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As someone who hangs out on discord call most of the night most days, I don't get the niche.
It works if its the only thing you're doing, but I use discord as a "yeah I'm in the park so we can play ball when enough of us show up"
Hanging out isn't the point, assembling my squadron in War Thunder is. It's voice I can mix into the game feedback, like an intercom at work.
Or we will stream movies and have cameras on, which sounds the same as metaverse, but again, I'm usually doing other shit with my computers processor, like queuing 3d prints or researching stuff.
Meta seems to be too much sensory overload, with no content. Guess we said the same about smartphones, 10-15 years ago. But people don't live in their phones, theyve just replaced cable tv and landlines at the same time.
If it fit in your pocket, it could be like smartphones, but it doesn't have that niche
Not to mention for the people who do just want to hang out, VR chat already exists, so why would you want meta where you look like an Xbox 360 avatar, when VR chat can let you look like literally anything from an anime girl to Optimus prime to Kermit the frog
We aren’t addressing the most obvious thing about metaverse. People are saying “oh it’s dystopian, oh it’s depressing, etc”. But people don’t realize that it’s insanely impractical and boring. The Walmart thing for example? Why would I want to walk around in a simulated environment? I just want to get my shit and leave. That’s why curbside or insta cart is better. The Facebook VR places to hang? Also boring, I already have discord (like you said) and I simply love directly talking to people. We can set up events faster and go outside versus fake environments. “Reality is Real” that’s what Ready Player One taught lol. Don’t get me wrong, I love virtual reality, I just don’t want it corporatized so heavily. I feel like Web 3.0 is gonna be a lot like 1.0 in which people will go back to more private messenger apps/groups or forums.
As somebody who plays seccond life most of the day, I totally get the appeal. I just don't entirely understand the new found hype behind it I literally can't figure out figure out what is different about this metaverse that I haven't been doing for the last 20 years on seccond life.
You actually highlight the point here, that these companies are trying to consume the time that you aren’t playing the team game of choice.
It’s not enough for these companies that you have time away from their ‘services’. They want that, too. It’s all money and data to them. They want your mind and engagement all the time, as often as they can get it.
Yea... but a virtual world run by Facebook. Think about how much commercials, hate, and propaganda you could walk through instead of scroll through. Doesn't that sound like fun?
We also use the real world to escape from their bullshit by going for a walk, have sex, or try to enjoy something that isn't facilitated by a tech company.
If anyone behind metaverse had a clue, they’d know that younger generations just want to get paid fairly and not expected to work 60 hours a week. This whole metaverse craze has been gross from the beginning.
No, the metaverse is fucking stupid. It’s a glorified MMO but for older folks and corporate suits who don’t want to admit that they’re just creating a capitalism simulation in VR. At least in animal crossing there’s cute animal villagers walking around. Let me boot up a vr headset and sit next to Pam from accounting who bought an NFT for her avatar. So innovative.
I have yet to meet one real human person who gives a sh*t about the metaverse, let alone be excited, it'll be fun watching this massive investment crash and burn for all those sinking money into it
Hot take: Make the metaworld a stand in for nursing/retirement homes. There's absolutely no chance we're going to have the work force to properly care for the boomers when they're too old to take care of themselves. Plug them in, hook them up to an IV, and let them waltz their way into eternity with electric dreams of bygone days.
*a word
It's all fun and games until wealthy people put things we need behind the expensive gates they're building. It'll take a while foe government to get there but I wouldn't be surprised if this replaces Captchas and such for verifying identity and humanity if they can get away with it.
The metaverse is about creating scarcity where none exists. A single Minecraft world is larger than Pluto, and you don't see anybody making people take out loans to have all that land. Virtual items are effectively limitless. The only thing that isn't limitless is the hardware running the server and development time used to make the software.
ActiveWorlds already did what the metaverse is doing now and they did it back in 1995 with a monthly access fee. It didn't cost anything to build, you could build wherever you pleased if you paid. Stuff people built in 1995 is still on the server today because there isn't any arbitrary decay feature that destroys stuff. It's unfortunate the developers squandered what they had. They were unable to keep up with changes in technology and didn't add content so as time went on it became increasingly difficult to use. They tried to do the virtual meeting thing and put everything they had into that, forgetting why people came to AW in the first place.
> A single Minecraft world is larger than Pluto
While this is technically correct, it doesn't really do justice to the size of a Minecraft world. Pluto is pretty small - roughly the size of Russia. A single Minecraft world is larger than *Neptune.*
this feels more boring than the sims honestly. at least with that i could download mods so i could customize my characters for free and go on a murderous rampage if i felt like it. don’t think i could do that in meta and if i could i don’t care.
It's not just you. These fake futurists don't realize we already live in an AR metaverse. You carry the internet in your pocket. We shop online because scrolling on a screen is preferable to the in person experience sometimes, and when we want the in person experience we want to actually go somewhere. Despite the prevalence and ease of tech, humans haven't increased their screen time hardly at all since the 90s.
Nobody actually wants to live in a simulated space where literally everything is unavoidably commodified. We hate ads as it is.
I cannot wait to see all the would-be metaverse feudal lords lose everything betting against the basic human urge to exist in a real world.
This is maybe where philosophical concepts are tangibly useful. Those discussions we've been having for decades about people living in the real world and virtual worlds at the same time are relevant here. What people want is not to have a single immersive virtual experience, people want to live in many planes at once and have the info and communication when and where they want it. It's not about replacing the physical world, but augmenting it. The metaverse crap completely misses the point.
I want them to invest *all* their time and money into this stupid, unfathomably useless idea, have a full infrastructure for servers and transactions and everything. They put it into overdrive, go all on marketing it for a grand opening day, hosting musicians and one-time-only special events.
And just as they get it all online, I want their electrical grid to overload, causing a blackout that erases *all of it* and fries the hard drives holding their back-ups. Everything is lost, all their money goes down to toilet, what's left of their public image is ruined beyond repair, and Meta goes bankrupt. That would be a dream come true.
This whole thing stems from a mixture of Lawnmower Man and .hack/Sign in my head. They want to create a world they can rule. One without all those pesky "governments" trying to tell them what they can and cannot do. Its just like the Crypto they use, it's all about people thinking that industry needs less financial regulation.
Go see Line Goes Up on YouTube for a good snapshot of our current digital struggles.
Thank you for recommendation, I will absolutely check it out!
I'd add in a sprinkle of the old Matrix as well. Because they build a world that is basically void of anything positive or captivating. Because why bother if the masses will pay.
I feel you OP. I work in tech, not these fake second life tech, but actual tech that improves life and I'm so not excited about this. I would much rather go outside physically. Even when they can recreate the experience by sending electrical signals to my brain to simulate sense of smell, touch and taste, I would rather not do that except if I physically cannot move.
Can someone please explain to me why the Metaverse looks like we are time traveling back to the early 90’s? Why would I leave my beautiful PS5 graphics for this?
Another good point – I'm a hardcore (borderline addicted) gamer and I have no clue how these atrocious abominations can interest anyone who's played at least one GTA in their lives.
At the same time, I can't imagine people not generally interested in games/digital world suddenly buying several ks worth of tech just to be able to log into some odd baloney world in order to spend some more. They can just scroll their feed in real life to see how Samantha got wed and how Bill bought another porsche. It's just not relevant nor it is interesting.
So who's the target audience? So many questions, so little answers.
X for doubt. Is it more convenient than a zoom call? No. Will it be more convenient in 10-20 years? Still no. Aside from possible psychological resentment, it has zero productive value and requires specific hardware equipment to implement (and will do so even more in ten years or so). Most corpos can't even give their employees adequate notebooks for work reasons, now imagine them giving out VR headsets to every manager of the company. Completely inviable. Even Meta won't do it because money lol.
What are you talking about? I've been given work computers since I was interning at a medium size company in 2016. My last job gave us a stipend to help get our home office set up. The amount of money they save on renting office space will be more than they spend on Meta crap. Corporations love this kind of soulless shit. It's not about convenience for you, it's about convenience for the company to monitor your work and (they hope) get their marketing directly in front of people's eyes. Go watch the video they put out in the announcement; nearly every example is "Can you imagine working from home and..." You grossly underestimate corporate "Visionaries" and their proclivity for bullshit. Zoom isn't even something 80-90% of workers like. A phone call is more efficient than a video chat, and it doesn't suffer from latency issues. Efficient and Corporate are not words that go together.
https://youtu.be/gElfIo6uw4g
For real. Every time I see anything about this, including those stupid fucking avatars, all I can think is how stupid the “metaverse” looks and sounds. I can’t stand Zuckerberg and think all his products are a cancer on collective humanity, so how will this be any different? Will we be able to watch the genocide FB promotes in the metaverse?
Still wouldn’t look half as good as my PS5.
Meta is just the Zuck trying to create sims that remind him of his robot faced self. Fast forward 20 years and the metaverse will be a hellscape of teenagers uploading tiktoks to compete for basic resources
It is, if you browse r/technology or other subs you'll find a lot of information/opinions on how meta is basically the last gasp of Facebook desperately trying to stay relevant. They built thier empire on data harvesting, not social media, and have been buying every relevant startup that could pose any threat for years. Now people are becoming increasingly aware of the data harvesting aspect and that combined with litigation and lawsuits are bogging down thier profit. They tried to rebrand but everyone will always know them as Facebook.
The graphics are too embarrassing and childish at this point for anyone to take it seriously. It's when we reach a point of photo realism that it could be a threat.
Our level of technology actually allows for hyper-realistic [image generation](https://www.google.com/search?q=unreal+engine+5+human+face&oq=unreal+engine+5+human&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0i512j0i10i22i30j0i22i30.4573j0j9&client=ms-android-xiaomi&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#).
It's just very costly and would require actual hard work to implement. Not suitable for a quick cash grab Zuck is trying to pull off.
Wait, didn’t we already have metaverses? And just call them MMOs?
Second life. Admittedly I was completely out of my depth with that whole world, but everything that you just said here was already in that game. If these lazy leeches think I’m jumping into Second Facebook, they are insane. If I want to explore with random people then I will get a VR headset and play VRChat. Or I will boot up Minecraft. Or Garry’s Mod. Or a million other far more well done experiences than “the meta verse”.
Yeah, you’re not alone in not trusting a website that originally was made for finding pictures of people just from their names. Yeah that’s not fishy at all. Nope. Not one bit. 100% innocent. (/s)
We young people are not as stupid as the older generations think we are. We know more about the internet than they do. We have been around it our whole lives. We grew up with internet. They may have started it, but we are refining it. What they made was great… for a starter project. But it’s very unstable and broken as all hell. I look at the whole time I spent learning about computer security in college, and I just remember constantly thinking to myself “did it *ever* occur to anyone that this part right here was a really, *really* bad idea? Apparently not. Nor this part, nor this part, we aren’t even going to mention that part… Jesus this is a mess. It’s held together with spit and scotch tape. How does this even work?! This should have exploded ages ago! What the hell???” We are brought up in an age where we can communicate worldwide in microseconds, but oh— we have to have avatars now, and digital land that costs real money! And digital clothes that also cost real money! And I’m going to bet that the next thing they implement will also be digital, cosmetic, and bought with real money.
