Who is still inside the metaverse?
nymag.com
nymag.com
I own a Valve Index and I mostly don't play it because of it's just really a hassle to have to physically stand up (or even seated) and to wave your arms around, only to forget how to reload your damn gun after a couple of weeks/months of not playing.
I wish that people built simple keyboard-and-mouse VR games that I could enjoy the VRness of the experience using my fingers and palms like I'm used to in the past 30 years.
I want CSGO VR, not a good-looking-cheap-knock-off that I need to figure out how to reload each gun and where to draw the grenade from. I want Cities Skylines VR where I can see my city from above wherever I look. I want Red Alert VR.
The most enjoyable games I currently have that is worth whipping VR out for are those I can play with a regular XBox controller which I'm quite familiar with already.
I enjoy VR games for their easy-start/easy-stop hassle-free/memorization-free aspect. If I want a 3 hour session of complex game, I start my PC. If I have 10 minutes and just want to PLAY during those 10 minutes, I pick up my Quest2 and just... go. Whether I played yesterday or month ago, they tend to be intuitive. I absolutely positively do not want mouse and keyboard to be part of my VR experience :-).
Maybe your complaint is about bad VR games, because those certainly exist!
If I want to go back and play GTA V or RDR2 after a few months, I'm going to spend ~10 minutes finding a guide to my Xbox controller and trying to remember how you do all ~30 actions. And then still spend the next 30 minutes pressing the wrong buttons until I finally get back in my muscle memory.
On my Quest 2, you just go. Of course the games tend to be much simpler too. But memorizing how to use the controllers has just never been something I had to do.
I can think of one smaller game where reloading is different, and that's Space Pirate Trainer, where you bring your guns behind your back for a moment. But that's more of an arcade game than what most people mean when they talk about shooters.
Maybe give Subnautica a try. Or the old version of HL2 on VR.
More like physically doing a reload action while wearing a thick pair of well-buttered gloves.
Each game does have small differences in the reloading process, be it pressing a specific button to release the slide or (strangely) pulling the charging handle every reload. Even firearms enthusiasts would have to learn these details.
Beyond that, VR controls are still limited. You have little to no tactile feedback, so you don't intuitively know when you failed to grab the magazine off of your belt or failed to grip the bolt. You have to learn the exact positions and tolerances to avoid slipping up and botching an entire reload in the heat of the moment. I find this to be completely unsatisfying in comparison to mastering a real life manual task.
I also often find myself banging my controllers together, especially when handling pistols.
I think most people find this kind of thing frustrating and immersion breaking, which pretty much defeats the draw of VR gaming.
My favorite VR game is Resident Evil 4 partly because it seems that they focused on reducing the friction of weapon handling. Most processes are fairly simplified and the tolerances are generous, but you still get that heightened level of intractability in VR vs a simple button press.
And they do, even without VR, because every gun is different. They all have different mag ejection and safety methods too:)
AK or AR or ?
This seems exactly what the OP is complaining about. Why would you want that, rather than just hitting 'r' or whatever?
(I literally have no idea how to reload a gun, FWIW. Having it be "realistic" doesn't actually make it easy or discoverable.)
If you shoot real guns a lot, it's probably second nature. But it's a fairly involved motor process that's cumbersome to implement in VR. Furthermore, different guns in FPS games can have different (often creative) reload animations; Reaper from Overwatch for instance, simply discards his twin short-barrel shotguns and pulls out two new ones. Will these different reload animations necessitate different VR gestures?
Going for realism in VR or any video game is fraught with these kinds of problems. "The more you get specific about situations analogous to reality, the more you have to stipulate on." --Egoraptor
(There's a YouTube channel of a guy who makes different "reload animations" of himself wielding various objects (smoke detectors, caulk guns, toasters, Furbies, etc.) as "guns" with a different, unique way of reloading each: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHi-xECyGTU )
Because it's more immersive.
> Having it be "realistic" doesn't actually make it easy or discoverable.
Isn't it the games job to teach you this? Like it's teaching you which button to use?
Realistic skydiving game: Start! Drive your civic to the DZ. Oh no there’s traffic! Wait for plane. Get in plane. Take 20 minutes to fly to altitude. Fall for 1 minute. There are no obstacles, nothing around you so you don’t die. Land. Wait to get picked up, take 1 hr to repack your parachute. Talk to your friends about how cool it was.
Fun skydiving game: Start! Jump out of airplane immediately. Skydive for 15 minutes. Surf on the wing of a plane. Avoid obstacles. Fly around buildings. Try to land in a swimming pool on the side of a mountain. Land. Parachute repacks automatically. You’re back in the air automatically.
As another case in point: movement speeds in most first-person 3D games are unrealistically fast (like, walking at 10 mph, running at 20+ mph), because realistic movement speeds would make navigating around the game world painfully slow.
