The metaverse died because it didn’t mean anything, there was no clear thing you could point to and say “this is the metaverse”. It was a collection of buzzwords designed to sell a dream to investors and nothing more.
“Metaverse” was the idea that you would use only Meta services instead of the wider Internet. Much like AOL and Yahoo tried back in the 90s and 00s.
This was the best illustration of that. Years and years of effort for some cash-grab that never happened.
As a developer who loves to tinker with web stuff, I feel most of the tech scene and Silicon Valley are full of people who went into development just for the money. I almost see it every day.
Silicon Valley has become a vehicle to secure VC funding. They’ve forgotten that is just step 2.
Yes, it wasn’t always the case. I was in the Silicon Valley in the 2000’s and it was full of techies who really believed in the open web, and even Google was a proponent of open standards.
A few years later it seems like the tech matured enough that being technically savvy was no longer necessary to be a successful founder. Slowly it stopped being about technical innovations and became about raising money, product marketing, A/B testing, etc.
Selling dreams to VCs has long been the game, but VCs started getting dumber and greedier as all the low hanging opportunities were used up. So tech startups had to make sillier and sillier claims and business plans to keep raking in VC dough.
Subscriptions have been big VC keywords for the last 7-8 years, as data harvesting started to be monopolized by a few big owners. Ads are trying to make a comeback as subscription fatigue sets in, which is why blockers are being targeted lately.
I’m not looking forward to the next method of extracting wealth from the masses in trade for VC investment. Probably another form of slavery or subjugation they haven’t found a way to hide yet.
This is the cycle of co-option that takes place with any career that becomes profitable.
A lot of people don’t realize that computers and programming in general were seen as “women’s work” or “nerd shit” until especially the dotcom boom, and career women and nerds (of all genders) were displaced in favor of MBA-bros who the VCs and CEOs didn’t disdain (not by being forced out, but by not being given the jobs and funding; the “paper ceiling” is often used for this).
Machine learning and crypto were also relegated to being “nerd shit” in their nascent years, and now look who populates those particular spaces: non-technical MBA-bros and snake oil salesmen trying to cash in on the hype (and building on the uncompensated work of others… in machine learning’s case, quite literally so).
I feel the same way. They’re in it to become a unicorn and get a big exit. They don’t care about making good software, just profitable software. The vibe in Silicon Valley stopped being hackers and became bankers.
I didn’t go into tech for the money, but after several years of grinding I’m definitely at the point where I’m only still in it for the money. I don’t even want to think about computers outside of work anymore.
Sounds like you are just not in the role or company that appreciates you. I’ve had a similar experience at the beginning, but I kept looking until I found a company that did, so I hope one day you do as well.
Monorail Monorail Monorail 👋👋
I call the dumb one Zucky
It’s not strictly true that it didn’t mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.
Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.
Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.
Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros’ vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta’s implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.
In reality, Meta couldn’t offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn’t have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.
Sums it up nicely 👍
The Metaverse died because everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg isn’t trustworthy and really had no plan.
I misread the headline as “Stardew Valley” and it was a real headscratcher
Those damn farmers, always working the fields instead of generating entertaining VR universes!
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.
People don’t go to virtual spaces because they want to compulsively buy things, they want entertainment and social interaction. The more “buy this! buy that!” you shoehorn into a platform that is hardly ready for even normal gaming experiences is not going to take off imo.
Roblox is terrible but they worked out the model a little bit more intelligently. Make an engine where it’s free to join, host experiences and create new ones relatively easily. They have a shop where virtual items can be bought and sold and Roblox takes a major cut of virtual currency to real currency and store transactions, but outside of that their involvement within the games themselves is less pronounced.
Even if I don’t play Roblox myself, it’s popular with kids and this platform I think is more capable of becoming a VR universe than Horizon worlds or other buzzed “Metaverse” implementations.
Even Garry’s mod servers have more interesting interactions than Meta’s pet project. And I don’t trust Meta enough to touch a platform they develop.
After I watched a guy having to pay real dollars for clapping(!) in a vr open mic night thing I had no further questions about “the metaverse”.
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.
It never died, because it already existed for fucking years: Active Worlds from 1995 is where I started, Second Life later, now the dominant “metaverse” is VR Chat.
The corporate simpletons just never did their homework to see what the market is like for this.
I remember Blaxxun’s Colony City i think even earlier than that. VRML is the future of the past!
Oh my god I remember this too. It looks like there’s a revival project. https://www.cybertownrevival.com/
Even further back there was Lucasfilm’s Habitat all the way back in 1986. It’s kind of shocking how little the idea of the “Metaverse” has evolved since back then. It’s still just some virtual space with avatars, different hats and chatting.
Wow how fascinating! Thanks for sharing that video.
The word is meaningless, nothing like the metaverse as described in snowcrash ever existed. If you’re talking about a multiplayer game that tries to mimic the real word then you’re right. But that’s not what the metaverse actually is…or what the word stood for, before being ripped to shreds as a buzzword.
Yeah they (Facebook) chose the word as a form of marketing to rebrand something that already existed. It’s similar to how we went from “machine learning” to “AI”.
Machine learning is a form of AI. It’s the most useful one for complex problems we have right now, that’s why everybody is using it. The only reason we used random forests and more bespoke algorithms so long is that we didn’t have the compute power or infrastructure to train these networks on a mass scale. ML was invented decades ago but extremely unpractical because computers struggled to do any kind of efficient calculation the moment you added a decimal somewhere.
The kind of AI you find in Google Maps route finding just isn’t very interesting, because we’ve had that for decades.