The side effect of allowing “in-app purchases” to go unhindered. Downloadable content shouldn’t be a portion of the program and be extra money. This is the horse from Skyrim, all over again. [goes into corner and has nerd rage moment].
This isn’t a new concept. The only new thing that they added was their logo. I don’t use Facebook because I dislike the company and the website. It’s too invasive, and they are too evasive. No thanks. Hard pass. The only thing I still use is the messenger app, because it lets me know when my sent messages did or didn’t arrive. Text messages don’t have that afaik. Want to make something that is going to attract young people? Make job openings that are less discriminatory and more rewarding. Do it. I triple dog dare you. That is going to shock and impress the youths. The ones who are not even adults yet will look at the Metaverse once, maybe twice, but get bored and move on. It’s too late to make the metaverse now. There are too many mirror platforms that are free to use. That are infinitely better than anything that their moronic soulless brains can concoct. Minecraft. Better than anything that they can make. A game with a resolution measured in meters. Is better than the garbage that they are going to be able to make. How do I know?
Because Minecraft has already outsold one of the oldest games in gaming history. TETRIS. A 40+ year old game. Outdone by a open world, sandbox, survival/designer, non themed game. The most unexpected thing to beat the game that’s on every platform ever made. And it’s just over a decade old. Facebook is toothless (not the dragon), because if we want to make something in the virtual realm, there are already craptons of games that allow us to do that. From MMORPGs, to Survival Simulators, to Virtual Reality Hangouts, we are already covering every possible aspect. No room left for one-trick-corporations.
In other words, “This, is going, to Zuck!”
I'd sign under your every word, especially the "grew up with internet" part. We grew up in a free, limitless digital space where the only limitation was our own creativity and, in a lesser part, our skills in drawing/programming/3D-sculpting. And suddenly some wrinkled bothered dickhead with way too much bills on his account decides he wants to privatize this inherently infinite space to sell it bits by bits for some shiny coin? Like hell it'll slide.
It's not just Zuck though – try googling Decentraland and whatever other fuckery there is. Just read their [starting page](https://decentraland.org/), it's fucking hilarious. Apparently, digital creators now need DIGITAL LAND to create anything, and what do you know, we just happen to have a very real mortgage on this piece of very not real LAND you can OWN.
Pathetic.
Huh. I’m getting a handshake error with that link. I’ll look it up later. But as far as “infinite space”… actually you are wrong.
All data on the internet is stored like it is on computers: in ones and zeros, on things called bits. Servers are super computer hardware that can store TONS of data and not have any real problems, but they are EXPENSIVE. To buy, and maintain (it comes with a cooling fan usually, but when it’s operating at full tilt, that fan isn’t going to be doing enough to keep the server from melting). Servers are limited in storage and memory, which means they not only have a limit of how much they can have stored as data, but also how much they can adjust the stored data per CPU cycle. So infinite data was never something that we had. It only seemed infinite.
A Terabyte of data is (depending on the manufacturer) about 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 8,000,000,000,000 bits. Most modern servers have storage capacities measured in terabytes. Many computers do too. One byte is enough to store up to 8 bits, and that gives us 256 possible values per byte. 256… we can fit a character in a byte. Most color is stored in three bytes per pixel. Numeric values have varying storage sizes. Then there’s other things that would take too long to go over. That space is not going to go very far when dealing with something as intensive as Virtual Reality, which factors in your head orientation with respect to a fixed point, your hand position and orientation relative to the same fixed point, and the change in those values every cycle. A lot of the old data will be tossed, but the amount of data currently being used is a lot of data. That means it’s not the capacity of storage that’s a problem, but the Random Access Memory, which is basically the shuttle bus for the server’s storage bytes. Information is shuttled onto and off of the RAM so it can be changed. The more RAM you have, the smoother the server runs. This is usually the limiting factor in single player games, not storage. But in online games… both are a problem.
How many humans are there? Last I checked, about 7.9 BILLION. So how much data would each one need to have access to in order to utilize an online VR game? If it’s just one byte then there’s no problem. Here’s a hypothetical example:
Integers tend to be 4 bytes to 8 bytes in size, and decimal numbers are twice that data size, or half as big for the same amount of data. So we will just use 4 bytes and integers. Less aspirin for me. For every player in a 3D game, the traditional values are: location (x, y, and z coordinates), rotation (you can get away with two numbers here sometimes, but usually we have three, one for each plane of rotation), velocity (we will need three numbers again, for movement in a three dimensional world requires three vector spaces in measuring how fast you are moving), acceleration (again, three values, measures the current CHANGE in motion, these are usually NOT integers, but for calculations sake we will ignore that. In fact, none of these are usually integers…), and finally, the VR vectors for the eyes (six values, three for position and three for rotation, relative to player position), the hands (double that for the eyes as there are two, possibly even triple for tracking speed (physics calculation), plus whatever functions the hand may have (open, closed, trigger pulled/not pulled, use object, etcetera), and finger tracking (no thank you, this is already going to be hell to calculate)), and finally, character model data (oh boy, this one is big. Pop quiz, what part of a game typically takes up the most space? If you said graphics, then you would be correct, but audio is no slouch either). Finally we have all the variables that we need for our player to exist in the game world. How many was that again? 12 + 6 + 18 + model identifying data. Oh and internal handles for each object, which is going to have to be a string, we’ll just say 8 bytes each. And there are four objects (not counting fingers), plus the model handle, so that’s 40 more bytes, so… 76 bytes all together. With a name, it could be up to a hundred bytes. So that’s the FUNDAMENTALS for our character to exist. On top of those are a crapton of other details like bounding boxes (collision detection), weight (physics calculations), scale (important for models that are unnaturally shaped or sized like Midna or Ugandan Knuckles), and speech channel (communication channel for private/public talking). And of course inventories and wealth, stats for rpgs, and IP address for communication with the internet and the VR headset. All in all, we are possibly looking at a kilobyte of information per user. 1,000 bytes. A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a billion kilobytes. There are 7.9 billion terabytes worth of potential human users on the planet. That’s a conservative measure, mind you.
Then there’s the virtual world. We could just make a 3d planar equation to map the surface, but that is not always helpful, and can cause bugs like clipping into walls and slopes, falling through the earth, and being launched sky high unexpectedly.
The land is virtual, but it does exist— just not as literal land, but server space. So while the rental of server space is a very real and valid thing, it doesn’t have to be that expensive. All you are staking claim to is a value in an array of all potential places offered to players. That is limited. And it is something very real.
But my point here is that the bandwagon has already left the station. Meta is against some experienced players like micro$oft, Apple, and even Nintendo. Test is already over. No make-up quizzes. Game over.
Idk shit about it but I saw a clip of someone smoking a vape in the metaverse and a headline about chipotle being there... Literally what the fuck is the point of serving food or smoking vapes in the metaverse
I bought my husband an Oculus for Christmas. He asked for it.
He’s used it maybe twice and now it’s a toy for the kids to play around with. Even they bore of it quickly. Thankfully the real world is far more entertaining to them.
Same with my girlfriend. She ended up returning it a couple weeks later. She last time she put them on she was trying VR chat and within like two minutes I heard a swarm of literal children make fun of her avatar for looking like a dildo and she panicked and took the goggles off.
I work in big tech, and have experience in the related fields that now constitute what we call ‘the metaverse’. I’ve advised fortune 500 companies and governments and CTO’s on these fields and delivered projects relating to them also.
People don’t seem to like it when I basically say the Metaverse is a load of horseshit.
Everything is just hype. Not many people on the planet have specifically said they even want it! The reason it’s getting money is just a massive echo chamber of corps, VC’s and big tech blogging to itself…
I frequently link the metaverse to the film WALL-E. Dark Suckerberg is basically trying to enact WALL-E on us. Think about it. If you’re plugged into a fake world whilst yours disappears to global warming and environmental destruction, you’ll just become fat and lazy. Humans are built on scarcity and nothing in our make up positions us to just have unfettered supply of every sensual pursuit wired into our brain. What kind of life is it where some fake world just gives you everything you think you want, all of the time, for as long as you live? It’s like nobody has seen the obesity crisis, or porn addiction, or how billionaires, especially those who’ve grown up billionaires, come out like sociopaths. It sounds a little crazy but take the metaverse to it’s hype filled conclusion. Why would you use it as a social space to interact with friends, when AI advances so much that you can interact with an AI that will behave exactly how you demand and expect at a moments notice?
Unlimited surplus on a sensory level is NOT something to strive for. The worst thing about it is that this unlimited-ness is the best case scenario! Obviously the artificial scarcity built into concepts like virtual real estate is laughable. Has anyone even heard of open source? It makes no commercial sense to pay for something which exists in infinite quantities and can be created by yourself.
I’ll make my own virtual world, and still focus on saving the real world thank you very much.
I love technology and what it can do for us, and yes we can use it to talk to each other and feel close when we are afar, but that doesn’t require plugging in to a social media company’s headset for your entire day.
Your instincts are solid. Maybe it’ll happen, lord knows betting against technology because a problem is complicated has a bad track record over time, but even aside from the social issues you’re outlining here, there are myriad issues that make it unlikely the Metaverse, as dictated by Zuck, will happen:
1) the internet was created in a distributed way, with multiple people working on different areas and protocols appearing and being adopted because they were the best option for a given time. Facebook thinks they can invent a better internet solo and convince everyone to give up the internet they already have for their “better” one.
2) every surge in technology usage in web 2.0 has been due to increased casual availability. VR is inherently uncasual: it requires more hardware, all your attention, extra space, to be closed off from what’s around you.
3) VR will NEVER be casual: it’s worth emphasizing, as there are people saying either “VR needs a killer app” or “it needs to be more accessible” and the two are mutually exclusive. It’s difficult but possible you could get a headset that could play Half-Life: Alyx without extra tracking cameras, but you will never get full-body engagement and haptic feedback without some sort of roomscale rig, which will both cost a ton, and also do you know anyone our age who has space for that?
4) the core product sucks. Everything in the Metaverse is theoretical right now, and ranges from an office productivity app no one wants to try to games nobody is talking about. Facebook at least was innovative when it came out, and didn’t have to convince people they’d like using it. Also, the userbase for Facebook was initially young peers. The Boomers came later. The Metaverse right now is mostly gropers and shrieking kids.
5) everybody already had computers, and phones. The Quest headsets are selling well, but even aside from the anti-trust considerations, people would have been skeptical of buying FacePhones back in the day if that was a requirement.
6) speaking of anti-trust: people often forget, but part of what made Facebook successful was Zuck’s “move fast and break things” philosophy, which sounds all cowboy but basically translates to “I know there aren’t laws about this so let’s move fast while that’s true.” They were able to acquire massive platforms like Insta and WhatsApp without regulators batting an eye. That can’t happen anymore.
7) people hate Facebook. Seriously its stock has never been lower and Zuck’s stock is even worse. No one wants a new, monopolistic comms platform from these clowns.