I think it's more engaging/immersive not because it's more realistic, but rather because it adds nuance to the action and makes it more of a skill to be learned. The lows of the "oh shit" moment of flubbing a reload in the middle of a firefight and the highs of pulling off a perfectly timed John Wick-esque reload in the middle of a firefight are much more intense than just tapping a button.
It's a more embodied version of the "reload bar" mechanic in some games where you can just hit the reload button for a normal reload or hit it twice with good timing to get a better/faster reload, but if you miss the sweet spot you get a worse/slower reload.
The focus in VR games right now is creating realistic interactions. Ideally, your controllers should be only for interacting with meta content, like menus and other things "outside" of the game, or for controlling virtual hands.
Pushing a button to trigger a visible sequence of actions from your character breaks the immersion. It creates a separation between you and your character in a scenario where you're supposed to be the character.
Ultimately it is a stylistic choice. There's definitely room for both types of game in this space, but combining realistic and arcade style interactions in the same game tends to not work that well.
A big part of VR is manipulating psychology to fool you into feeling more immersed. It works pretty well until it doesn't, then users can become very uncomfortable.
I think the main problem here is semantics. We use the term VR to describe wholly-immersive games as well as traditional flat games with a 3D head mounted display, and everything in between. OP seems to just want a HMD experience tied to a traditional game. The industry really needs to come up with new terms to disambiguate these ideas.
I'm fairly confident that more people have experience reloading video game guns (just press Square) vs. the motions required to reload a real gun.
I know that when I'm playing Pavlov, every time I spawn with a new gun, I have to relearn how to reload it (and then die surrounded by all the clips I've dropped).
That is realism. Real guns are quite different in this regard too.
I understand you would prefer to just push a button but this makes it more realistic and adds another factor of skill.. Just like taking cover in real life.
Situational awareness in VR is better than pancake games. But a lot of other things are more difficult because it's more realistic.
But the parent comment complained about having to relearn complex control schemes every time they pick up a VR game, which is valid. Effectively nobody is going to have the muscle memory for reloading a gun, making it strictly more complicated than just mashing a reload button.
So in PvP you need to make one choice and stick with it. Single player games don't have this issue.
The only game that really messed this up IMO was Lone Echo. There's a tutorial for a new thing every 2 minutes and that really gets annoying.
Many of them require you to grab something in your belt area (and I'm a fat guy, so several games already require me pushing into my body to get to the right position), and/or I'll try to do it without looking down (like I would in real life) but then the game thinks I clicked in the wrong area, so I have to look down each time and even then it seems I clicked just slightly off 2-3 times before I can grab the damn clip off my belt, and by then the zombie or whatever has closed half the distance to me.
You're already breaking immersion for movement by having a stick to move you around and not walking 1 to 1, just let me press a damn button, wait a couple seconds while focusing on the enemy, and keep shooting.
Also, requiring you to grab ammo from your belt pretty much stops the game from being able to be played seated, because you'll be jabbing your couch or chair arm trying to get to your virtual belt. Sometimes I just don't want to stand in place for an hour. For most of those games, that's the only thing keeping them from being playable while seated.
One of the reasons I like Space Pirate Trainer so much is because there's no immersion breaking there, it's all energy weapons and you just have to slow down or stop shooting for a moment for it to recharge enough to shoot again, no reload required. And I can keep my focus on the enemies swarming around me. But I want more games besides that, and there doesn't seem to be that many (at least not that I'm aware of).
Compound is another one I like, although it does have several steps for its more complicated guns (although not the basic guns, and I tend to rely heavily on those), and sometimes requires you to drop your second gun (for it to float in midair, mind you) so you have a hand free to reload your other gun. How's that for immersion breaking?
In-game, the aircraft's seat is constantly rotating and accelerating all over the place. The seat I'm physically sitting on is not moving. This causes a great deal of motion sickness.
Anything where I was "walking" around gave me the same disconnect you mentioned - my avatar was walking around but my body was seated in a chair with hands on a controller or joystick.
Looks like people are saying the other issue with webcams is they are low framerate - there are dedicated devices it seems like TrackIR (more money) but I bet a phone with a decent FPS camera could work well. Theres also software called OpenTrack (and people are saying to get a high FPS webcam with low latency). Some people on reddit are even using a wiimote to reduce CPU useage supposedly.
Biggest thing though is you want the largest screen possible - otherwise you will barely be able to move your head and still be looking at the monitor (best experience I had was in a theater with 3 full imax screens side by side)
Nowadays I haven't used any of them in a long time because the Oculus is outdated and barely usable. None of the newer options seem worth the cost for me (in money or Facebook attachment) so I haven't played with any of that in a while.
Edit: Interesting, the glasses actually have hollow rims with a blue fluid.
What is this 'traditional meaning' that you speak of?
Words change and this is a meaning everyone seems to want I guess. I was just pointing out that once you go down this route, its pretty hard to differentiate between what is ironic or not because its a broad and subjective definition.
