The metaverse was stillborn.
It was the hype for like 4 weeks and was dead before it even existed
Other businesses got hyped and signed up in droves, but they forgot they need a user base.
The crazy part is that it is not even clear what they signed up for. Everybody started talking “Metaverse” as if it was an actual thing. But it never was. There never was an app, a standard or much of anything.
Second Life ain’t exactly perfect either, but at least that’s an actual thing that exists and in which you can open up your virtual advertisement booth.
It’s crazy how Zuckerberg hyped it up to the extreme, even renamed his company for it and than never actually build anything remotely worth of that name. What is going on in Horizon Worlds still looks less interesting than what they demoed with Facebook Social all the way back in 2016 on Oculus Rift.
Just give me a virtual space where I can watch movies, play games and go shopping with friends. It shouldn’t be that hard to build something that at least feels a bit deeper than just yet another chat app. Or take the silly stuff CodeMiko is doing, that is what I expect to be happening in the Metaverse, yet it happens in 2D on Twitch. Even Meta’s own conferences are still real world events with video screens, not events in the Metaverse.
I don’t mind the idea of the Metaverse, but the implementation is lightyears behind of where it should be.
I’m pretty sure it is hard
I feel like part of the impetus for the name change, and perhaps the extreme hype to some extent, came from trying to distance themselves from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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Engineers make Star Trek tech because people want to live in Star Trek. No one (besides Zuck) wants to live in Ready Player One.
- dense housing
- VRchat is mainstream
Fortnite shows that there are people interested in living in a game enviroment where they are surrounded by recognizable brands. But Meta’s infomercial vibe with bland, low budget, dead-eyed characters, which are so sanitized they didn’t even have lower bodies, is not anything close to anything that anyone wants.
The weird thing is they actually do have the tech for photorealistic avatars. But they didn’t implement because if they did then inevitably people would use it for “virtual encounters” which Facebook don’t want to deal with understandably. But at the same time if that’s what people want to do with it and you’re not letting them that’s a problem.
This tech won’t work if it’s run by one boring ass company.
Purity is the enemy of innovation, got it.
Almost across the board, new technology is used to spread two things: religious dogma and porn.
And the farmer’s almanac, but mostly the Bible and porn.
Well this sounds funny, but really? I think our newest tech is applied in… Research, manufacturing, weaponry, speed/efficiency/throughput.
On the consumer side of things, we have new technology applied in TVs, movie theatres, and video games. Depending on how “new” is new to you. NGL porn does get a lot of love from tech, though. Not only video resolution, 3D video, and VR… But teledildonics, fancy new backend (ha!) Systems for all of this streaming and payment.
What do you think?
I guess some new technology is applied in super churches. More likely the prices lowered on some entertainment tech, making it accessible for them. But hey it happens.
new technology is used to spread two things:
religious dogmawar and porn.Religion might be a distant third.
Photo realistic avatars aren’t possible today. Even if they have the technology for it to work in normal conditions and it wasn’t faked like the leg tracking, it’s going to take more than a smartphone to render, and the majority of people don’t have a computer more powerful than a smartphone, even if they do own a VR headset. The sad reality for PC VR is that most PC users don’t have VR and probably most VR users don’t have a gaming PC.
The metaverse could be successful but it needs to be a protocol not a proprietary product by one company, least of all Facebook.
Right now anyone can make a website if they know how to program one. It can be hosted on any number of services or you can host it yourself if you have the hardware. Your website can look like anything, have any functionality you want, be as complex as you want, be as large as you want. You can use website builders or you can go entirely custom. There is a huge range of options.
What now needs to happen is that same thing for the metaverse. It needs to be a standard programming language or set of programming languages that people can learn, that will enable them to build experiences. Those experiences should be hostable on any old server and a routeing protocol needs to be developed so that people can access them without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Second Life does a very good job of modifying the web URL concept to work for virtual worlds, just copy that. There also needs to be a standardised API for returning feedback responses and querying available interfaces (vibration motors, speakers, lights, force resistance motors etc) that all headsets and interaction devices use.
Perhaps some kind of federation service that enables different servers to interact with each other for transferring items from one environment to another and making sure that they make sense in all environments.
Like VRML from the 90s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML?wprov=sfla1
Another underlying aspect is the dimensionality:
- Paper is 2D
- IRL items are 3D
- webpages are… you’d be tempted to say “2D”, but look at the links, in how many directions one can move across webpages… they’re n-D!
