Metaverse Metaverse? Metaverse | Hacker News Reader

Metaverse Metaverse? Metaverse

ben-evans.com

17 pointsdoener11 comments

Facebook pushing this reminds me of the time they gaslighted the news media into producing short form video.

The difference is you can't even get a decent dev kit for AR consumer applications. Other applications are proceeding just fine: the US Army bought a Hololens 2 for each and every soldier, you can use an AR headset to view maintenance manuals on a jet engine when you are inside it, view the plans for a construction site when you are at the construction site, etc.

Other applications produce enough value from the headset to justify the cost (how much money can you lose if you screw up a concrete pour?) but consumer apps struggle against TV sets, smartphones, video game consoles and other mature technologies.

I like the theme that some video game technologies are going to "break out". Specifically I see people working on "social robots" in the adjacent building to my office and it seems that they could take the same sensors and software and have it control the actions of a video game character rather than a custom-built machine.

But NFTs? That's something that drives good people away. I've gotten into what I call "subartistic" activity in the last year. A big part of it is the desire to make physical objects, but also I am really not so good at it and to get better at it I want to connect (or not) connect with people based on the merit of the work.

If I got involved with NFTs I could find "friends" who think my farts are music so long as they are part of an NFT; if I can make them believe they can sell them to a greater fool, all the better.

That's not what I want or need.

Defining the merit of work is quite hard. What makes a Picasso or Warhol valuable? Much of it seems to simply be that rich ppl became interested in it and were willing to pay a high price for it

You are absolutely correct. Or for NFTs. The value is what someone is willing to pay for it. And that always changes with time. Scarcity always helps in raising prices. The supply/demand angle.

I find it very disappointing that these articles never mention VRChat, the current largest VR social media platform and just use Facebook press material to guide their opinion on the metaverse. VRChat is leagues ahead of all the competition. It has an established ecosystem of players, communities, maps, games, content, and a whole network of modders finding and creating features users actually want.

Right now, I can meet my irl friend to go avatar shopping for a fun looking character with full body tracking (because full body feels 100x more immersive), head to a VR strip club to get drunk with strangers and watch people poledance using roomscale stripper pole setups, go play a boxing mini game against a person roleplaying in a Donald Duck avatar I met at the bar, then finish off the night of regret by watching YouTube videos in a virtual movie theater with 5 other people. You probably can't do that on whatever FB will push out.

My experience with it is sub-par. The performance is so bad that even on my fairly high end PC that I only hit around 60 FPS in a populated lobby. It's hard to be immersed when it feels like you've just got a screen strapped to your face and things momentarily warp because the VR runtime is trying to smooth things out. Not to mention the copyright infringement, lack of child safety features. VRChat is a disaster and I'm not sure how it's still going.

Sansar was a better experience for me. Much smoother, things moved more realistically and hence it was more immersive, and the content is 'proper' I guess you could say. And there's a marketplace for it.

Yeah, for a first timer the experience sucks. Public lobbies are cesspools because of toxic people and anyone can join in with large polygon models which causes everyone to lag. Moderation is almost non-existent. VRChat is also very nsfw and not a place for kids.

I was lucky to have a friend connect me to moderated lobbies where everyone is verified to be 21+ and etiquette is enforced by moderators.

Pfft. The Microsoft product that I am paid to peddle in my day job, has used the term Metaverse for its central DB for over a decade, it's not a new term at all. It's also been used heavily in science-future writing for probably longer than that.

This reminds me of the time when all the young Go programmers stole the term Gopher from us.

The term is from Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel _Snow Crash_.

Having read it years ago, I knew it was referenced, but I wasn't sure if he coined it.

I recently wrote about this topic and am in agreement that the term is poorly defined and thus you can’t really define how the metaverse is different from today’s Internet. My conclusion is that the VR-ness is the least interesting aspect of it. The most interesting aspect to me is that ability to do business with anyone and to do so anonymously (as your avatar).

https://www.startuplevelup.com/musings-on-the-metaverse/

I also think that Discord is the platform most likely to become the eventual metaverse and would love to invest or be involved somehow!

It feels like this article uses 10 paragraphs to say nothing at all.

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