Your assertion does not make sense to me. Your definition is that the situation is ironic because a slightly broader statement of that situation is ironic? It sounds like you are just saying its ironic because it seems ironic. All that means is that it gives you a feeling which you associate with that word. The reason it seems ironic is that the unexpected outcome of a "life-saving" thing actually resulting in injury, is amusing, because it is the opposite of its intention. In fact almost every time something has a net positive influence on overall outcomes, there will be cases where some outcomes are worse. If you are shot and the surgeon goes to perform life-saving surgury, but it turns out you have an allergy to the anesthetic and it kills you, is that ironic? A doctor who was intending to save you actually killed you. I don't know about this definition but I guess its the one we're stuck with. I'll probably just call it an amusing coincidence though.
Oh come on.
A device which was made for one purpose and one purpose only -- to stop the president from getting shot ends up getting the president shot. This is the direct opposite of the intention of the thing's existence -- hence "intentionally ... the opposite of its plain meaning".
If you want to purposefully dilute things to make a point you can do that, but it is dishonest.
Effect X being caused by Y and solved by Z AND X being caused by Z and solved by Y is irony.
Dictionary definition: “ a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects”
It's highly dependent on the type of VR content you're looking at. For most people, the moment the camera or your character moves at odds with your real head, they get uncomfortable. My job is developing VR stuff and still when head tracking gets out of sync for more than a second, I get dizzy and have a headache the rest of the day.
If you want to continue with VR, I'd say stick with standing experiences. Try out the racing game now and then, but quit at the first sign of discomfort. You may find that your brain gets used to the conflicting input over time, or it might not. No way to tell without trying it.
I even can't handle first person shooters where the camera moves around using a control stick (the sensation of movement is unpleasant). Some games solve this with a mode where you sort of "snap" from one position to another rather than "moving".
I played a lot of Descent in the 90s and beyond, and got really used to 6dof flying, which at the time some folks couldn't stomach, so perhaps I'd do OK.
For example:
I kept getting stuck unable to control or do things during the game and eventually gave up since it had been a promotional free download and I wasn't invested enough to spend more than an hour or two trying to get it set up.
Also have a look at VTOL VR if you're interested in using motion controllers for all cockpit interaction.
I had Oculus Rift in my living room, then upgraded to Index. The difference in lighthouse placement basically reduced my usage of Index vs Rift by 75%. It’s impossible to get out and use casually.
I played that Jedi game on PS5 the other day and found it really intuitive how they implemented the reloading. There you have to pull back this little virtual lever with your non-gun hand. I liked that much better than remembering some button even if it's not 100% realistic.
In VR you can do a lot with your hands using the controllers. No button to reload but you insert a new clip and slide back if you emptied the chamber.
PS I still spend a lot of time in the 'metaverse'. In VR chat, in games and I develop for work too.
I think what is going to end up being big is the setup where you have a camera on top of a monitor or TV that just does head tracking. As TV's get larger and cheaper (and projectors better and better) having no headset but nice head tracking is a great middleground to VR. Plus other people can easily watch you play (and it is easier for noobs to get into). Most games do not really need full 360 degree head movement - you can just turn around with a keyboard or controller as you normally would.
It's just nothing has made it worth it yet.
And as for CSGO type things, too many players find traditional FPS gameplay on VR to be puke-city.
This is also more fundamental and difficult to solve than it seems.
Beating the seemingly low-tech but widely successful existing control systems is not a given.
Most alternatives are inferior.
One in particular that I feel like is critically underrated (mainly due to the game itself being a bit boring) is a flying game. You lay down in this bird like giant controller with your arms at your sides and there are multiple fans blowing in your face. You can tilt the whole thing, move the "wings" to change your speed and angle / elevation and do lots of other movements. The game itself is basically just cruising around a virtual world (they have a few different types) but I thought it was super cool. The fans even change speed and direction based on how you are flying.
If the game itself was more engaging (like say it was multiplayer and maybe you were piloting a mechanical "bird" with lasers and whatnot) I think it would be pretty freaking awesome. But the "controller" of course must be very expensive and takes up a ton of space so it is really not useable at home unless you have a ton of extra space and disposable income. And of course it is a bit of a one trick pony.
Oculus has this very neat trick with their controllers. Most of the buttons and sticks have some type of sensor that detects if you're touching it, even lightly. They use that information to alter the pose of the virtual hand. When the controllers are visible, your virtual fingers mostly match where your real ones are on the controller.
At least one company builds unique user profiles that make your virtual hands the same size and skin tone as your physical hands, as well as adjusting for height and other parameters. Personally I find it gimmicky, but some people like it.
Unfortunately, the technology isn't quite robust enough that we can fully get rid of controllers. Ultraleap is working on a system with multiple 3D IR cameras to track hands from multiple perspectives. I think this is the most likely path forward. There's some really crazy alternatives like strapping dozens of electrodes to the forearm to record muscle impulses that get fed to an ML model which extrapolates hand and finger movement.