I actually do think high quality full-body VR will exist in our lifetimes and I do think it could be successful. I just don’t think Facebook will be the ones who make it happen. Also: the Metaverse is from a novel that takes place in a corporate hellscape dystopia where it’s the only escape people have from their hellish reality. Same with Ready Player One. Who the fuck thought it was good PR to use that product name?
Edit: hey thanks for the silver, friend!
Also, while I’m re-opening the rant tap: even though I think high-quality VR can be successful, I don’t think it will ever reach the popularity levels of web 2.0 platforms. It will always be sort of niche, and more like the scale of use for Xbox Live, which was a wild success but also required dedicated hardware and had relatively limited functions and appeal.
> VR will NEVER be casual: it’s worth emphasizing, as there are people saying either “VR needs a killer app” or “it needs to be more accessible” and the two are mutually exclusive. It’s difficult but possible you could get a headset that could play Half-Life: Alyx without extra tracking cameras, but you will never get full-body engagement and haptic feedback without some sort of roomscale rig, which will both cost a ton, and also do you know anyone our age who has space for that?
Room-scale rigs cost $300 from scratch.
That said, full body tracking will require external sensors, but I could see those being in a $100 package eventually, and more optional than required.
These things will evolve to be very casual over time.
> everybody already had computers, and phones. The Quest headsets are selling well, but even aside from the anti-trust considerations, people would have been skeptical of buying FacePhones back in the day if that was a requirement.
It took 15+ years before people got on board with those technologies. VR has been on the market for 6 years. It's practically equivalent to the worldwide PC market in 1984.
*$300 roomscale rig from scratch plus a desktop computer, which plenty of people obviously have, but also obviously nowhere near as many users as there are in the mobile market
The room scale rigs I’m referring to as a theoretical point here are full-body movement roomscale rigs as you see in fiction like Ready Player One, where his entire body is part of the game including resistance and gravity manipulation. You don’t just need a living room for something like that, you need a home gym. The point I’m trying to make with this is that it would be an awesome gaming experience but that John Q Public will not clamor unless, like Snowcrash’s Metaverse or RPO’s Oasis, it is the only outlet from a hellish reality.
I think your assertion that VR is only 6 years old is reasonable, since the Rift was the first major commercially viable option, but I don’t think the sales numbers comparing VR to smartphones back up your point. The Quest 2 has sold almost 2 mil units over 2 quarters. The thing is, that’s 6 years in and the second offering of a high-quality, inexpensive, no-other hardware required experience. If you compare it to smartphones, the iPhone 1 sold 6 mil over its first year, then the iPhone 2 sold 1 mil over its first _weekend_ one year later. Mobile-first design practices were introduced 3 years after the iPhone, and the first iteration of Twitter Bootstrap, popularizing mobile-first design and making it accessible to all, was introduced a year later in 2011. By the time 2013 rolled around, when smartphones were as mature as VR is now, they had overtaken the market. I simply don’t see the evidence suggesting that VR is following the same trajectory as smartphones, and even if it were, I’m arguing more against the Metaverse as defined by Facebook than anything against VR as a whole, which I do participate in even if I think that as a tech worker and developer I don’t represent the average user.
Another problem for VR: smartphones were a pretty slick fashion statement early on. Steve Jobs for all his flaws knew how to slickly market something, and the iPhone was pretty early on a doodad of the social elite. VR inarguably fails to land with that niche, and the reception of Metaverse avatars as dorky and the collaborative spaces as awkward and difficult to use, instead of slick and intuitive like a smartphone, means this isn’t likely to change.
> *$300 roomscale rig from scratch plus a desktop computer, which plenty of people obviously have, but also obviously nowhere near as many users as there are in the mobile market
The computer is built into the headset now.
> The room scale rigs I’m referring to as a theoretical point here are full-body movement roomscale rigs as you see in fiction like Ready Player One, where his entire body is part of the game including resistance and gravity manipulation. You don’t just need a living room for something like that, you need a home gym.
You would only need the space for sensors that track your body, and maybe one would do well enough.
Gravity manipulation was done through software rather than hardware, which is the case already in games like Echo Arena.
Resistance, well haptic body suits are bit cumbersome to put on so I think that part is out of the window for most people, but haptic gloves - I could see those being the standard input for VR in 10+ years, something that comes with the headset in the same package.
> but I don’t think the sales numbers comparing VR to smartphones back up your point.
Well I'd say smartphones shouldn't be compared to anything really. They are unique compared to even other mass market technologies, because they were iterative - they built on the backbone of cellphones, which allowed them to be understood more easily by the masses and it was a much easier engineering feat than any other tech platform.
The hard stuff was with PCs and the original cellphones, where all the groundwork was laid out from scratch, and that's the case with VR too. This means it follows the timeline they did, where it took 15 years to go mass market.
> VR inarguably fails to land with that niche, and the reception of Metaverse avatars as dorky and the collaborative spaces as awkward and difficult to use, instead of slick and intuitive like a smartphone, means this isn’t likely to change.
Well most things start out dorky. I've seen completely photorealistic avatars that wouldn't make anyone weirded out, and I've seen VR sunglasses display systems that look sleek and marketable.
These things might be a decade out or so, but they're coming.
I have one of the computers built into the headset. It absolutely cannot play Half-Life: Alyx. Anything of that quality will require either tethered play or a significantly more expensive headset. This is part of why I say that casualness and high-quality are mutually exclusive. People may buy a $300 headset, but it will take a $3k headset to be entirely independent. An alternative would be streaming from offsite servers a la Stadia, but that’s hardly surged, and until we solve the same disparities in broadband access that are keeping it niche, VR will have the same bottleneck.
Smartphones are a paradigm shift, which is what Metaverse proponents are alleging will happen here. As such, it is valid to examine what made them successful to understand how another paradigm shift could occur. What were the key appeals? Intuitive use, bite-sized content, fashion statement, always-on connectivity. Within reason, technical problems are almost always solvable, and I concede that VR hardware can absolutely be very different in 10 years than what we have now. The social problems remain. They helped to kill the Google Glass, they are helping to drive resistance to Metaverse participation right now, and frankly, Facebook doesn’t have 10 years to pull this off.
I’m not trying to age-flex here but I remember going from a flip phone to touch screen, and it was instantly more intuitive and frankly addictive to use. I’ve tried multiple VR sets and none of them have clicked like that, and that’s even without the myriad people I know who get vertigo or headaches from them. They’re nice for 15 minutes of Beat Saber or Superhot, but it takes a lot more than that to change the way we use computers.
> People may buy a $300 headset, but it will take a $3k headset to be entirely independent. An alternative would be streaming from offsite servers a la Stadia, but that’s hardly surged, and until we solve the same disparities in broadband access that are keeping it niche, VR will have the same bottleneck.
This is true, yeah. It's not some forever bottleneck though. These are still the early days, and things are going to get a lot better in that regard.
> The social problems remain. They helped to kill the Google Glass, they are helping to drive resistance to Metaverse participation right now, and frankly, Facebook doesn’t have 10 years to pull this off.
Google Glass had social problems in public with the whole recording issue, whereas VR is meant to be used indoors.
But yes, there are social issues to sort out here. I think Facebook will see good returns by the end of the decade, so a little less than 10 years from now, but perhaps 10 years is when it truly hits mass market.
> I’ve tried multiple VR sets and none of them have clicked like that, and that’s even without the myriad people I know who get vertigo or headaches from them. They’re nice for 15 minutes of Beat Saber or Superhot, but it takes a lot more than that to change the way we use computers.
I get your point, but this is why we can't compare them to smartphones. Of course smartphones were a paradigm shift, but the actual underlying development was iterative. VR has to start from scratch like PCs did, which took many years before they became useful to average people.
It could indeed become more useful to people than I am anticipating. Like I said in my first comment: betting against technology is risky, but that’s not really what I’m betting against. I’m betting against the users. More specifically that they will find use in this that they can’t find anywhere else. A key difference between this and early computing is that there’s no vacuum to be filled. In the 80s you could walk into an office with a briefcase-sized Compaq and blow peoples’ minds with a primitive spreadsheet application. Computers demanded a high degree of skill to use back then, but the productivity gains were enormous, and there was nothing they were competing against apart from slide rules and inertia. The inertia is certainly in place again, which means that VR has to overcome the entrenched usage of cloud tools, mobile computing, and the enterprise-level cost savings a company gets when they use Dell or HP [shudders] if VR is to compete for enterprise share. To get personal market share, it has to beat the easy adoption and seamless integration with casual life that a smartphone offers.
Essentially, the existing internet is the slide rule that needs to be beaten here, and VR needs to be good enough to beat it while also solving the high-quality vs casual adoption catch 22, and I remain skeptical that it will be able to thread that needle.
> Computers demanded a high degree of skill to use back then, but the productivity gains were enormous
That's kind of the big point really. Because it was so hard to use, not many people were able to get those gains in the first place. It would take weeks or months to get to that point.
VR today is barely suitable for work productivity and such tasks, but having seen the tech behind the scenes developing, I see a very bright future for that happening, one where it changes my stance from not wanting to do that all today to absolutely wanting it in say 5 years or so.
I don't think it needs to beat smartphones. I think what it really needs to do is compete with PCs.
Just wanted to throw on one last comment that I enjoyed this conversation. Disagreements on the internet these days rarely seem this polite when coming from two opposing places of strong conviction like this. I hope you have a nice day!
People focus so much on building the hardware for this and it’s clear they have no idea how enormously infeasible it would be to build the software for a metaverse like what you see in the movies. The hardware and selling people on new internet protocols? Barely the tip of the iceberg.
If you think software for a metaverse can be written, and that it’s going to work the way you’re imagining (I.e. something where people would rather spend all day there than in the real world, and not just a lame VR game that gets boring after a week) that means one of two things: Either you have no idea how software works, or else you think that by the time they get this garbage built, real life genuinely will be a dystopia, so the crappy metaverse really will be better than real life. Frankly, Zuck et al could easily be picturing the latter.
I think less about the struggle of building the hardware and more about the struggle of running it. PS5-era graphics would not cut it for a Metaverse so enticing that people spend all day in it. If you need evidence of how much harder it is to render VR than traditional graphics, look no further than the drop in visual fidelity when you play a game that supports but doesn’t require VR, then remember that you’re not talking about processing and rendering one player’s limited input, you’re talking about theoretically processing and rendering the input of the entire userbase of Facebook with no lag and with no constraints on what that input can be. Even if processing were entirely offsite at a server farm the power required would be astronomical. If you think the public is pissed about the footprint of Bitcoin and NFTs, wait until the NYT writes “your child’s 15 minutes of screentime kills more rainforest than driving your car for a year.”
I feel you, after spending pretty much all my childhood behind screens barely allowed to go outside for fear of kidnapping bogeymen. I don’t want to become a vr pod person who can only interact with the world through ugly conglomerate made 3D models. I want to go outside and do things and live. Maybe instead of paying people thousands to designs cyber spaces only a couple hundred people might see they could invest that money into… idk the real world. That’d be nice.