That’s the thing I hate: the word AI is being misused. It’s not a buzzword, at least it wasn’t supposed to be. It’s artifical intelligence, not in the sense of having a brain but in the sense of being an intelligent algorithm solving an issue. The path finder algorithm A* (A Star) is in this group. Machine learning is a sub category of AI, nothing less.
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Exactly, they should have included fursonas IMMEDIATELY if they wanted it to work.
Even basic market research should have told them this.
Is SL still around? I left my partially nude Darth Vader wearing a banana thong in someone’s art gallery and haven’t been back
I don’t think it was ever born to have died. I think they grossly overestimated how much this tech would improve
There’s no use case for the metaverse that gives it any more value than a video conference. But I can set up a video conference for free, while the metaverse is set up to constantly extract money from the user. On top of that, the barrier to entry is too high in both cost and practicality. I can buy a high quality webcam for a fraction of the price of a VR headset, and I don’t have to strap it to my face just to have a meeting.
In order to justify the cost of being in the metaverse, there has to be a value return that makes it worthwhile - something that can’t be replicated with other simpler and cheaper options. Right now, the metaverse is a platform run by grifters ripping off other wannabe grifters and the gullible.
There doesn’t need to be a value return - if it’s fun. Unfortunately, it seems designed specifically to be brand safe for future advertising instead of appealing to real people.
There doesn’t need to be a value return - if it’s fun.
This is fine, for a video game. But the metaverse isn’t being marketed as a video game, it’s being marketed as a social and utility platform.
Also if it is just a video game then there’s nothing more compelling about it than any other video game… and also it’s a crappy video game built around microtransactions. It’s not fun, it’s a dead mall.
It’s very difficult to just burst into the mainstream without carving out a niche first, and Meta’s Metaverse failed because they couldn’t carve out that niche.
Though even if they had tried, the very tech nerds who would be their early adopters already don’t trust them because of their shady deals (did anybody say Cambridge Analytica scandel?), so they weren’t ever going to fork out money for this.
Not just their business practices, but also just the oculus purchase.
I already had an oculus. I was told (via press release) that I wouldn’t have any issues with not having a Facebook account…only for them to turn around a little while later and require a Facebook login.
Engineers make Star Trek tech because people want to live in Star Trek. No one (besides Zuck) wants to live in Ready Player One.
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.
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.
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.
- dense housing
- VRchat is mainstream
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.
Third Room by matrix.org does all of this.
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.
It died because meta (which everyone still sees as facebook) is a toxic brand, even to the average consumer now.
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.
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.
Dear tech developers, if you are listening please put VR projects on the back burner. They are an interesting future technology but the currently possible technology that people would adopt if it were economical to do so is AR. A simple heads up display with an integrated personal assistant has enormous potential in both personal and business uses right now if it was reasonably priced and reliable. You could replace cell phones.
A simple heads up display with an integrated personal assistant has enormous potential in both personal and business uses right now if it was reasonably priced and reliable. You could replace cell phones.
I’m honestly wondering if the new Apple thing will take off like this. It’s overpriced, but this is the company that sells $700 wheels to people successfully, and the concept looks great.
You know all those programmer memes about screen arrangement? You could have them all and more with a single headset.
VisionPro might work as monitor and TV replacement, but I don’t see it taking of as some kind of person assistant that you wear when you go outside your house. Battery life alone completely kills that usecase
Try a movie via hmd for a half hour and you’ll be looking for a monitor.
HMD already has replaced my TV, and that’s a crappy one from 5 years ago. VisionPro is on a whole different level in terms of features and resolution. The ability to have a virtual screen wherever you want it and however big you want it shouldn’t be underestimated. And that’s not even counting everything else the headset can do.
Wait, is the battery life public? It’s a separate battery pack connected to the set by wire, so it doesn’t have to be terrible.
Yes, it’s public and official: “The external battery supports up to 2 hours of use, and all day use when plugged in.”
VisionPro can barely be considered a portable/mobile device and it won’t even last through a modern movie.
Yikes!
Yeah, it’s probably going to be relegated to toy status then. Maybe we’ll revisit this in a few years once we figure out how to do it on lower power.
VR is just a marketing hype to collect VC money, that’s it.
Just like crypto, AI, Cloud, Big Data, share economy, Internet of things, etc. They all get hyped like hell, burn billions of VC money, and after a few years actually useful products might appear, but are several orders of magnitude more mundane.
It’s so predictable, that even Gartner found out about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
AR has a huge battery life and size problem. The amount of video processing that thing would need to do to be useful, would result in an enormous device with an hour or two of battery life. Rendering it useless for any real world consumer application.
On top of that it has a gigantic privacy and surveillance problem.
And if that wouldn’t be enough, what the heck are you going to do with it? Everything an AR headset could do, you can do today with your phone already. There is very little need to wear that functionality on your head all the time.
For some rare business use cases it can make sense, that’s why Microsoft Hololens is still around, but even they struggle to finding any areas where it makes it past the “nice idea” stage and actually into a working product.
It died for the exact same reason every single aspect of life is getting shittier and shittier. Shareholders. When a company is publicly traded, it has NO CHOICE but to get worse and worse and worse, because shareholders will accept NOTHING beyond continuous growth. If you lose value in the market, they will run for the hills, if you plateau they will run, if you suddenly start making even slightly smaller gains, they will run. They are the sole reason for every decision, and because of that, every single decision will be a detriment to both employees and consumers. Underneath all the bullshit, this is why everything will go to shit eventually unless it is both privately held and by people with good intentions, which is rare to find tied together.
I would argue Zuckerburg had a lot of control over this project, lost a lot of money, and shareholders, due to the structure of Meta as a company, could do fuck all about it.
… But in almost literally every other company on earth, yea this is the case. And meta made these decisions in a world defined by the relationship you just described.