You're right, there's a lot of fundamental problems we have to work around, and it's far from easy. Even with Facebook's ridiculous resources, the oculus hand tracking is hot wet garbage for anything even slightly abnormal, like wearing a jacket.
But, the industry as a whole is really picking up steam. It won't be too much longer before we solve most of the big problems.
Existing VR controls are great now that the Quest Pro controllers can self-track. The problems have been that you either had to setup lighthouses around your room to track you or have your hands always be in sight of the headset cameras. However, the QPro controllers can track independently like the headset itself by using SLAM and the difference is huge.
I don't see why you would think that the controls are difficult to solve. The problem isn't the controls -- the problem is that people don't realize how tiring it is to actually physically do the things you do in a video game, even on a very basic level. This makes VR great for getting physical activity -- but it makes for a very bad 'lazy day gaming' or 'after work gaming' recreation.
It sounds awesome to think about being in VR and being in the FPS until you realize that people who fight wars as infantry for real have to be in amazing shape.
Yes. This is one of the things that leads to the counterintuitive truth that if you want a fully immersive and fun game (defining "immersive" as "the player is no longer aware that the game world is not their actual reality), you don't actually want too much realism.
What you want is an "effortlessness" -- the ability for the player to trigger an action without effort or conscious thought.
Furthermore, the idea that having to stand up (not always true) and perform natural arm movements being bad is just silly to me. Arguably, the best performing VR game is Beat Saber.
VR is all about the immersion, and that means doing physical actions that approximate real world actions. That's the whole point, and that's why the vast majority of VR games (and the popular ones of course) incorporate that physicality.
I plunked down $500 for PSVR just to play Rez Infinite; other VR games I got to play on it were gravy.
that exists. there's a version in the occulus app store as we speak
Did you never just tried that out?
Lime you can stay seated in Skyrim and co
> I own a Valve Index and I mostly don't play it because of it's just really a hassle to have to physically stand up (or even seated) and to wave your arms around, only to forget how to reload your damn gun after a couple of weeks/months of not playing.
> I wish that people built simple keyboard-and-mouse VR games that I could enjoy the VRness of the experience using my fingers and palms like I'm used to in the past 30 years.
all I hear you saying is that you're an older person now, and that you learned to play with a controller and that's how games should be.
well, I'm even older (or lazier) because I never even learned to play FPS games with a controller. WASD+mouse for me please.
I always see people confusing familiarity with "simplicity" and "ease of use". of course familiar things are better! but let's not mangle together the simple and well-made with the familiar; though it's hard to do this.
No sir. The idea of virtual reality and "holograms" is at least here since the early 20th century. It's just that these people burnt billions of dollars on some tacky tech demos and empty marketing promises, and the industry believed them for years.
Companies invested billions in tackling all those fundamental technology limitations (reduce motion-to-photon latency, higher refresh-rates, global refresh, lower pixel-persistence,...).
The dilemma is, that in VR everything "sucks" until you achieve presence (the feeling of really being somewhere else) or at least full immersion.
So how do you fund all this development? By releasing iterative products which sadly harm the wide adoption more than they help, because "it still sucks".
At best, VR drove mass-production of necessary technology in other industries (i.e. adoption of >60Hz displays, high-resolution sensors, eye-tracking, OLED, immersive audio,...), which ultimately helps the next entrant to create a more-affordable AR/VR-device.
At the very least, it created IP that this "somebody sometime" will then have to license. I doubt it will be possible to create a new VR-device without the patents of Sony, Microsoft or Samsung.
How much this helps to really innovate is another question, arguably it means Apple is the only new entrant large enough to cross-license and still disrupt...
I played about 300 hours of VR, then moved somewhere that didn’t have the space, and I haven’t ever felt the desire to play VR since. Regular PC games are just as fun if not more so.
Required physical space and overall utilization are commercially limiting factors, achieving the required level of "presence" (which is beyond immersion) is still a major technical hurdle.
After all, the human brain is preconditioned to detect if something is "off", VR needs to achieve a level of performance that doesn't trigger any of this senses.
AR on the other hand has none of the above limitations. It's comparatively easy to develop a good experience there, and much more simple to develop applications once a strong ecosystem is in place. AND it contributes heavily to the VR-evolution as well.
If XR will disrupt in this "round", expect VR to evolve slowly until AR has appeared and scaled. Without AR fueling it, VR won't be able to accelerate in evolution and affordability.
It's easy to avoid the patents by waiting for them to expire. This is the traditional way of doing things, and is why there are so many instances of technologies not becoming commonplace until 20 years or so after they are patented.
We're still in the competition for the leading XR ecosystem. If a company wants to establish themselves in this space, "just wait" is not an option. Quite the opposite, now there's still a chance to shake-up everything by delivering a strong user-experience
I had an AR startup in the "pre-Pokemon Go" times (2015). Explaining what we were doing and what AR was capable of became significantly harder after Niantic launched their second game (remember Ingress?).
