So, here’s asking some smart people to ELI5 the whole concept of the “metaverse”, where Meta/Facebook fit in (is this VR?), where Augmented Reality (lenses/glasses, etc) fit in, etc.
I mean, when I hear some explanations, I keep thinking “That sounds like Second Life, or The Sims Online…” Clearly it can’t be that, right?
But what’s the application? Commerce/shopping? Social media? Group action platforms/political action platform?
and Playstation Home
I’ll be interested to hear as well. My thoughts jump back to VRML in the 90s, I think the key takeaway is “platform independent.” The metaverse will be an open standard of VR/AR where entities can create their own presence that coexists with everything else. Persistent, visual/haptic, open. It will be awful.
That is pretty high on the list of things that it won’t be.
Yeah, that is not what tech companies are talking about when they tell investors they are going big on the metaverse. They’re talking about bringing other activity inside their proprietary platform.
Early stages, yes. Right now we’re seeing the first spasm where everyone is trying to be THE platform. And that might work, Meta might win the war and be the de facto platform. Apple might, too. I don’t see a future where Walmart, say, is maintaining a dozen metaverse locations across different platforms.Something will win, and then become the “open” standard.
If by open you mean “all the profits going to one company”, sure.
I’m having a hard time envisioning this as well, having spent time in Second Life and various “virtual worlds” in VR. It all seems to devolve into a haven for pedophiles and furries.
I think they have some major obstacles to overcome on the hardware side before this becomes a worthwhile thing.
I can understand VR/AR sharing hardware, having similar design and build tools, shared payment methods, FB selling marketing tools that work in all of the above, etc.
I get lost trying to imagine how or why you would switch apps/chats/games seamlessly. I’d think you’d just flick from your Slack VR app for work over to your Star Citizen app, like you currently choose programs on your computer, phone or TV. I can’t see how these companies are going to develop a seamless world together, only that they are going to share technologies and tools and some of your data may be portable.
I think you’ve got it exactly right, the idea is pretty simple but it’s just not a very good idea. Extrapolating the real world into the experience of the internet is like extrapolating a limp into an FPS. If I want something from Walmart, it adds nothing to make me walk around in VR to get it. I just want the thing, type it in, and buy it. If VR were about six generations farther along there might be a compelling reason to use it over the basic functions that the internet provides today, but even at that stage it’s still not going to be shopping.
The long-term vision is that eventually, it’ll all be interoperable, just like the Internet.
We’re at the Mosaic and AOL/Prodigy point of the metaverse timescale. Everyone’s figuring it out and searching for that killer use case.
The weird thing, though, is that AOL at least was incredibly popular, but I’m a VR evangelist and even I acknowledge that it’s a super niche thing. Most people do not want to have business meetings in VR. Outside of very specific things, like remote viewing a potential home, or maybe furniture shopping, I do not want to do commerce in VR/AR.
Actually, the really weird thing is the way companies keep talking about “the metaverse” like it’s a thing that exists now, rather than a bunch of vague aspirations and tech demos.
I think doing meetings in VR makes a huge amount of sense , if they can get positional audio and lipsync worked out, and you can use reasonable avatars. Right now it’s a nightmare on Zoom/Meet to have multiple people talk into each other and overlap thoughts etc, whereas it would be more natural to have a circle of people and use normal social cues to interject, add a comment etc without mangling someone’s audio or flow. As well as casting from your desktop in as big or small a way as you like. But I shudder to think of the technical setup needed to make it work on every end.
As for being more widely adopted, I’m a pretty firm believer in VR for gaming and even watching just normal TV and movies on a virtual bigscreen from the sofa. I have trouble turning on my tv to play traditional games now, it’s feels so small and constrained even though it blows away my Quest 2 in terms of horsepower. And watching the tv from 6 feet away makes my 43" feel puny. VR just needs to reach enough people to become ubiquitous in my mind.
VR meetings themselves are fine. The real pain is donning and doffing my motion capture suit for each session.
Ok, the metaverse.
The metaverse isn’t good or bad. It isn’t, because it doesn’t even exist. Nor it will exist for at least 15 years. So most things you have heard about it are dumb.
The metaverse is called that way because it’s a term taken from a science fiction novel, a dystopic one, one that wasn’t even trying to be particularly realistic. It’s kind of funny that peopel are trying to copy it now, in a way.
About the novel: Imagine a future where there are mega corps, and and all the social and gaming applicatiosn have condensed in a single uber-application in VR, a single services which inside contains multitude of virtual Universes (diffferent experiences and games). This being fiction, imagine having thousands of stupidely detailed game worlds with different settings and styles. Hence ‘metaverse’, it isn’t a single normal universe.