Going from nD to 3D, is a step back, and even when people don’t realize it consciously, they’ll keep falling back to the superior webpage solution.
Until someone puts the nD mobility into 3D worlds, there is no chance for them to take over.
Third Room by matrix.org does all of this.
It’s gonna come back in some shape. Imagine being able to make users live inside your little world, and you can manipulate their emotions and track them around the clock. Wet dream.
Facebook and Google are doing this already but at least without the virtual world graphics.
VR Chat is still here and doing well. Its good for niche stuff. When the tech is ready maybe it can reach the mass, but the current tech is not ready yet.
The main problem is that they only focused on how much money they could make, and forgot to make it somewhere people actually wanted to be. Basically the developer equivalent of “here’s the deal, you do something for me-” then they never finish the sentence.
Exactly this. When you read about the metaverse in something like Snow Crash, it’s a place built by enthusiasts, very cheap to use, and people have the choice of DIY, or paying someone to do things for them.
In the facebook’s version, everything but connecting costs money, and it’s all done by facebook.
I can’t ever forget the first trailer where they pulled street art out of a street into virtual space, and then they had to tip so it wouldn’t disappear. It was insanely transparent how any attempt at imaginative play was superficial, that the creators were completely out of touch with what people wanted, and squeezing money out of people was the ultimate goal.
They did the reverse enshitification, do it shit first and then… wait what then?
That said…it is VR although is getting bigger still plenty of people without headsets or people with issues with them.
That said…it is VR although is getting bigger still plenty of people without headsets or people with issues with them.
That was one problem yes. There isn’t really any need for the metaverse to VR only, at least not initially. Even Facebook actually came up with a sort of workaround for this problem where you could use your phone and navigate an avatar around with on-screen controls. It would have probably worked better on a desktop computer which is something they never bothered to implement but it wouldn’t be that hard to make.
If it was actually fun and useful and people used it on a regular basis other people would be incentivised to go out and spend big bucks on a VR headset. Trying to get people to buy the VR headset first was never going to work, only enthusiasts were going to get one that way around, and they weren’t actually interested in metaverse all that much, they were going after traditional gaming experiences, watching 3D movies, and porn obviously.
They needed VR to convince people that this one fad of virtual real estate and tradeable virtual items totally wasn’t exactly like Second Life.
Well that was always my problem with Facebook’s implementation as well. If I’m paying money for virtual real estate I’d rather just pay money for the server and then control it myself. It never made sense to me to let one company host the code, because there’s literally no benefit to me for them doing that. Usually the benefit of letting a company host the code is that it costs less money, but if I’m going to be paying virtual rent every month anyway I’d rather just have server access.
Don’t dismiss an entire group on the actions of a single person.
I think this article makes reasonable sense. Also that quote from Spez is so disheartening. Glad I’m not on reddit anymore
God, they even want to make leisure time into a side hustle. Is it so much to ask that they let me not think about my participation in capital for like, two hours?
I’ve just invented a pillow that bombards your dreams with ads.
For the user it is free, and it is literally the most comfortable pillow you will ever lay your head on
It has a White noise generator, and a built-in fan so that it’s constantly the cool side of the pillow. It is exceedingly soft and yet surprisingly supportive but you will see ads every single moment of REM sleep for the rest of your life and once you’ve gotten used to using it if you stop using it you will never be able to fall asleep again.
Currently Microsoft meta Amazon and Netflix are all in a bidding war to purchase this technology from me.
Small correction - Steve Huffman is u/spez, he’s the current CEO. Alexis Ohanian was one of the co-founders and was on the board of directors for a while but I don’t think he’s involved with Reddit any more except probably as an investor.
The question implies that it was alive at some point. Was it though? All I know about Metaverse is that a lot of “tech” journalists were writing about it, but I don’t know anyone who used it. And I owned a Meta Quest 2 for 6 months.
There is no metaverse. There’s VR games and multiplayer games, and metaverse became a word for anything that remotely touched any of these or that’s even remotely vaguely related. 3D assets → metaverse. Online game → metaverse. Video call → metaverse.
If you’re talking about Horizon Worlds, that’s a multiplayer game/social experience. Nothing about this is a “metaverse” as it described in the book where that word came from.
It died because meta (which everyone still sees as facebook) is a toxic brand, even to the average consumer now.