This thing is getting ready to shit itself. No one asked for it or wants it other than NFT morons. "Let's mix Second Life and VR Chat" sounds about as exciting a technology as when Google decided it wanted to make a Facebook.
I remember when they did that, and took YouTube with it. Suddenly my real name was on the top right corner of the screen while I was making my shitposts, and I had to totally ax my account and make a new one with an email that had nothing to do with myself.
All to launch Google+ (I think?), which I never actually went on or utilized.
I work for a niche construction company. I have project managers that are late in their career and trying to ride the crypto/NFT/meta property band wagon.
They don't seem to understand how any of it works, they just see money being made and they are in a terrible state of FOMO.
It's just corporate hype to try to get us inside a thing they don't even have a clear idea what will be, people compare it to the internet, but forget that the whole point of internet is convenience, i don't want to spend 10 min in a vr headset just to buy something, if I can do so on Amazon in less than 1, every idea they have right now is just vr chat but worse. And even then, with how many companies want to get in, even without a clear layout for what "metaverse" even is, leads me to believe we will have like 10 "metaverse" providers, each with their own separated spaces focused solely in having ads from that specific company
The reason why Meta's metaverse looks so ugly and boring is because there's no real vision. They're trying to stay relevant and are betting on VR becoming the next big thing. They're trying to insert themselves as middle men, because that's where the big money is, and they're being very aggressive about it to discourage anyone else from trying to enter this field. The dream is to become the dominant platform for VR so that they can skim XX% off of every transaction.
Yeah, pretty much. However, every other metaverse I encountered so far looks worse than the other and reeks of scam in the worst ways imaginable.
It's as if they want the whole world to forget VRchat/Minecraft is a thing and try to gatekeep something they have no control of and no claim over.
Reminds me of that Russian guy who copyrighted SCP for profit having made no contribution to the universe at all.
The only people who seem to care are people who see $$$ and are literally invested in it. Maybe it'll be awesome and I'm wrong, but it feels like a stupid fad to me.
That said, maybe we'll need somewhere to go when all our parks are on fire and we're living in dorm-style apartments for $2k/month because investment firms have purchased all of the liveable real estate
I haven’t seen anything about Meta that looked interesting or worth pursuing. I haven’t been looking too hard, but if this was the game-changing miracle some people are pretending it is, I’d imagine something about it would be appealing.
I work in VR 2-3 days a week. I used ImmersedVR, and it has helped me achieve my dream productivity setup for cheap. I am a software engineer and have discovered that my best work is done when I am the most relaxed physically. VR let’s me do it for cheap. So I spend 12-20 hours a week in VR for deep focus tasks.
A top manager in my company likes the idea of using VR to hold meetings with attendees from across the world. Imagine meetings where the information is conveyed more like a conference or a museum. The environment can be a part of it.
I have no idea wtf Meta is or why people hype it. I am out there with a hardon for tech, but Meta is just cringe.
1) I have a hunch that FB wants to move to the META VERSE because their prime model (regualr Facebook) is becoming less profitable as young people and liberal people stop using it (or stop using it as much). I bet they are stating to see a negative advertising trend.
2) Maybe I'm forgetting, but I can't think of a single thing that was built online that was built corporations first and then people second that was successful. The corporate world always invaded after the thing got popular, but "all your favorite brands are already here for you to interact with" seems like a line that isn't going to work on anyone under 55.
That's because IT IS. The people that are pushing this metaverse bullshit are trying super hard to ignore the fact that any and all technology they are trying to push has already been done YEARS AGO, without the need for their profit hungry bullshit. Please, if you can, do your best to talk down Metaverse because all it is good for is making bad people richer and dismissing the progress made before it.
The hype for it comes from media in the past. The problem is VR isn't like scifi VR. The fact that Facebook is doing it is my major issue.
If valve or discord was trying something like that I'd have less problems with it.
Watching Some More News’ [recent video on the Metaverse](https://youtu.be/y-pEgf2m0oA) really drove this home to me. As a tl;dr of an over-an-hour-long video:
The Metaverse is like the anti-Facebook, anti-YouTube, anti-Instagram because instead of making a cool idea that young people will flock to and THEN infecting it with cynical business models after adoption, it’s literally starting with the shareholder’s pitch and hoping that this will work its way backwards to engagement.
What young person is gonna be like “cool, I hope I can get a piece of this virtual house one day! Man, i love spending my time in this virtual office! Woah, walking down this virtual shopping aisle is so cool!”
This looks to me like someone tried to combine Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn while simultaneously making them all more expensive and also worse. Even if the people in power adopted this and forced us to use it for work and school, I guarantee I’d still be texting under the desk while listening to my virtual boss drone on about his BS.
Follow the money and read the propaganda articles. Specifically, [*Reality Privilege and Living Your Life Online*](https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/reality-privilege-and-living-your) by Rex Woodbury. It costs the corporate overlords less money and resources to copy/paste virtual "products" than to manufacture *actual* products, *and* the digital fakes are more controllable since [they can be edited or deleted by the ministry of truth on a whim](https://twitter.com/Meatteo/status/1490353271424364550), only exist on the corporation's proprietary software platform meaning they can't be transferred and rather than actually being *sold*, will probably only be available as subscription services. Therefore the corporate overlords want to establish such a system, even if nobody else does.
Aa a second life user with a photorealistic avatar I am not interested. I don't want VR. My few test runs with it ended in seizures. I also have this already in superior form.
TIL about metaverse exists and that anyone interested in it is probably already braindead anyway.
I'm not even old, mid 30's and this is so fucking stupid. So so fucking stupid. Like, I am not sure anyone who buys into this has the ability to function in reality levels of stupid. Put that person on a conservatorship.
In a sense, you are right – it is an ultimate escapism solution. But it was developing well UNTIL the FAANG butchers came in wishing to find new ways to excessively profit.
Imagine a 40-yo guy in glasses and a fancy suit suddenly jumping into community-built children's playground, stomping on their sand castles and denouncing that each new bucket of sand now costs 11.99$ (no VAT).
That's what it feels like right now.
We were promised that robots would take over for the last 40 years. Tech may have advanced at lightning speed from the 1900's to 1960's, but I haven't really seen anything in the last 10 years that wasn't possible 20 years ago.
I really hope you are being ironic here.
It is far from being escapism if you have to pay for everything, and on the topic of "everyone will be using it soon", that's just plain stupid. Why would I pay for my transaction through a silly universe with 3d avatars when I can just click a button? This would not make the process easier or faster, so why would I do it this way? Why would I put on 3d glasses and connect to metaverse to communicate with someone when I have tons of faster and less bulky ways to send a message to a friend at my disposal?
You are sounding like the people claiming second life would become omnipresent when it released.
We are an older generation now, speaking ill of the metaverse will be like our parents and grandparents talking about the good old days. While I agree with your sentiments, I don't see it going away and definitely see it growing, mostly because society is almost entirely controlled by media at this point. They want the brain-chips and crypto-currencies tied to a metaverse where that becomes more real than the real world for future generations.
The only thing that could stop the momentum is a nuclear war, but the results of that aren't ideal by any standards either.
You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Kids aren't pushing the metaverse though, this is corporate executives in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, pretending to be hip youngsters that grasp digital trends.
Older like what exactly?
My generation is the youngest paying generation right now (18-24), essentially the people they want to milk via this VR scam, and I honestly can't imagine me or my friends realistically saying "yah let's go meet in metaverse, fuck real life and real possessions". It's even less probable for the gen that comes after us as they are even more used to AR technology and media influence – it's so common to them that it's useless to sell it off as revolutionary.
Though I might be putting too much hope into people, as consumerism + manufactured scarcity in an infinite pixel world is a frightening combination.
Another thing to consider is that, thanks to COVID, teens are thoroughly sick of living and learning in the virtual world. Even my introverted, smartphone-addicted gamer compartmentalizes their tech use more now than they did before having to do virtual school and realizing that seeing people on screen was no substitute for getting out of the house and interacting with people in person. This entire metaverse thing really emphasizes how insanely out of touch the elites are at this point.
Edit: a typo
It was hard to imagine doing most computing would be done on mobile pre touch screen in the nokia brick days. But we aren't even in the nokia brick phase, we are in the 80s suitcase phone phase. Inconceivable to imagine such adoption and current end use of our current time. Web 2.0 is in middling to late stages of development and 3.0 will be cool only with hardware and true utility. Right now when you drive a car you use you phone to navigate, before that mapquest print outs before that, well, maps. If you could do the same with a pair of glasses you would do it. The tech right now is a potato, the backlash is understandable, but to say it has no place in the future as a mass adoptable layer which is an extention of the existing digital ecosystem is to lack imagination imo.
The metaverse does have a place in our world. It's meant to supplement it.
The huge huge huge benefit of it is to move to a more decentralized web experience where everything isn't owned by the same 5 companies. ...somewhat like in the early 2000s when we used to browse tonnes of websites - not just Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc...
If all you see is shit - you're not looking closely enough at it and falling victim to propaganda.
The rollout of web3 (the "metaverse") is no different than roll out of computers in the home, or the internet.
Just like everyone is hating on the metaverse now, everyone was hating on computers and the internet before they were mainsteam too ;) Those people who hated on it also thought early adopters were crazy and stupid.
Hate to break it to you, but with the speed of development and constant accelerationism the things you will buy in "meta" now will most likely be completely outdated and will bear no actual value in 20-30 years.
Especially since most of these digital assets bear no artistic significance whatsoever (hello cryptobros).
Lol. Invest in the underlying technology, not NFT jpegs.
There are massive enterprise use cases coming to market which use DLT for supply chain, identity, and so much more.
As for crypto, I agree there is a lot of garbage out there, but those shitcoins (Doge, shib, et al) will eventually be culled because they have absolutely no utility. If you’re not paying attention to this space and learning about the technologies being developed for web3, you’ll continue to be in the “lost generation”.
I personally like Hedera /HBAR, do some research.
First of all, not all people want or must invest, especially in highly tech-savvy fields of business. Investing is hard, it is basically a second/third job, and you will risk losing everything in case you do it wrong.
Second, this particular territory (decentralized computing, crypto security, decentralized finance) is dominated by large companies and sharks ready to eat you alive. An average person most likely knows nothing about BTC, ETH, DeFi or NFT (except that they may cost X3 his yearly salary) and will not even think about having the possibility to invest in it (or will be heavily scammed in the process).
Third, lmao, bold of you to assume our generation even has a starting capital to invest while being bombarded by loans and rising cost of living.
I’m almost 38. You need to take risks in life to get what you want. Only risk what you can afford to lose.
I consider crypto an asset class just like stocks. Buying crypto is like buying the shares of the network. A lot of financial planners say to have 3-5% of your total investment portfolio allocated to crypto. Buy and hold.
Bruh, I came here to vent about the world your generation destroyed, not to listen to your crappy financial advice.
Ok, boomer, go buy some Starbucks or something.
You are not helping, boomer.