The main reason was that the definition of AR changed from "augmenting reality" to "3d floaters". It was much easier to work with people who had no prior experience with AR as we didn't have to help them unlearn whatever marketing bullshit they read at the time. Now I think that sound is the most immersive AR platform.
Incidentally, we had a project called Metaverse as well. Let's say it was smaller in scope and much more "boring" though (boring is good, I like boring).
I remain unsure whether Zuck is running that same playbook, or if he legitimately thought bulky-ass VR goggles were the way of the future and expects to have a smash-hit before marketable AR glasses exist.
Devices being made by these companies all embody elements of solutions to these challenges, but they all recognize it's a long road, and there's a lot of learning still to be done.
* https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-vr-ar-strategy
I'd love to get insight on how his 10 year plan would look today.
Overall it seemed like they weren't too far from {something_useful}.
Did they?
From the outset, people pretty unanimously called bullshit on the metaverse and ridiculed Zuckerberg. Facebook's own advertising of the metaverse wasn't even ever designed to attact users, it was very obviously designed to make people think there were revenue sources buried in the multiverse. They never had a product or even a particularly coherent idea for one.
I think the illusion was the problem. Suck wanted it to work without realizing his gadget.
I'm much more curious if Tim will really release apples version and if it will burn him.
And I only mean for broad consumer vr/ar not for industry etc.
Forcing a worker to wear a headset is much easier and there are fast financial benefits. Alone when you can train someone virtual before letting them on the real thing.
So it will be with VR.
My favorite metaverse is RuneScape, but I unfortunately haven't visited in a decade or more. Steam might also be considered a metaverse. Which would imply Xbox Online and all that are too.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/meaning-of-met...
[2]: https://about.meta.com/what-is-the-metaverse/
[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/09/23/fortnites-...
The consideration of Steam and Xbox Online as a metaverse is one I'm not too fond of. It kind of messes the entire idea up as you're not really using 3D avatars to communicate with others in a way that sort of replicates reality. If Steam and Xbox get considered as metaverses, we're now suddenly calling Twitter and HN also metaverses which is a bit absurd when we have perfectly reasonable names for them.
Also while the current implementations of metaverses are quite limited and mostly game related, people are setting their sights on future goals. Mainly interoperability. Right now you can't go from Runescape to VR Chat in any seamless way, you lose your friends lists, items, accounts, expectations and standards, etc. There is some work being done here, for example Epic created EOS as a layer of interoperability between any games without the usual restrictions, however the project is still very much in early stages and acts as nothing more than a universal friends list/account for now.
Prior to the misuse, it had always meant a single unified network[0]. I maintain that if there is no one metaverse, there are none. Don't let the confused BS that comes from marketing people change the meaning of words.
At its most basic, a metaverse is just a persistent virtual space shared among multiple users. We have lots of those, and have had them for years, and unsurprisingly they're pretty much all video games.
Aside from how it was specifically used, the way the word is formulated alone suggests there should only be one. Meta loosely means above, and encompassing, on a higher plane. Verse comes from universe obviously. The unified world, above everything.
This is just another case of people confidently misusing words so prominently that the meaning changes, which "is allowed", obviously.
> a metaverse is just a persistent virtual space shared among multiple users. We have lots of those, and have had them for years
Yes, we've had them for years, and we didn't call them metaverses, and nothing was lost in that time. That's good evidence for my prior assertion that the word (with its new definition) is practically useless.
I think the word is not only useless, it's actively off-putting to most people.
I want to also dispute this point. The idea of the metaverse from Snow Crash was one that was federated and interoperable, like the internet was historically, and still remains, at a low level. The standardized nature of the metaverse's spacial analogy was key to the concept. It was the internet, but represented and navigable as physical space. I'd say it's "independent metaverses" that are antithetical to the concept of a metaverse.
This alone makes Zuckerberg's project not a metaverse IMO. The whole thing exists to enforce scarcity.
It's the one redeeming moment in Horizon Worlds that I have had. I continue to check in once a month or so but have had no other meaningful interactions since.
This is a topic which I am currently experiencing and thinking a lot about.
For those who truly cannot be in lively areas, technology can provide at least some level of connection to the rest of humanity. But I realize now that living location choice can make an enormous difference on quality of life just based on the availability of good social options. And as a techie who has lived most of my life behind a computer, I have recently discovered that real life is much, much more rewarding - if you're in an area where people are not just boxed up in their own homes every night from 6pm+.
Unless 'metaverse' is supposed to only mean 'VR platform sold by Facebook'.
That is exactly what Zuckerberg is shooting for, and why he is failing on an epic scale. He doesn't really care about VR and virtual universes so much as he cares about ownership of the 'one true metaverse'.
VRChat, I think everyone with a VR headset has at least tried it, plus plenty of people using the desktop client.
Rec Room was also a popular early "metaverse" type setup in VR, though VRChat has mostly supplanted it.
