people are not going to buy a VR headset nor even bother with the setup if they have no killer app to use it with.
True, but they're still a bad option.
Maybe dystopia is not an inescapable black hole after all.
Or maybe it is but we have not crossed its event horizon yet.
But somehow entrusting our digital future to out-of-control oligopolists in the hope that they either crash and burn or their abilities get copied doesnt feel like an... optimal trajectory.
The Snow Crash Metaverse was kind of fun to think about. The Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse was DOA given the trashed reputation Facebook had by the time the pivot was announced.
Quest 2 is pretty good but it’s not ready yet for a few more years. Their software and “games” are just soulless
Advertising is cancer, marketing is a blight upon every facet of humanity.
It should be no surprise a medium designed to facilitate marketing first, and "be barely engaging enough to ensure most people can visit and be exposed to marketing without having a strikingly negative impression" is going to be soulless.
Even in real life, businesses and stores are built where there is already demand. stores do not create demand. The commercial-first approach to a metaverse is akin to building a shopping mall deep in the Sahara desert and expecting people to move next to it and found a town. At most you'll get a town of the mall's employees.
The Internet was successful because it didn't start out as what it is today. It was about people and their creations first. I hypothesise if e-commerce was indeed the first feature of the Internet, vastly less people would be engaging with the Internet nowadays. Why go to a store with the most unrelenting salesman ever by your side, on a medium you have absolutely zero idea how to use and interpret?
There has been a crack in a wall in Gorilla Tag for two years. My son has been telling me they are releasing an update that lets you go in the crack and explore. It has been really interesting to contrast the flailing of Meta attempting to coherently describe their vision of the metaverse with the ability of the Gorilla Tag developers to build a community around their game.
You have an avatar, that can traverse in and out of thousands of shared player made experiences, and you take your things with you. Is there much more to the concept?
Roblox is owned by a single company. Only Roblox can host Roblox servers and if Roblox goes out of business it disappears. For the web to disappear every single site has to stop functioning.
If there was a there there, the category would already be occupied and its products would be ubiquitous.
As it stands, most people don't see value in it as anything beyond a Google Glass or a game console attachment.
https://youtu.be/EiZhdpLXZ8Q
I'll admin my partner has promoted products on Instagram before so I guess there is her answer, but honestly, she found it pretty much useless in conversions and ultimately found much better success via other channels.
Why these companies valuations are so high I have no idea, but I kind of thing in a more just world, they'd go bust.
There is the open source version of it, OpenSimulator with a few thousands of diehard users having all sorts of fun in their own self-hosted simulators (https://opensimworld.com) .
Ironically these worlds will live long after zuckerberg's and cryptobros' failed creations. More ironically, nobody invested a single dollar in those. Instead, 'the metaverse' became a testament to how money can dazzle and blind people's judgement.
If they really believed in it, the first priority of the company would have been to make it so that every non hardware unit of their physical offices was shut down and people were told to go work from the metaverse within the spaces of their homes, beach houses, coffee shops or wherever they physically were. Every meeting would have been held in the metaverse. Every all-hands, in the metaverse. Every employee in charge of people would have been working with the product and engineering to create experiences for the team to bond and share time in within the Metaverse. Meta should have lived and breathed as a company within the metaverse. Pre layoffs that would have been more than 86,000 concurrent users who would have a daily direct impact on the product.
Instead, Mark wanted people to come back to the office.
The Metaverse by Meta died when their people touted it as the future of work and play but then did absolutely nothing to use it that way themselves.
Sometimes this works if some niche will adopt it and let the system grow with them but it's very rare
This seems like an obvious thing to do, but I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it. If your game is amazing, why isn’t your team taking the time to enjoy playing it?
this can be as simple as a high score competition (imagine making a game with scoring mechanisms and no leaderboards, yes thats you Codemasters!)
i am still absolutely dumbfounded when i meet devs who do not play their own games, let alone play them thoroughly.
modern game development is mostly pretty brain dead, and nintendo and their first party studios tend to be exceptional, some of the very best out there.
When I asked for testing time and space with the team, management shut me down. It's like selling a good product is secondary XD
There was a day when this sort of thing was pretty common. Close to standard practice.
The fact that they could take two weeks off and still hit the window is a testament to their good planning. (And the fact that they had already announced a delay a year earlier.) But software is notoriously hard to plan, and a lot of things could easily have turned that two week time off into two weeks of 100-hour crunch time.
It sounds as if they planned a generous schedule, which is another great thing. Triple-A game studios are notorious for doing the Silicon Valley thing: make optimistic announcements and insist that everybody work unpaid overtime to make it happen. Artists, QA, and other "little people" often take the brunt of the hit there, and sure don't get rich off of it.
Taking the time to develop a product well, without killing your team, seems anathema to a lot of CEOs.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
I also think there are actual individual work needs that can be significantly improved by using 3D affordances but this is probably not most people's definition of anything Metaverse; it's more like applying game engine animation and realistic physics to real things we are doing now in a 2D WIMP Pancakeland.
What are the advantages that would have?
It would be similar to criticizing the first ever bridge builders that they don’t use their own yet under-construction bridge for constructing that bridge, and instead transport their construction materials on water.
Almost nobody used it because the product required a lot of setup, was downright ugly, and was completely inferior to the usual Zoom / Workplace Chat meetings in every way.
The whole thing had a very top-down feeling, with directors trying to convince managers to make their teams use the Metaverse while nobody in the company really knew what the Metaverse even was. It's great that Meta was still mildly engineer-driven and didn't force employees to use it, because in that case they would have ended with a Microsoft Teams situation.
1) Create an team to internally sell it
2) Make it an ultimatum, and fire people if they don’t agree
3) Hope your marketing is good enough that you get grassroots adoption
Option 1 is a waste of money - your best sales folks should be making money, not doing internal processes. Option 2 is terrible for moral and retention. Option 3 is ineffective. I’m sure Zuck would have loved to have the whole company on the metaverse if he could.
I mean, just thinking about it kills most people's morale instantly.
It will be great for disabled people who can't do these things in the real world, but at the moment the tech is not good enough to complete with anything that has a real life equivalent already.