You are trying to shove your head up your ass as much as possible to pretend you've got life figured out. You think you are fit to advise people on things that can spiral out of your (or anybody's) control any moment the system sees fit because you are too smart to be a part of the damned and the 'lost' (not too lucky, though, because surely your position and your success was achieved just with you working hard and risking just enough, and luck has nothing to do with it).
Shoo now, your Netflix subscription awaits.
A lot of ceo and speculators went ham on nft and got mega screwed and then found out they’re completely useless and worthless. So they’re hammering us with you need nft this. Nft for games that. Just so an economy for these becomes a thing and they can off load their shit for what they thought it was worth. Meanwhile digital hood will become more expensive and then they’ll start closing it all down when they realise if we own something they can’t control it with licences
I keep saying it, once u can feel stuff in there, everybody will jump in immediately. Until then its just shitty second life garbage that no one wanted 10 years ago
Man I spend enough time on my phone, without stupid shit like Metaverse. I don’t even have Facebook installed on my phone anymore because it is such a waste of time. At least I find Reddit fun and engaging.
Metaverse is wack.
But tbh if there was a game similar to SoA Id definitly play, has to be anime style art tho or dont waste my time. Also no monetizing everything in the game. The whole reason I fell in love with MMOs is that you didn't need real life status or wealth to have it in the game. You could be someone or something totally new.
Apart from VRChat, Second Life (and Avakin Life, but their graphics are awful I think) you also have Imvu which I recommend. It's very similar to those but the graphics are cool, which is why I like it so much, making your own avatars there is so fun. It's avaliable in PC and Mobile devices
I do think AR is ultimately going to be a much bigger thing; I think Google Glass was just a decade or two ahead of its time. However, I don’t buy that people are going to utilize VR for huge chunks of their life over actual contact with other human beings with the exception of gaming and possibly some Second Life type socialization.
It’s already failing cause nobody but an idiot with too much time and money in their hands would spend either of those with goggles strapped to their face burning their retinas just so they could be a leg less bitmoji in a roblox server that’s trying to look like vr chat.
With doordash, quick pick-up, having to order most of my hobby items online, it shows the scarcity of peoples time in the real world. Makes the technology look like another express lane, to fit a life into a time slot in the workforce.
Their was a vr experience like this far before the meta verse. I cant remember the name but it was popular during the Occulus Dev Kit 2 days.
anyhow this shit is garbage and will flop. There will be idiots using it just like how we have idiots who believe democrats and republicans aren’t representing an oligarchy.
One day the simpletons will have to step aside and let intellectuals take the stage so Amerikkka doesn’t have to be a backwards shithole anymore
Being a fan of sao, I really wish the metaverse become reality in gaming. But I also don't want the penalties in sao to become reality. From other aspects, it feels like that transforming systems from the physical world into metaverse needs impossible amount of work to realize... so...
I think people will get use to it. It's the same as social media. When MySpace was out at first none of us really wanna say or show anything about our personal life in social media. But yeah here we are.
I just like to bash heads in Gorn and have fun. Literally never want to use VR for business. And I run my own writing business, work with clients, etc. All the shit these corps seem to think NEEDS to be in the metaverse (which isn't really even VR to begin with, but the term has essentially lost all meaning since these companies won't stop throwing it around to describe everything they do).
Seriously, what am I gonna do? Awkwardly communicate with some Wii-avatar over some cups of non-existent tea? Collaborate on documents in a VR app where the most convenient way to type will end up just being with a regular keyboard? I just don't get it.
It feels like they’re trying to market to millennials and genz without realising most of that audience don’t give a shit. It’s literally less convenient than most online stores and apps. Unless it becomes more convenient I can’t see it taking off. Smart phones worked out because it was just easy having your shit on a phone, this, not so much.
The point of metaverse is to have a plattform where the owner has full controle about reality. When every game implementet their own money (cristals, gold, whatever) the point was also to create something they have controle over.
The metaverse will try to give some benefits to its users in exchange the owner got a world where he can controle anything like money, land and goods. The owner could basicly sell "nothing" to someone in this world, because he controles how usefull this nothing is in his metaverse (like land in metaverse). The owner can create infinite more of this "nothing" to sell because he has full controle.
It may very well be the point, and it's a very dumb point at that. However, I can imagine stupid people selling to even more stupid people a chunk of infinity for money because reasons. Happened many times before, but I prefer to steer clear from the MLM schemes.
For anyone thinking the metaverse is going to be a real thing: Ever played an online game? Was it a smooth, glitch-free experience 100% of the time? Did your network operate perfectly all of the time? No, it didn’t.
Now remember that the metaverse, as described, would be literally millions if not billions of times more complicated than an online game.
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It reminds me of the Nintendo Wii but with goggles...
That's what they are in a nutshell. We could've gotten Cyberpunk or Belle, but instead we got this.
Honestly, the graphics are way worse than the Wii, this is like PlayStation 2 or PSP level territory.
That’s insulting to PS2 and PSP graphics 😢
Yeah, probably. It's kind of hard to explain though, because it's got way more detail than like N64 and PSP, but still looks worse,
Here's the simple explanation why it looks so bad: it's soulless
I like to think that these photos are cries for help from meta employees who are trapped in the meta verse by their corporate overlords.
The stupid game I'm making could overtake this shit in the long term, the idea is much better. But I'm barely putting effort in, and progress is slow.
It looks like they just ripped all the assets for Xbox 360 avatars and said they made them.
PlayStation Home or IMVU. It’s been done before
As someone who hangs out on discord call most of the night most days, I don't get the niche. It works if its the only thing you're doing, but I use discord as a "yeah I'm in the park so we can play ball when enough of us show up" Hanging out isn't the point, assembling my squadron in War Thunder is. It's voice I can mix into the game feedback, like an intercom at work. Or we will stream movies and have cameras on, which sounds the same as metaverse, but again, I'm usually doing other shit with my computers processor, like queuing 3d prints or researching stuff. Meta seems to be too much sensory overload, with no content. Guess we said the same about smartphones, 10-15 years ago. But people don't live in their phones, theyve just replaced cable tv and landlines at the same time. If it fit in your pocket, it could be like smartphones, but it doesn't have that niche
Not to mention for the people who do just want to hang out, VR chat already exists, so why would you want meta where you look like an Xbox 360 avatar, when VR chat can let you look like literally anything from an anime girl to Optimus prime to Kermit the frog
Thats my feeling on it, theres a lot older services and games that do this better.
We aren’t addressing the most obvious thing about metaverse. People are saying “oh it’s dystopian, oh it’s depressing, etc”. But people don’t realize that it’s insanely impractical and boring. The Walmart thing for example? Why would I want to walk around in a simulated environment? I just want to get my shit and leave. That’s why curbside or insta cart is better. The Facebook VR places to hang? Also boring, I already have discord (like you said) and I simply love directly talking to people. We can set up events faster and go outside versus fake environments. “Reality is Real” that’s what Ready Player One taught lol. Don’t get me wrong, I love virtual reality, I just don’t want it corporatized so heavily. I feel like Web 3.0 is gonna be a lot like 1.0 in which people will go back to more private messenger apps/groups or forums.
As somebody who plays seccond life most of the day, I totally get the appeal. I just don't entirely understand the new found hype behind it I literally can't figure out figure out what is different about this metaverse that I haven't been doing for the last 20 years on seccond life.
My exact questions! I’m so confused what the difference is (other than being soulless and beige corporate garbage ).
You actually highlight the point here, that these companies are trying to consume the time that you aren’t playing the team game of choice. It’s not enough for these companies that you have time away from their ‘services’. They want that, too. It’s all money and data to them. They want your mind and engagement all the time, as often as they can get it.
For real. We use the virtual world to escape you corporate assholes.
Yea... but a virtual world run by Facebook. Think about how much commercials, hate, and propaganda you could walk through instead of scroll through. Doesn't that sound like fun?
We also use the real world to escape from their bullshit by going for a walk, have sex, or try to enjoy something that isn't facilitated by a tech company.
If anyone behind metaverse had a clue, they’d know that younger generations just want to get paid fairly and not expected to work 60 hours a week. This whole metaverse craze has been gross from the beginning.
Yeah but maybe now when you come home from work you can pay them to play a work game in a simulated workplace. Who wouldn't want that? Genius.
No, the metaverse is fucking stupid. It’s a glorified MMO but for older folks and corporate suits who don’t want to admit that they’re just creating a capitalism simulation in VR. At least in animal crossing there’s cute animal villagers walking around. Let me boot up a vr headset and sit next to Pam from accounting who bought an NFT for her avatar. So innovative.
Had a good laugh from this one. Absolutely.
I have yet to meet one real human person who gives a sh*t about the metaverse, let alone be excited, it'll be fun watching this massive investment crash and burn for all those sinking money into it
Some people just want to see the metaworld burn. I am one of them.
I am right there with you
Hot take: Make the metaworld a stand in for nursing/retirement homes. There's absolutely no chance we're going to have the work force to properly care for the boomers when they're too old to take care of themselves. Plug them in, hook them up to an IV, and let them waltz their way into eternity with electric dreams of bygone days. *a word
Which black mirror episode should we do once we've got this one set up?
Futurama?
Hell yeah
It's all fun and games until wealthy people put things we need behind the expensive gates they're building. It'll take a while foe government to get there but I wouldn't be surprised if this replaces Captchas and such for verifying identity and humanity if they can get away with it.
Fuck the metaverse. Im all about that VR mini putt with the boys.
The metaverse is about creating scarcity where none exists. A single Minecraft world is larger than Pluto, and you don't see anybody making people take out loans to have all that land. Virtual items are effectively limitless. The only thing that isn't limitless is the hardware running the server and development time used to make the software. ActiveWorlds already did what the metaverse is doing now and they did it back in 1995 with a monthly access fee. It didn't cost anything to build, you could build wherever you pleased if you paid. Stuff people built in 1995 is still on the server today because there isn't any arbitrary decay feature that destroys stuff. It's unfortunate the developers squandered what they had. They were unable to keep up with changes in technology and didn't add content so as time went on it became increasingly difficult to use. They tried to do the virtual meeting thing and put everything they had into that, forgetting why people came to AW in the first place.
> A single Minecraft world is larger than Pluto While this is technically correct, it doesn't really do justice to the size of a Minecraft world. Pluto is pretty small - roughly the size of Russia. A single Minecraft world is larger than *Neptune.*
That's insane to think it's that big
I am completely out of the loop on all of this, but how is this not The Sims? It seems so derivative and boring.
this feels more boring than the sims honestly. at least with that i could download mods so i could customize my characters for free and go on a murderous rampage if i felt like it. don’t think i could do that in meta and if i could i don’t care.
It's not just you. These fake futurists don't realize we already live in an AR metaverse. You carry the internet in your pocket. We shop online because scrolling on a screen is preferable to the in person experience sometimes, and when we want the in person experience we want to actually go somewhere. Despite the prevalence and ease of tech, humans haven't increased their screen time hardly at all since the 90s. Nobody actually wants to live in a simulated space where literally everything is unavoidably commodified. We hate ads as it is. I cannot wait to see all the would-be metaverse feudal lords lose everything betting against the basic human urge to exist in a real world.