And of course, if VR is not a requirement for your metaverse, basically every mmorpg is also a metaverse.
I also went into a cinema, thought I was alone but when I turned my head to the room realized that people were staring at me lol. I screamed of surprise, they heard it and laughed, it was too real so I disconnected.
I did VR chat a bit but in general the feeling of presence was too strong when I wanted to chill so didn’t experience as many things as I could.
I’ve had friends visit my space and play chess with me there as well. But at the time our headsets would only last for like 30min and they would overheat easily. I got the Quest later and every problem had been fixed. Perfect headset. Can’t imagine what the quest 2 feels like.
Wrote about some of it here: https://p1x3l.com/story/239/social-virtual-reality-and-the-o...
I was involved in Second Life around the turn of the century. I've been ignoring the metaverse since giving up on SL a long time ago. Obviously the resolution, frame rate, and software integration in metaverse will be somewhat better than SL; aside from that, can anyone tell me the difference between modern metaverse and SL, also how does that difference translate into profitable sales?
The new hype wave for SL sounds like someone hyping up the "new" idea of a CLI, and me feeling, uh, I think I've seen this before...
Most of the modern metaverses are worse than Second Life. Their big advantages were VR, browser and mobile clients. Second Life is getting most of those features now.
Their dev team finally got out of "can't do" mode. (That's client side. Server side, they still have trouble fixing long-standing bugs.) They hired some good game devs, and graphics started to get better.
* Frame rates have increased substantially. There's more multi-threading in the clients now, and the servers have been upgraded to better AWS instances. Still OpenGL, but work is going on to use Vulkan.
* Graphics realism has increased, again. Physically based rendering with high dynamic range lighting is in test. Not subsurface scattering, though, so skin still looks plastic under some lighting. Graphics realism is becoming comparable to GTA-V, but not Red Dead Redemption.
* There's a mobile viewer in test. Uses Unity as the graphics engine.[1]
* Full body tracking is in test, and being demoed. It's striking to see how someone rigged for full tracking dominates a meeting.
Second Life may end up being the metaverse, after everybody else fails. It's one of the very few systems with a large, continuous world, one about the size of greater Los Angeles. Facebook failed to deliver much, the NFT guys delivered even less, and the people who announced and didn't ship probably never will.
VRChat is significantly more voice-heavy than SL, which is better or worse depending on your use-case.
The best thing about VRChat is that you get to wear a toaster on your face and get physical interaction with people. If you want to take a dancing course in VRChat, you can. Buy a few gadgets to track your limbs, and it'll be shown accurately.
VRChat is essentially the next step in the user-programmable social video game, and the community seems more ambitious. The platform is so open that they've ran emulated Linux on user avatars.
Outside of my regular group of friends, I've met people who were regulars within AltSpaceVR which has now closed. They've now shifted to Horizon and avoid VRChat which is full of kids or people pretending to be a mouse in a race car.
Horizon has given me the ability to make friends from other parts of the country and the world. People that are actual friends, not just people I talk to online.
I'm a bit too old to feel comfortable doing that in person anymore. So it was nice to have that feeling again, as fleeting as it was.
Too bad it has to be in an environment that looks like it came out of the PS1 era with the blandest art direction possible.
Thankfully it's not the dystopian warning of being a "browser" with unlockable ads, tracking (including new stuff like always on cameras, eye tracking, and everything you fit in a fitness watch/ tracker), and all wrapped up by like a proprietary walled garden.
This is one of the many metaverses. Minecraft is a pretty readily available one too. Neither required VR gear, either.
The Metaverse I am convinced is pretty dumb unless we can make it significantly more immersive - as in adding sense of touch or other senses.
Everything spontaneous was empty.
So more like event based like cinema than a hang out space
Meta gets all the headlines because they tried to create the same thing and ended up lighting billions of dollars on fire.
The plan was most likely to try and disrupt the VR market like they did social media, and attempt to capture (hold hostage) a significant share of VR users.
But they forgot that users need a reason to use the product. It wasn't fun, the avatars are bland, sterile Mii-like characters that nobody likes, and the disclaimers about legs are absurd beyond reason. They failed at every turn. VRchat was the main competition, and Facebook forgot that they needed to be competitive.
Even inside the VR industry, the metaverse is regarded as an abject failure. It's more or less the antithesis of what makes a good VR experience: fun, engaging, immersive. Facebook went with bland, boring, and intrusive.
The only good thing Facebook has done in the VR space is getting Quest headsets onto millions of heads. This drastically lowered the barrier to entry for new users, which increases the audience for good developers. The quest hardware isn't good by any stretch, but it's good enough for people to judge whether VR is for them without spending $1000.
As others have already commented, most of that money has gone towards longer-term bets on hardware and other investments. A small percentage of that $36 billion mentioned by the author was directed towards Horizon Worlds.
The author wrote about his experience using the system as designed and promoted towards end users. This isn't some deep business analysis or some investigation into the lesser-known corners of VR development, it's a normal user wanting to try out "the metaverse" as promoted by the global megacorporation "Meta."