Having Zuckerberg, the clammy, glassy-eyed mola mola, as the face of the effort was definitely a big mistake too. I mean, I’m glad it failed, but it was a mistake from a business perspective to use a wax figure with shark eyes as their mascot.
Really, no. That’s not it at all.
It’s because it’s been almost exclusively pushed by hucksters. Just like blockchain, whose driving inspiration in the marketplace has been crypto and NFTs.
Isn’t fun just defined as “a period of user base growth followed by extracting every last dollar possible in an exponential growth pattern forever and ever because that’s totally possible mhm it totally is!” to them?
Indeed. “Funnel. Us. Notoriety.”
Was the metaverse ever alive? All I ever saw were posts about what the metaverse could be, but I never even knew it was an actual thing that existed.
Meta’s very own Horizon Worlds still hasn’t even launched globally, it is still restricted to a small handful of countries. On top of that it isn’t even a Metaverse in any meaningful sense, it’s just yet another VR chat application.
What separates a “real” Metaverse from a normal chat app is that it connects all the other applications into one unified virtual space, but Horizon Worlds ain’t doing that and nobody else is either.
Sony’s Playstation Home back from the PS3 days or Second Life are still closer to a Metaverse than any of the modern attempts.
I’d argue that the MiiVerse for the Wii U was up there too.
If there was any potential in a “metaverse”, it would be picked up by people who know how to make something fun. In Silicon Valley or somewhere else.
That’s not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.
That’s not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.
Realistically, the only thing you’d actually want to do in the Metaverse is something you can’t do in real life, utilising the features of a virtual reality computer generated environment to do things that are physically impossible. If only there was some way you could use a computer, with or without a VR headset, to fly a spaceship, use magic, and explore beautiful environments. There could even be these computer generated characters that could give you ideas about things you could do and places you could go, by giving you a reason to go there and do those things, and all of this could tie into a narrative element that turns it into a kind of interactive story, so you’ve got a reason to keep engaging with the computer-generated environment and characters. And maybe you’d get some of that cool computer-generated swag while you’re there, which you could dress your avatar in…
Hmmm… there could be money in that idea. Someone should try making something like that.
If computer interaction benefited from being more ‘like reality’, then Microsoft Bob or any of the countless other attempts to create a reality- and/or 3D-based computer interface, would have caught on long ago.
The thing is, computer interaction can benefit quite a bit from a 3D space. I really liked what Microsoft did with WMR Portal and how it let you organize your apps simply by placing them in a 3D space, meaning you could have a cinema space with all your video related apps, a stack with games that you were playing, a stack with games you finished, etc. You could have frequently used webpages pasted to the walls. You could just grab the things, resize them and put them somewhere else. It was far more intuitive than any 2D interface I ever used and extremely customizable to your needs.
The problem was that it was also incomplete and unfinished in a lot of other ways and Microsoft just gave up on it. Outside of WMR Portal there has been surprisingly little effort into building good VR user interfaces and even less when comes to actively taking advantage of the 3D space (e.g. plenty apps still use drop shadows to simulate 3D instead of making the buttons actually 3D).
Will be interesting to see how well VisionPro does in this space. They seem to be a lot better with the basic UI elements than everybody else (e.g. dynamically lighting them to fit the AR environment and using real 3D), but at the same time, their focus on a static sitting experience without locomotion drastically limits how much advantage you can take from the 3D. Their main menu so far looks more like a table-UI stuck to your face than an 3D UI.
This has been tried and tried again, and it never catches on. Computer interfaces that are completely detached from physical 3D space are just much more flexible and easy to use.
This describes what I want - being able to have relatively blank walls/spaces that light up and fill up with content when you’re wearing the headset.
It never even existed and was this ambiguous buzzword that got way too much traction.
This is the only true answer here.
Even Meta themselves said they want to “build the metaverse”, at that point the word still had a somewhat clear definition. It then became a bullshit buzzword and lost all meaning. Now even Meta is using the word as a synonym for “VR” or “Multiplayer”, which has nothing to do with the snow crash definition of the word.
There’s way, way too many buzzword chasers out there. How hard can it possibly be to assess something by it’s own merits instead of looking for keywords that other Successful Cool Guys™ are promoting? Instead, we get people copying each other’s hype to the point they build entire markets in intrinsically worthless things on occasion.