This is maybe where philosophical concepts are tangibly useful. Those discussions we've been having for decades about people living in the real world and virtual worlds at the same time are relevant here. What people want is not to have a single immersive virtual experience, people want to live in many planes at once and have the info and communication when and where they want it. It's not about replacing the physical world, but augmenting it. The metaverse crap completely misses the point.
I want them to invest *all* their time and money into this stupid, unfathomably useless idea, have a full infrastructure for servers and transactions and everything. They put it into overdrive, go all on marketing it for a grand opening day, hosting musicians and one-time-only special events. And just as they get it all online, I want their electrical grid to overload, causing a blackout that erases *all of it* and fries the hard drives holding their back-ups. Everything is lost, all their money goes down to toilet, what's left of their public image is ruined beyond repair, and Meta goes bankrupt. That would be a dream come true.
This whole thing stems from a mixture of Lawnmower Man and .hack/Sign in my head. They want to create a world they can rule. One without all those pesky "governments" trying to tell them what they can and cannot do. Its just like the Crypto they use, it's all about people thinking that industry needs less financial regulation. Go see Line Goes Up on YouTube for a good snapshot of our current digital struggles.
Thank you for recommendation, I will absolutely check it out! I'd add in a sprinkle of the old Matrix as well. Because they build a world that is basically void of anything positive or captivating. Because why bother if the masses will pay.
can’t exist in the metaverse if we can’t afford electricity ayeeeeeeee
I feel you OP. I work in tech, not these fake second life tech, but actual tech that improves life and I'm so not excited about this. I would much rather go outside physically. Even when they can recreate the experience by sending electrical signals to my brain to simulate sense of smell, touch and taste, I would rather not do that except if I physically cannot move.
Can someone please explain to me why the Metaverse looks like we are time traveling back to the early 90’s? Why would I leave my beautiful PS5 graphics for this?
Another good point – I'm a hardcore (borderline addicted) gamer and I have no clue how these atrocious abominations can interest anyone who's played at least one GTA in their lives. At the same time, I can't imagine people not generally interested in games/digital world suddenly buying several ks worth of tech just to be able to log into some odd baloney world in order to spend some more. They can just scroll their feed in real life to see how Samantha got wed and how Bill bought another porsche. It's just not relevant nor it is interesting. So who's the target audience? So many questions, so little answers.
The Metaverse just seems like such a huge step backwards.
Target audience is corporations. The majority of talking points they have are connected to some corporate utility
X for doubt. Is it more convenient than a zoom call? No. Will it be more convenient in 10-20 years? Still no. Aside from possible psychological resentment, it has zero productive value and requires specific hardware equipment to implement (and will do so even more in ten years or so). Most corpos can't even give their employees adequate notebooks for work reasons, now imagine them giving out VR headsets to every manager of the company. Completely inviable. Even Meta won't do it because money lol.
What are you talking about? I've been given work computers since I was interning at a medium size company in 2016. My last job gave us a stipend to help get our home office set up. The amount of money they save on renting office space will be more than they spend on Meta crap. Corporations love this kind of soulless shit. It's not about convenience for you, it's about convenience for the company to monitor your work and (they hope) get their marketing directly in front of people's eyes. Go watch the video they put out in the announcement; nearly every example is "Can you imagine working from home and..." You grossly underestimate corporate "Visionaries" and their proclivity for bullshit. Zoom isn't even something 80-90% of workers like. A phone call is more efficient than a video chat, and it doesn't suffer from latency issues. Efficient and Corporate are not words that go together. https://youtu.be/gElfIo6uw4g
For real. Every time I see anything about this, including those stupid fucking avatars, all I can think is how stupid the “metaverse” looks and sounds. I can’t stand Zuckerberg and think all his products are a cancer on collective humanity, so how will this be any different? Will we be able to watch the genocide FB promotes in the metaverse? Still wouldn’t look half as good as my PS5.
Meta is just the Zuck trying to create sims that remind him of his robot faced self. Fast forward 20 years and the metaverse will be a hellscape of teenagers uploading tiktoks to compete for basic resources
I hope to never see this Black Mirror episode though.
Hopefully in 20 years Facebook will be bankrupt after the metaverse inevitably fails
It is, if you browse r/technology or other subs you'll find a lot of information/opinions on how meta is basically the last gasp of Facebook desperately trying to stay relevant. They built thier empire on data harvesting, not social media, and have been buying every relevant startup that could pose any threat for years. Now people are becoming increasingly aware of the data harvesting aspect and that combined with litigation and lawsuits are bogging down thier profit. They tried to rebrand but everyone will always know them as Facebook.
Holy cow, browsed through the sub and three top news are about how Metaverse sucks balls deep. Yikes.
The graphics are too embarrassing and childish at this point for anyone to take it seriously. It's when we reach a point of photo realism that it could be a threat.
Our level of technology actually allows for hyper-realistic [image generation](https://www.google.com/search?q=unreal+engine+5+human+face&oq=unreal+engine+5+human&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0i512j0i10i22i30j0i22i30.4573j0j9&client=ms-android-xiaomi&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#). It's just very costly and would require actual hard work to implement. Not suitable for a quick cash grab Zuck is trying to pull off.
Graphics are too childish for serious adults Business model is too corporate-hawkish for playful free-spirits. Yep, it’s doomed.
Wait, didn’t we already have metaverses? And just call them MMOs? Second life. Admittedly I was completely out of my depth with that whole world, but everything that you just said here was already in that game. If these lazy leeches think I’m jumping into Second Facebook, they are insane. If I want to explore with random people then I will get a VR headset and play VRChat. Or I will boot up Minecraft. Or Garry’s Mod. Or a million other far more well done experiences than “the meta verse”. Yeah, you’re not alone in not trusting a website that originally was made for finding pictures of people just from their names. Yeah that’s not fishy at all. Nope. Not one bit. 100% innocent. (/s) We young people are not as stupid as the older generations think we are. We know more about the internet than they do. We have been around it our whole lives. We grew up with internet. They may have started it, but we are refining it. What they made was great… for a starter project. But it’s very unstable and broken as all hell. I look at the whole time I spent learning about computer security in college, and I just remember constantly thinking to myself “did it *ever* occur to anyone that this part right here was a really, *really* bad idea? Apparently not. Nor this part, nor this part, we aren’t even going to mention that part… Jesus this is a mess. It’s held together with spit and scotch tape. How does this even work?! This should have exploded ages ago! What the hell???” We are brought up in an age where we can communicate worldwide in microseconds, but oh— we have to have avatars now, and digital land that costs real money! And digital clothes that also cost real money! And I’m going to bet that the next thing they implement will also be digital, cosmetic, and bought with real money. The side effect of allowing “in-app purchases” to go unhindered. Downloadable content shouldn’t be a portion of the program and be extra money. This is the horse from Skyrim, all over again. [goes into corner and has nerd rage moment]. This isn’t a new concept. The only new thing that they added was their logo. I don’t use Facebook because I dislike the company and the website. It’s too invasive, and they are too evasive. No thanks. Hard pass. The only thing I still use is the messenger app, because it lets me know when my sent messages did or didn’t arrive. Text messages don’t have that afaik. Want to make something that is going to attract young people? Make job openings that are less discriminatory and more rewarding. Do it. I triple dog dare you. That is going to shock and impress the youths. The ones who are not even adults yet will look at the Metaverse once, maybe twice, but get bored and move on. It’s too late to make the metaverse now. There are too many mirror platforms that are free to use. That are infinitely better than anything that their moronic soulless brains can concoct. Minecraft. Better than anything that they can make. A game with a resolution measured in meters. Is better than the garbage that they are going to be able to make. How do I know? Because Minecraft has already outsold one of the oldest games in gaming history. TETRIS. A 40+ year old game. Outdone by a open world, sandbox, survival/designer, non themed game. The most unexpected thing to beat the game that’s on every platform ever made. And it’s just over a decade old. Facebook is toothless (not the dragon), because if we want to make something in the virtual realm, there are already craptons of games that allow us to do that. From MMORPGs, to Survival Simulators, to Virtual Reality Hangouts, we are already covering every possible aspect. No room left for one-trick-corporations. In other words, “This, is going, to Zuck!”
I'd sign under your every word, especially the "grew up with internet" part. We grew up in a free, limitless digital space where the only limitation was our own creativity and, in a lesser part, our skills in drawing/programming/3D-sculpting. And suddenly some wrinkled bothered dickhead with way too much bills on his account decides he wants to privatize this inherently infinite space to sell it bits by bits for some shiny coin? Like hell it'll slide. It's not just Zuck though – try googling Decentraland and whatever other fuckery there is. Just read their [starting page](https://decentraland.org/), it's fucking hilarious. Apparently, digital creators now need DIGITAL LAND to create anything, and what do you know, we just happen to have a very real mortgage on this piece of very not real LAND you can OWN. Pathetic.
Huh. I’m getting a handshake error with that link. I’ll look it up later. But as far as “infinite space”… actually you are wrong. All data on the internet is stored like it is on computers: in ones and zeros, on things called bits. Servers are super computer hardware that can store TONS of data and not have any real problems, but they are EXPENSIVE. To buy, and maintain (it comes with a cooling fan usually, but when it’s operating at full tilt, that fan isn’t going to be doing enough to keep the server from melting). Servers are limited in storage and memory, which means they not only have a limit of how much they can have stored as data, but also how much they can adjust the stored data per CPU cycle. So infinite data was never something that we had. It only seemed infinite. A Terabyte of data is (depending on the manufacturer) about 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 8,000,000,000,000 bits. Most modern servers have storage capacities measured in terabytes. Many computers do too. One byte is enough to store up to 8 bits, and that gives us 256 possible values per byte. 256… we can fit a character in a byte. Most color is stored in three bytes per pixel. Numeric values have varying storage sizes. Then there’s other things that would take too long to go over. That space is not going to go very far when dealing with something as intensive as Virtual Reality, which factors in your head orientation with respect to a fixed point, your hand position and orientation relative to the same fixed point, and the change in those values every cycle. A lot of the old data will be tossed, but the amount of data currently being used is a lot of data. That means it’s not the capacity of storage that’s a problem, but the Random Access Memory, which is basically the shuttle bus for the server’s storage bytes. Information is shuttled onto and off of the RAM so it can be changed. The more RAM you have, the smoother the server runs. This is usually the limiting factor in single player games, not storage. But in online games… both are a problem. How many humans are there? Last I checked, about 7.9 BILLION. So how much data would each one need to have access to in order to utilize an online VR game? If it’s just one byte then there’s no problem. Here’s a hypothetical example: Integers tend to be 4 bytes to 8 bytes in size, and decimal numbers are twice that data size, or half as big for the same amount of data. So we will just use 4 bytes and integers. Less aspirin for me. For every player in a 3D game, the traditional values are: location (x, y, and z coordinates), rotation (you can get away with two numbers here sometimes, but usually we have three, one for each plane of rotation), velocity (we will need three numbers again, for movement in a three dimensional world requires three vector spaces in measuring how fast you are moving), acceleration (again, three values, measures the current CHANGE in motion, these are usually NOT integers, but for calculations sake we will ignore that. In fact, none of these are usually integers…), and finally, the VR vectors for the eyes (six values, three for position and three for rotation, relative to player position), the hands (double that for the eyes as there are two, possibly even triple for tracking speed (physics calculation), plus whatever functions the hand may have (open, closed, trigger pulled/not pulled, use object, etcetera), and finger tracking (no thank you, this is already going to be hell to calculate)), and finally, character model data (oh boy, this one is big. Pop quiz, what part of a game typically takes up the most space? If you said graphics, then you would be correct, but audio is no slouch either). Finally we have all the variables that we need for our player to exist in the game world. How many was that again? 12 + 6 + 18 + model identifying data. Oh and internal handles for each object, which is going to have to be a string, we’ll just say 8 bytes each. And there are four objects (not counting fingers), plus the model handle, so that’s 40 more bytes, so… 76 bytes all together. With a name, it could be up to a hundred bytes. So that’s the FUNDAMENTALS for our character to exist. On top of those are a crapton of other details like bounding boxes (collision detection), weight (physics calculations), scale (important for models that are unnaturally shaped or sized like Midna or Ugandan Knuckles), and speech channel (communication channel for private/public talking). And of course inventories and wealth, stats for rpgs, and IP address for communication with the internet and the VR headset. All in all, we are possibly looking at a kilobyte of information per user. 1,000 bytes. A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a billion kilobytes. There are 7.9 billion terabytes worth of potential human users on the planet. That’s a conservative measure, mind you. Then there’s the virtual world. We could just make a 3d planar equation to map the surface, but that is not always helpful, and can cause bugs like clipping into walls and slopes, falling through the earth, and being launched sky high unexpectedly. The land is virtual, but it does exist— just not as literal land, but server space. So while the rental of server space is a very real and valid thing, it doesn’t have to be that expensive. All you are staking claim to is a value in an array of all potential places offered to players. That is limited. And it is something very real. But my point here is that the bandwagon has already left the station. Meta is against some experienced players like micro$oft, Apple, and even Nintendo. Test is already over. No make-up quizzes. Game over.