It's reasonable to want other kinds of reporting as well, but there's a lot to learn from a user recounting their own personal experiences in the space. You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, and if this is what users on the happy path will see, their disappointment is completely understandable.
Can a regular person?
And don't say things like RecRoom, because those exist independent of the billions Facebook spent on meta
You seem to believe that only things financed by Facebook qualify as "metaverse", a concept which existed long before Facebook:
Similarly, despite the obscure industry term predating Facebooks push, it is not a common term, and even techies do not think of Minecraft and other digital worlds as being 'Facebooks Metaverse'.
A company cannot just start using a term and then retroactivly justify their expense based on other external examples.
No, you are.
> it is not a common term, and even techies do not think of Minecraft and other digital worlds as being 'Facebooks Metaverse'
Here's a well-publicized example of techies persistently doing just that:
October 2021: https://medium.com/@ow/the-metaverse-is-already-here-its-cal...
August 2022: https://tech.hindustantimes.com/gaming/news/fortnite-gamemak...
September 2022: https://mashable.com/article/fortnite-is-the-real-metaverse
September 2022: https://nordic.ign.com/fortnite/60374/opinion/how-fortnite-i...
December 2022: https://mixed-news.com/en/fortnite-studio-epic-games-develop...
December 2022: https://coingape.com/education/explained-fortnite-game-and-w...
While the term certainly existed prior to Facebook what made it anywhere close to common was Facebook's investment and media coverage which not only resulted in the above article but general use of the term for the first time, see the first small bump and the second overwhelming bump: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Sometimes a big corporation coming along and taking over a term that was barely ever used happens. When people talk of it having happened you can still take them seriously even if you don't like that the word was co-opted.
Why must the metaverse be the result of billions Facebook invested? Maybe Facebook spent billions on attempting to clone Minecraft, and failed?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending any of the metaverse branding crap but your point about this just being the same stupid scripted article about Horizon Worlds is accurate and I'm not sure how this reached the front page.
People don't want to blindly buy an unproven expensive gaming system without trying it out first. You can't go into a local Best Buy, Walmart, or Target and try the units out. You have to wait till someone you know gets it an is kind enough to let you give it a go.
With all the money Zuck has spent on developing these devices, it is surprising that no money was spent on demo kiosks.
> The results of these tests indicated that the Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from the headsets possessed high levels of antibiotic resistance.
Your eyes and nose are much closer and sweat might go down your face.
Germs/bacteria were not even 1% of what was running through my brain.
You're not the target audience for this, nor am I anymore.
For the Quest Pro they had demo units in Best Buy. You can search YouTube to find videos of people checking it out.
The hygiene aspect of VR is under-appreciated.
I feel like VR is a technology that has no idea where it fits into the world. It's cool, but why should anyone care about it before they've put up the money to buy into the ecosystem? It's not like a TV which is an easily shared experience.
I used to watch this reality TV show with my girlfriend. Metaverse was such a big deal in 2022 that one of the main characters of the season was a Metaverse real estate agent.
https://www.bravotv.com/people/jessica-stocker
> Jess is a beautiful Metaverse real estate agent, investor and entrepreneur from Los Angeles. After Jason slid into her DM’s, she was excited to join the house and show off her wild side to a completely new group of friends. While her party girl behavior gets her into hot water with some of her housemates, she’ll also explore a romance that has the potential to last beyond the winter vacation.
I wonder if that's still her job now that it isn't as relevant anymore.
Just checked Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/blondesbuildingequity/?hl=en
Blondes Building Equity
"Best friends building a Real Estate empire"
They have a podcast. Titles of recent episodes:
"Financially free by age 25 through real estate investing"
"70 rental units in under 4 years"
"The rule breaker who broke the real-estate industry"
The subtly funny bit is, in this world of talking cartoon animals, the virtual romantic partner was an impossibly handsome male unicorn.
All in all a great bit of writing and commentary on something shit. The metaverse.
also, meta has their own virtual monitor thing but it’s only on quest pro iirc (and not on quest 2)
The Meta Horizons stuff though - was creepy. There seemed to be people that must've been paid to be there to excite the newcomers, and once I sort of got away from that I ran into the "these are obviously children" problem. I can't help but think that there's a huge COPA fine at the end of that rainbow.
Like I've killed the battery on my Q1 multiple times playing Minecraft in VR (vivecraft + a host app for Quest) or the TWD games. Heck even beat saber. Sure they're not all magical social experiences but I hate that Meta turned VR into that. That's why I didn't want to link to facebook. I don't play VR to play with people I play it to be immersed in the game I'm playing.
such as?
Why is the Meta product so catastrophically naff? What went wrong?
I read through part of it and I had enough. I quote one of the many misleading statements:
"So far, the gamble hasn’t paid off. Only 20 million Quest headsets have been sold"
The Xbox series S/X sold 20 million, the PS5 sold 30 million. Looking at these numbers, I'd say the Quest is pretty mainstream, no?