Of course, this is all fiction. In our world I doubt all communication and entertaiment would be consolidated in a single medium. And the novel skips the small little thing of how to generate realistic, detailed worlds, it’s handwaved with ‘it’s in the future!’
The real metaverse is just a vague concept based on the fictional metaverse. ‘The metaverse’ is just a name for a long-term inititiave to have good, usable, mainstream VR/AR in our world. Like:
To be able to have a custom virtual house you can be with just putting your glasses, to be able to meet with your friend in that space and do things together seamlessly like watching a vr experience or playing a game. Or go visit a VR museum or assist a 360º concert. Or have a meeting in VR at work instead of using Zoom.
As technology improves and the headsets are more comfortable, lighter, more powerful and have better optics, all these uses that right now seem iffy will start to be more appealing. So in reality ‘the metaverse’ is too a inititive to continue improving the hardware.
You mention Second Life, as it was something bad, but a Second Life with 2030 tech, with 100 times more budget and in VR could be pretty cool.
This is all focused in VR, because AR is still even more on its infancy. But part of the this inititive is to face the challenge of Augmented Reality, and year by year inch closer to the ideal of AR shown too in science fiction, to have normal looking glasses, that are able to inclue in your view obects and persons that aren’t there, integrated perfectly in the real world. Imagine having a empty chair near you, and with the AR glasses you can see and interact with your sister that live in another city.
edit: btw I think that Meta announcing “they are building the metaverse” was stupid. Just improve what you have, add new features, and if in two decades you organically grow to something like a metaverse, cool, but at this point saying they are gonig to do the metaverse is LOL. You can’t even order by date the videos in Oculus TV ffs.
True story:
A co-worker of mine, a talented 3D artist, announces he’s quitting the games biz to work for a certain very large organization (you’d recognize it if you heard it) to do metaverse-y things. Specifically, to work on an app that would allow execs to conduct meetings virtually.
I tell him, “Good luck, but keep up with your contacts in games. Those sorts of virtual meeting concepts have been tried. But they haven’t really gone anywhere because, while people think it sounds cool, there’s no big advantage to doing it that way over a standard call. You’re just unnecessarily forcing people to walk around as an avatar before they can get down to business.”
That was (counts on fingers and toes) twenty-two years ago.
The thing that baffles me about all the recent hoopla about the metaverse being the next big thing is that, as a matter of practical usage, it pretty much already exists. Without leaving my chair and in the space of a few minutes I can do work, buy something from Walmart, chat with my pals from all over the world while jumping around into different multiplayer games with them, and see and talk to my sister on the other side of the country. It’s just to do those things right now I don’t use a single app from Facebook, er, Meta, but rather VPN/the Web/Discord/various games/Zoom.
What would the metaverse add to the way I do it now? I guess if there were a single unified metaverse I wouldn’t have to swap applications. That’s an advantage, but a tiny one: hitting alt-tab is not exactly difficult. I’d be doing it in VR, but for a lot of things (a bunch of work, shopping at Walmart, even talking to my sister - I’d rather see a 2D video image of the real her than some Pixar-ish avatar) I’d prefer not to do it in VR. I certainly don’t want to have to walk my avatar from the virtual Walmart to a virtual meeting room. The only “advantage” would be having a single consistent digital avatar. But even there, I don’t consider that a plus for games: I want my avatar to seamlessly blend with the game I’m playing, not be something like a Mii that always feels slightly out of place. An avatar that fits with WOW won’t fit with COD won’t fit with Disco Elysium.
The current state of their avatars is pretty good, as seen in this reality labs video from last year!
They’re a long way from this tech being production-ready, but that’s where its heading, people having photo-real presence in VR.
I used to work in the VR/AR space and the thing about virtual reality is that most people don’t really like it. People will put on a headset, they’ll have fun playing around for a bit, they’ll say it was cool — but then they don’t want to use it again. Even with device buyers, use spikes in the first few weeks of ownership and then falls off a cliff. Which makes sense, the trend in media consumption is to take in several forms of media at once (watch TV while browsing twitter, play game while listening to podcast, etc), and VR breaks this by monopolizing your attention. AR’s more promising but the tech is still years away from being useable.
Facebook knows the home consumer numbers are terrible. Enterprise use isn’t any better — no business is going to meet in VR, it actually drives productivity down because you can’t multitask. So why is Facebook making a big deal about Meta now? Why are they rebranding around an unsuccessful part of their business?
I think that this is a cynical ploy to position Facebook as a whiz-bang innovator of the future, in an effort to avoid the looming threat of government regulation. They’re trying to obfuscate that the core of their business is still this toxic machine that monopolizes and extracts rent from the internet’s public commons. As a PR move, propping up the VR division may be worth the cost, even as the Metaverse struggles to be useful.
That definitely seemed to be the driver behind them announcing those supposedly metaverse-related jobs in Europe.