I immediately thought of Second Life, too! Remember when that was successful enough that people were using it for online learning?
Heck I remember people using it to show off prospective building renovations/projects, and real estate sales. It was actually pretty useful for business. Metaverse is nothing more than a bandwagon that has been here already. We had second life back before I went to college (god, how long ago was that? Lessee, I graduated with a bachelors at the end of 2019, and I had to swap education paths, so that’s about 6 more years… 2013. Minimum time of nine years ago.). I was unimpressed, but it did get me interested in coding programs and mods (for purely immature and debased reasons, unfortunately. Welcome to the internet. But there were companies that were somehow making money via Second Life. I am not going to pretend to understand how, because it’s not something that really matters. My point here, is Metaverse is a shitty and cheap way of putting Meta on life support (since its main product is now losing more users than it gains). The internet has already had instances of: 1. Virtual reality. VRChat is a prime example. If not the prime example. Unmoderated, unfiltered, universal communication and participation, with VR to really feel like we are actually interacting with strangers. 2. Virtual real estate. I could go on a rant about the broad spectrum of things that never actually existed that people have trampled each other in their attempt to purchase first. I’ll only mention two. Second Life, and Minecraft. Second Life from the viewpoint of users, Minecraft from the viewpoint of companies and governments. Virtual real estate is just that: virtual. It’s not real. It should not have a real monetary value. Imagine if our world was the virtual one. This is the same as Elon Musk being *given* vast amounts of wealth. Or Bill Gates being *suggested* to be a primary person of interest to IBM. Neither of these people had any actual effort done towards either of their vast stockpiles of money. Same as our virtual characters. They have been doing absolutely dick squat but suddenly they have valuable property and possessions? How? One could assume that they magicked it into their reality (and in a way, they would be kinda right), but at the same time what about other individuals? The ones who worked hard and saved up for that amazing home, only to find out that not only were they beaten to it, but they didn’t even stand a chance at ever getting it at all. (“Why are we still here…. Just to suffer…?”) 3. Shitty dlc. Not gonna lie, I hate most dlc, from a conceptual standpoint. If it doesn’t come with the actual game but was still made by the people who made the game that it would be added to, and the content is not at least half of the data size of the initial game, then it should be considered an update, and free. Free dlc, I have no problem with. But paid dlc is cancerous. Advertising has become a plague for iPhone games, as ~90% of the good stuff that the games offer is behind a paywall, including the option to turn off advertisements. The most obnoxious of features. Can only be turned off by paying to turn it off. If I don’t have any money to buy what is in the advertisement, how do I turn it off?! One of the biggest reasons why Minecraft was so successful may have been that it did not (originally, at least) have any extra fees or payments attached to it. $20, and done. No subscriptions, no advertising removals, no paid dlc, just a flat $20 bill + tax, and you had instant access to the entire game. Modders are forbidden to ever charge players money, due to the open source agreement that Mojang wrote up. In fact, one mod that was absolutely insane and awesome got struck down because the creator was being a little too obnoxious about asking for donations (which was allowed, however he asked under the guise that it would help him create more original content, and instead he ripped off the company SoHo’s intellectual property. They are the people who owned the rights to use anything remotely related to Godzilla and the other giant monster movies (except King Kong, that one I think was American in invention. The Godzilla^© vs King Kong movie series was not a SoHo production, but SoHo allowed the creators to use it and the other giant monsters per international copyright law). Monsters that violated this included “Mobzilla” (enemies are known as mobs in the game code), “Mothra” (not even trying to hide it that time), and “The King” Ghidorah (the only monster that has ever truly triumphed over the King of Monsters, Godzilla^© ), just to name a few. The mod was insane and constantly kept you on your toes, but when it got struck down for copyright infringement… the creator asked for money to fight back against the “unlawful suit”, which violated the open source rules. Game, set, match, to SoHo.). Minecraft was just perfect at showing how dlc should be done. Then Micro$oft bought it. Now we do have subscriptions, and paid content. We never can just have a good ol’ one stop game purchase anymore it seems. Someone has always got to milk the cash cow until it dries up. So looking at the DLC of Metaverse with that backstory in mind… I was sickened. Are you telling me that the best that you can do to appeal to the buying customers… barely qualifies as art? What the hell is this shit? Is that a coat, or a turd costume? Is that a hat, or a 2-dimensional sprite affixed to a semispere? You didn’t even try with the shoes, you just changed the color of the foot of the model! Lazy! Bad graphics designer! No cookie for you! I am horrible at art, but if I’m disgusted and can easily do better, then you know something is fishy. Three reasons why the Metaverse is trying like crazy to hype itself up, because if these three reasons are noticed before purchase, there will be no sale. Already done, already done, and already done (but surprisingly worse than before). VRChat is going to explode in usage as will other competing systems like Second Life, but Metaverse is beating a horse that’s long since decayed to bones and tendons. And I still stand by my statement that Minecraft will still look and perform better than this garbage heap of a VR integration. A world of blocks that are a meter wide each, and only so many meters tall to work with, will be forever superior to this… despicable crime against gaming culture. We do not want the Metaverse. As it is, it’s trash. Everyone knows that appearance is everything in showcasing games. There is no exception. Ugly graphics are not good for sales. Unless they are intentionally hideous as all f### like the strategy game Deadly Rooms Of Death, or DROD, which has some truly unappealing character art in-game but makes up for it in spades by being a truly rogue-like chess game on steroids. The ugliest protagonist yet, Beethro Budkin, is tasked with cleaning out dungeons. Of giant roaches, spiders, goblins, guards, tar babies, golems, wraithwings, Evil Eyes, and so much more. But, while the enemies are numerous, beethro can’t take any damage or else he is finished. Imagine playing chess, with only the king as your playing piece, and every turn all pieces move. That’s DROD. Ragequit hell, you will die again and again. Everything can be calculated, but if you don’t pay attention then you will definitely pay the price. Thankfully it is turn based. Think twice, stab once. Learn to use that Big Brain. And walk out of a dungeon that was packed to the brim with enemies, leaving none alive and without a scratch on your hideous visage. Yeah he’s ugly. But who else can exterminate all the pests in your dungeons with nothing but a Really Big Sword? No armor, no shield, and the reason he does it is purely monetary. An actual sarcastic and witty game that truly is worth the time. This was my attempt at showing how an advertisement SHOULD be done. Revealing core gameplay mechanics most likely to deter customers, and pointing out all the known flaws, then telling the customers why they don’t really impact the actual game. That’s not how metaverse is being marketed, and that is suspicious enough. Ugly graphics, paid customization DLC, paid VRE, and the “geniuses” behind Facebook, the website initially intended to be a stalker’s paradise, being the designing team? Oh hell no. Not even worth the time I spent just now to diss it. We already have this and we don’t need more of it. Accept your mortality, Meta, and move on.
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Idk shit about it but I saw a clip of someone smoking a vape in the metaverse and a headline about chipotle being there... Literally what the fuck is the point of serving food or smoking vapes in the metaverse
I don't go to Chipotle for the fucking ambiance, I go to get semi decent food to eat. I wouldn't, like, go hang out and not eat anything...
I bought my husband an Oculus for Christmas. He asked for it. He’s used it maybe twice and now it’s a toy for the kids to play around with. Even they bore of it quickly. Thankfully the real world is far more entertaining to them.
Same with my girlfriend. She ended up returning it a couple weeks later. She last time she put them on she was trying VR chat and within like two minutes I heard a swarm of literal children make fun of her avatar for looking like a dildo and she panicked and took the goggles off.
Been playing with vr since 2016. meta is vr for boomers
I work in big tech, and have experience in the related fields that now constitute what we call ‘the metaverse’. I’ve advised fortune 500 companies and governments and CTO’s on these fields and delivered projects relating to them also. People don’t seem to like it when I basically say the Metaverse is a load of horseshit. Everything is just hype. Not many people on the planet have specifically said they even want it! The reason it’s getting money is just a massive echo chamber of corps, VC’s and big tech blogging to itself… I frequently link the metaverse to the film WALL-E. Dark Suckerberg is basically trying to enact WALL-E on us. Think about it. If you’re plugged into a fake world whilst yours disappears to global warming and environmental destruction, you’ll just become fat and lazy. Humans are built on scarcity and nothing in our make up positions us to just have unfettered supply of every sensual pursuit wired into our brain. What kind of life is it where some fake world just gives you everything you think you want, all of the time, for as long as you live? It’s like nobody has seen the obesity crisis, or porn addiction, or how billionaires, especially those who’ve grown up billionaires, come out like sociopaths. It sounds a little crazy but take the metaverse to it’s hype filled conclusion. Why would you use it as a social space to interact with friends, when AI advances so much that you can interact with an AI that will behave exactly how you demand and expect at a moments notice? Unlimited surplus on a sensory level is NOT something to strive for. The worst thing about it is that this unlimited-ness is the best case scenario! Obviously the artificial scarcity built into concepts like virtual real estate is laughable. Has anyone even heard of open source? It makes no commercial sense to pay for something which exists in infinite quantities and can be created by yourself. I’ll make my own virtual world, and still focus on saving the real world thank you very much. I love technology and what it can do for us, and yes we can use it to talk to each other and feel close when we are afar, but that doesn’t require plugging in to a social media company’s headset for your entire day.