Meta spent $100 billion[0] on VR to sell 20 million Quest headsets that most people have put in the closet. That's 30 years of total Sony R&D budget, including all the Playstations, Walkmen, VCRs, DVDs, Blu Rays, cameras, sensors, TVs, speakers, headphones, and even their own VR device.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/27/metas-sha...
For comparison, the Mars Science Laboratory project had a $2.5bn budget and sent a spacecraft that landed a rover on another planet. Yes, the MSC built on existing NASA infra and previous rover R&D ... but so did Meta's VR division.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619730/meta-vr-oculus-a...
So you can say that they did indeed spend $100b on selling 20m Quests so far.
The most likely reason is physics. These devices aren't fun to use. They're disorienting and make people sick. In practice, they add nothing to the experience -- certainly not the experience of a business meeting! It seems quite ridiculous to think that would ever have been a use case.
So, the article really isn't a hit piece but perhaps a rather late and rather obvious commentary on something that even Zuck has to admit isn't a thing.
But there's one small thing - it can be fun! and LOTS of it!
Job Simulator is my go-to so-you-wanna-try-VR game. It's fun. It knows what its limits are and create fun within them. It's silly. Anyone can play it! It's like the fun of the point-and-click games of old but in VR.
Every single person who I've shown - from my mom to my wife to friends - has been absolutely blown away by how readily your brain accepts the VR world as "real". Your brain's ability to "adopt" the VR hands is just a magical thing to experience, and so fun!
The same goes for the Valve VR demo thing whose name I forget, where you're in an Aperture lab or something and can go through portals to do different minigames as well as mess around in the lab itself.
It reminds me of Wii Sports for the Wii and the motion-sensing wiimotes. Some cute demos (and nearly some full games in their own right) that show off the hardware, and the spark is truly there and your grandparents play 200 hours of wii bowling, but then nobody can figure out where to go next. People didn't like it in Skyward Sword. So eventually it's kind of ditched for the Wii U and then kind of brought back for the Switch Joycons but only to be trotted out every once in a great while for a quirk.
We seem to kind of be somewhere in there for VR except that some companies scented THE NEXT BIG THING and tried to be the google/facebook/amazon/etc of this new paradigm but they all got collectively wiimote'd. So the comedown is a lot more dramatic than just the WiiU not having a remote.
I hope someone figures out google glass and AR stuff though. And not just the garbage AR that pokemon go et al call "AR" where it's just "look we put your phone's camera as the background of the scene" and they use GPS + PoI's. Real AR like I'm the pilot of a damn evangelion and it's giving me readouts. (JARVIS/Iron Man might be a more recent reference that I would also accept as well).
I recall a story from a colleague who knew some folks who had worked on the game System Shock (this was in the early nineties). System shock was one of the first games that had an engine that implemented real 3D physics; so when you threw a grenade, it would describe a real parabola. And you can lean around a corner and sneak a peak without exposing your entire body to enemy fire, and when you did that, the 1st person shooter rendering would realistically reflect that. They had an experimental version of the game that was hooked to a virtual reality headset at the time, and gave up on it because, as one of them joked, it was "virtual reality, real nausea".
This was 30 years ago, and things haven't improved since then.
"Descent" was the game where you blast robots in a very 3-d mine.
One oddity of "VR" is it initially attracts people with excellent visuospatial analysis skills; the problem is the majority of the population is not good at it. It would be like implementing a user interface based on bench pressing 275 pounds of real world weights; it would be an incredibly popular fad among people already qualified to participate, then the general public would LOL and that's it. So that's the problem selling VR to the general public; most folks aren't very good at solving maze puzzles and drawing 3D CAD drawings in their heads so a UI based on that will be a hard sell.
I feel like all the 3D hype is just that. While it could be fun in games in a holodeck-type environment (but probably not outside of that, 'cause physics), I don't think the majority of everyday human interactions with information are better off in 3D. Why would anyone think so? We don't read in 3D. We don't write in 3D. We don't make pictures in 3D. Why would a 3D interface be better?
I think most Quests are doing what mine is doing: sitting in a drawer unused.
In my case it was because my pupillary distance is too wide for the Quest (and almost every other VR headset) so everything looks blurry all of the time no matter what.
It sucks being only slightly smaller than Hafþór Björnsson.
Every person I know who has a Quest bought Beat Saber and Job Simulator, played for a couple of weeks, and then put it away.
I have a gamer friend with a gamer spouse with multiple VR rigs from his spouse's job, similar situation, job doesn't care if they play with the hardware. He says he played them a bit for a couple months a couple years back, did the very small number of must-play games (mostly just Alyx and SuperHot, I think) and that was it, all of it's sat unused since then.
Maybe we're not representative, but that's four-for-four of not really giving a shit about VR even when we're all gamers and the hardware's free.