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Comment by jhoelzel | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling that the metaverse is going to be completely unusable through over-engeneering.

What kind of made second life great in the beginning was its roughness and that you could really discover stuff because everybody could basically do whatever they wanted. I have a lingering feeling that this is not going to be so simple this time around.

That said, as long as I dont get a "holodeck" like in Star-Trek I don't think that I'll put on a headset for this.... If im honest with you I dont even want to put on a headset to have an immersive experience with current gen video games, so why would I do this....... to hang out?!

Lastly the way people talk about the metaverse, I am pretty sure that every experience I can possibly have will be monetized to the max. So please wake me once there are pirated servers of the metaverse, leaving me to actually being able to experience a limitless world, not one where the limit is my credit card limit.

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On a whim I picked up The Metaverse, Matthew Ball's book released last week (7/19). I am only about 1/3 of the way through it, so I can't recommend it yet, but I have two main takeaways so far...

1. If you can get through the marketing slog thrown out by FB, Epic, and others, many ideas behind a/the metaverse aren't terrible. Perhaps even good. As an old fogie myself, I cannot see spending hours/days in it, but I have to acknowledge there will be a market for it. (Granted, the author is a VC, so he might be a little biased here.)

2. We are a LOT further away from a functioning metaverse than people think/expect/hope. Many challenges exist across the tech (networking, storage, hardware, processing power, etc.). Not to mention identity, governance, and interoperability. Surely many more. Predictions in tech are always foolish, but I would be surprised if we approached anything like a 'Snow Crash' metaverse in the next decade.

I would realllllly like to know what tge heck the "metaverse" actually is?

I think Mark just put out some buzzwords to buy time.

Like Web 3.0, it is whatever you want it to be.

There's a lot of playing fast and loose with the definition right now, but the lowest common denominator is basically online virtual worlds with more Web3 and XR. Think Roblox + VR + blockchain.

The consulting companies (Gartner, McKinsey) will tell you that something like Roblox is metaverse already but that Web3 and VR are integral to what it's becoming. I.e., it's tech that's already here, just in its infancy and not working in concert yet. The envisioned ideal combines it into an interoperable ecosystem where you're making global payments and moving virtual posessions from one platform to another.

Games are often the example, but imagine 3D multiplayer environments for collaboratively architecting buildings, public transportation systems, computer chips, or software. You use voice and gestures to speak components into existence and shape flows. Other engineers are in the environment with you in real time. Tools are created to assist you, and you can transport them from one platform to another while retaining ownership. That's sort of the promise and what people are excited about.

Where we are now is like looking at a clunky applet from the early days of the web and going, "This is Web 2.0. Someday all our apps will run in the browser." It maybe was Web 2.0 in an aspirational sense, but it hadn't really been realized yet. Same with the metaverse.

That shows a misunderstanding of how architecture, transport system design, and computer chips are built.

The important elements are calculated. TThey're not created with an airy wave of the hand and some vague hopes.

Transport flows, airliner wings, electronic circuits, and more are literally engineered with differential equations. Voice + gesture is not an effective way to work with them.

A more plausible benefit would be visibility of more parts of the system at the same time. This could be especially useful for software. Multiple wall-sized zoomable displays of all the elements in a big project would be much easier to work with than our current small screens, which provide tiny windows into a very much larger space.

> The important elements are calculated. TThey're not created with an airy wave of the hand and some vague hopes.

Why not?

AI (DALL-E) can now build images that were once painstakingly created by graphic designers selecting from stock photography and creating layer masks. Now they can use language as a starting point and then adjust the details.

What if you and a group could start with a concept: "a hotel shaped like a pyramid," and then AI does those calculations and prompts you for more specifications? We're on the verge of automating those kinds of tasks, and a collaborative environment only enriches the possibilities.

Sounds like absolute nonsense to me. Blockchain is irrelevant.

What they want is platform control over the next big medium.

Some of it is hype, like blockchain, which doesn't make sense without massive legal and economic changes. But there's no they per se. Metaverse != Meta, they're just investing in it.

Well, if someone was to pull it off at this point in time it would be Zuck, but we're a couple of years early me thinks. Or maybe we won't go meta/vr at all.

We are like 12-13 years into the VR renaissance and locomotion is still not fixed besides some novelty approaches. If they can’t fix it AR is all that is left and we still don’t have the computing nor the displays for proper immersion. It’s still a very long road ahead…

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