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Comment by jon-wood | Hacker News Reader

The other reason being that nobody is asking for The Metaverse, and definitely don’t want to spend huge chunks of cash on a funny hat to wear in order to access it.

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Some people are asking for The Metaverse. Currently, the entire VRChat userbase. But you're right that there is not a large population of people willing to throw cash at it outside of a minority of virtual furries

Critically, VRChat works on desktop (though it's an inferior experience), and you can incrementally enhance your experience with it by doing things like webcam face/hand tracking instead of buying an expensive headset.

Examples that demonstrate why lockdown hurts ease-of-use and therefore non-intrinsically hurts community. Meta or Apple may not realize people want on desktop want to use VR software; they may want people to spend more (although a smaller community may generate less overall revenue); they may want people to have the “true” experience (their idea of what the users want, instead of what they actually want); they may not want to spend the budget and expertise to develop webcam face/hand tracking.

If they released a cheap or impressive enough VR headset, I doubt desktop or face-tracking would matter. But I think the next best thing, a decent headset with an open platform that enabled such things, would’ve saved them.

VRChat is also consistently active with people making new worlds/maps, avatars, etc. There also used to be a client modding scene with e.g. melonloader but that got cracked down on around 2022. The "metaverse" however, does it even exist? Is there a vrchat-like, meta-built social vr environment available on quest hardware?

No idea, which is notable because I boot into my Meta Quest 3 most nights for sim racing. You'd think I'd have seen it if they were pushing it.

I am glad they don't, the headset should be a general computing device first and foremost, launching apps you choose to participate in.

It's also very highly customisable without being monetized out the wazoo, allows you to host your own servers, and in general avoids the incredibly bland corporate image that meta projects.

(Meta, I think, fails to understand that the people that most want a virtual space to interact with, to the point of putting up with the limitations of VR tech, mostly want to not look like regular people in that space, because they keep pushing a vision that seems to be a uniform 'normality' even more extreme than the real world)

I think they also would not accept that variability, in both avatars and spaces. Even VRChat developers have struggled with what users do and frankly as a company that makes total sense. It's a wild west which is great for a community, nightmarish for a company with moderation liabilities, copyright concerns etc.

The VRChat community should consider forming and funding an open source group to re-implement the platform as it will eventually get regulated.

For what it's worth I don't use VRChat, I've just been around the internet for long enough to know the pattern.

Yes, while VRChat does a lot of things right, the VRChat company definitely doesn't seem trustworthy in the long run. It's an aggressively walled garden where the company has full control over both content and narrative, and we're starting to see more aggressive pushes for revenue, with the major new features in recent months being subscription-gated or addiction bait (stickers, baubles, random reward boxes, etc). I'd love to see an open, federated VR social environment, but how do you get people to use it? Many VR users aren't technologically savvy at all.

There are currently two much smaller competitors that are perfectly usable but lacking community buy-in. Chillout, which is similar to VRChat, with some improvements the community has wanted for years, but missing some of VRChat's (admittedly excellent) homemade functionality, such as better IK code, better bone dynamics, etc. And Resonite, which is more similar to SecondLife, possessing a cross-world inventory system and in-game content authoring tools.

Probably half the people who grew up with Instagram cat filters are furries now.

I am now instantly reminded of that clip of the cat whose human filter wasn't working. 'I'm not a cat', indeed.

A lot of people seem to be spending huge chunks of cash on enormous monitors, dual monitors, curved monitors, etc., and the appeal of that is mostly that it gets you a little bit closer to wearing a head-mounted display.

Makes sense that a primate with front-facing eyes that is both predator and prey would prefer to look at things at arms length rather than encase their head in a cocoon that is designed to block environmental awareness.

That's a function of what software you have running on it.

Depends on what you mean with "environmental" awareness. Awareness of reality or virtuality?

Monitors load my desk, not my neck.

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