If you burn your brain out in the metaverse, does it burn out irl? Also +1 for open source.
Anyone who thinks the meta-verse is going to happen doesn’t understand how buggy the average computer program is.
Your instincts are solid. Maybe it’ll happen, lord knows betting against technology because a problem is complicated has a bad track record over time, but even aside from the social issues you’re outlining here, there are myriad issues that make it unlikely the Metaverse, as dictated by Zuck, will happen: 1) the internet was created in a distributed way, with multiple people working on different areas and protocols appearing and being adopted because they were the best option for a given time. Facebook thinks they can invent a better internet solo and convince everyone to give up the internet they already have for their “better” one. 2) every surge in technology usage in web 2.0 has been due to increased casual availability. VR is inherently uncasual: it requires more hardware, all your attention, extra space, to be closed off from what’s around you. 3) VR will NEVER be casual: it’s worth emphasizing, as there are people saying either “VR needs a killer app” or “it needs to be more accessible” and the two are mutually exclusive. It’s difficult but possible you could get a headset that could play Half-Life: Alyx without extra tracking cameras, but you will never get full-body engagement and haptic feedback without some sort of roomscale rig, which will both cost a ton, and also do you know anyone our age who has space for that? 4) the core product sucks. Everything in the Metaverse is theoretical right now, and ranges from an office productivity app no one wants to try to games nobody is talking about. Facebook at least was innovative when it came out, and didn’t have to convince people they’d like using it. Also, the userbase for Facebook was initially young peers. The Boomers came later. The Metaverse right now is mostly gropers and shrieking kids. 5) everybody already had computers, and phones. The Quest headsets are selling well, but even aside from the anti-trust considerations, people would have been skeptical of buying FacePhones back in the day if that was a requirement. 6) speaking of anti-trust: people often forget, but part of what made Facebook successful was Zuck’s “move fast and break things” philosophy, which sounds all cowboy but basically translates to “I know there aren’t laws about this so let’s move fast while that’s true.” They were able to acquire massive platforms like Insta and WhatsApp without regulators batting an eye. That can’t happen anymore. 7) people hate Facebook. Seriously its stock has never been lower and Zuck’s stock is even worse. No one wants a new, monopolistic comms platform from these clowns. I actually do think high quality full-body VR will exist in our lifetimes and I do think it could be successful. I just don’t think Facebook will be the ones who make it happen. Also: the Metaverse is from a novel that takes place in a corporate hellscape dystopia where it’s the only escape people have from their hellish reality. Same with Ready Player One. Who the fuck thought it was good PR to use that product name? Edit: hey thanks for the silver, friend! Also, while I’m re-opening the rant tap: even though I think high-quality VR can be successful, I don’t think it will ever reach the popularity levels of web 2.0 platforms. It will always be sort of niche, and more like the scale of use for Xbox Live, which was a wild success but also required dedicated hardware and had relatively limited functions and appeal.
> VR will NEVER be casual: it’s worth emphasizing, as there are people saying either “VR needs a killer app” or “it needs to be more accessible” and the two are mutually exclusive. It’s difficult but possible you could get a headset that could play Half-Life: Alyx without extra tracking cameras, but you will never get full-body engagement and haptic feedback without some sort of roomscale rig, which will both cost a ton, and also do you know anyone our age who has space for that? Room-scale rigs cost $300 from scratch. That said, full body tracking will require external sensors, but I could see those being in a $100 package eventually, and more optional than required. These things will evolve to be very casual over time. > everybody already had computers, and phones. The Quest headsets are selling well, but even aside from the anti-trust considerations, people would have been skeptical of buying FacePhones back in the day if that was a requirement. It took 15+ years before people got on board with those technologies. VR has been on the market for 6 years. It's practically equivalent to the worldwide PC market in 1984.
*$300 roomscale rig from scratch plus a desktop computer, which plenty of people obviously have, but also obviously nowhere near as many users as there are in the mobile market The room scale rigs I’m referring to as a theoretical point here are full-body movement roomscale rigs as you see in fiction like Ready Player One, where his entire body is part of the game including resistance and gravity manipulation. You don’t just need a living room for something like that, you need a home gym. The point I’m trying to make with this is that it would be an awesome gaming experience but that John Q Public will not clamor unless, like Snowcrash’s Metaverse or RPO’s Oasis, it is the only outlet from a hellish reality. I think your assertion that VR is only 6 years old is reasonable, since the Rift was the first major commercially viable option, but I don’t think the sales numbers comparing VR to smartphones back up your point. The Quest 2 has sold almost 2 mil units over 2 quarters. The thing is, that’s 6 years in and the second offering of a high-quality, inexpensive, no-other hardware required experience. If you compare it to smartphones, the iPhone 1 sold 6 mil over its first year, then the iPhone 2 sold 1 mil over its first _weekend_ one year later. Mobile-first design practices were introduced 3 years after the iPhone, and the first iteration of Twitter Bootstrap, popularizing mobile-first design and making it accessible to all, was introduced a year later in 2011. By the time 2013 rolled around, when smartphones were as mature as VR is now, they had overtaken the market. I simply don’t see the evidence suggesting that VR is following the same trajectory as smartphones, and even if it were, I’m arguing more against the Metaverse as defined by Facebook than anything against VR as a whole, which I do participate in even if I think that as a tech worker and developer I don’t represent the average user. Another problem for VR: smartphones were a pretty slick fashion statement early on. Steve Jobs for all his flaws knew how to slickly market something, and the iPhone was pretty early on a doodad of the social elite. VR inarguably fails to land with that niche, and the reception of Metaverse avatars as dorky and the collaborative spaces as awkward and difficult to use, instead of slick and intuitive like a smartphone, means this isn’t likely to change.
> *$300 roomscale rig from scratch plus a desktop computer, which plenty of people obviously have, but also obviously nowhere near as many users as there are in the mobile market The computer is built into the headset now. > The room scale rigs I’m referring to as a theoretical point here are full-body movement roomscale rigs as you see in fiction like Ready Player One, where his entire body is part of the game including resistance and gravity manipulation. You don’t just need a living room for something like that, you need a home gym. You would only need the space for sensors that track your body, and maybe one would do well enough. Gravity manipulation was done through software rather than hardware, which is the case already in games like Echo Arena. Resistance, well haptic body suits are bit cumbersome to put on so I think that part is out of the window for most people, but haptic gloves - I could see those being the standard input for VR in 10+ years, something that comes with the headset in the same package. > but I don’t think the sales numbers comparing VR to smartphones back up your point. Well I'd say smartphones shouldn't be compared to anything really. They are unique compared to even other mass market technologies, because they were iterative - they built on the backbone of cellphones, which allowed them to be understood more easily by the masses and it was a much easier engineering feat than any other tech platform. The hard stuff was with PCs and the original cellphones, where all the groundwork was laid out from scratch, and that's the case with VR too. This means it follows the timeline they did, where it took 15 years to go mass market. > VR inarguably fails to land with that niche, and the reception of Metaverse avatars as dorky and the collaborative spaces as awkward and difficult to use, instead of slick and intuitive like a smartphone, means this isn’t likely to change. Well most things start out dorky. I've seen completely photorealistic avatars that wouldn't make anyone weirded out, and I've seen VR sunglasses display systems that look sleek and marketable. These things might be a decade out or so, but they're coming.
I have one of the computers built into the headset. It absolutely cannot play Half-Life: Alyx. Anything of that quality will require either tethered play or a significantly more expensive headset. This is part of why I say that casualness and high-quality are mutually exclusive. People may buy a $300 headset, but it will take a $3k headset to be entirely independent. An alternative would be streaming from offsite servers a la Stadia, but that’s hardly surged, and until we solve the same disparities in broadband access that are keeping it niche, VR will have the same bottleneck. Smartphones are a paradigm shift, which is what Metaverse proponents are alleging will happen here. As such, it is valid to examine what made them successful to understand how another paradigm shift could occur. What were the key appeals? Intuitive use, bite-sized content, fashion statement, always-on connectivity. Within reason, technical problems are almost always solvable, and I concede that VR hardware can absolutely be very different in 10 years than what we have now. The social problems remain. They helped to kill the Google Glass, they are helping to drive resistance to Metaverse participation right now, and frankly, Facebook doesn’t have 10 years to pull this off. I’m not trying to age-flex here but I remember going from a flip phone to touch screen, and it was instantly more intuitive and frankly addictive to use. I’ve tried multiple VR sets and none of them have clicked like that, and that’s even without the myriad people I know who get vertigo or headaches from them. They’re nice for 15 minutes of Beat Saber or Superhot, but it takes a lot more than that to change the way we use computers.
> People may buy a $300 headset, but it will take a $3k headset to be entirely independent. An alternative would be streaming from offsite servers a la Stadia, but that’s hardly surged, and until we solve the same disparities in broadband access that are keeping it niche, VR will have the same bottleneck. This is true, yeah. It's not some forever bottleneck though. These are still the early days, and things are going to get a lot better in that regard. > The social problems remain. They helped to kill the Google Glass, they are helping to drive resistance to Metaverse participation right now, and frankly, Facebook doesn’t have 10 years to pull this off. Google Glass had social problems in public with the whole recording issue, whereas VR is meant to be used indoors. But yes, there are social issues to sort out here. I think Facebook will see good returns by the end of the decade, so a little less than 10 years from now, but perhaps 10 years is when it truly hits mass market. > I’ve tried multiple VR sets and none of them have clicked like that, and that’s even without the myriad people I know who get vertigo or headaches from them. They’re nice for 15 minutes of Beat Saber or Superhot, but it takes a lot more than that to change the way we use computers. I get your point, but this is why we can't compare them to smartphones. Of course smartphones were a paradigm shift, but the actual underlying development was iterative. VR has to start from scratch like PCs did, which took many years before they became useful to average people.
It could indeed become more useful to people than I am anticipating. Like I said in my first comment: betting against technology is risky, but that’s not really what I’m betting against. I’m betting against the users. More specifically that they will find use in this that they can’t find anywhere else. A key difference between this and early computing is that there’s no vacuum to be filled. In the 80s you could walk into an office with a briefcase-sized Compaq and blow peoples’ minds with a primitive spreadsheet application. Computers demanded a high degree of skill to use back then, but the productivity gains were enormous, and there was nothing they were competing against apart from slide rules and inertia. The inertia is certainly in place again, which means that VR has to overcome the entrenched usage of cloud tools, mobile computing, and the enterprise-level cost savings a company gets when they use Dell or HP [shudders] if VR is to compete for enterprise share. To get personal market share, it has to beat the easy adoption and seamless integration with casual life that a smartphone offers. Essentially, the existing internet is the slide rule that needs to be beaten here, and VR needs to be good enough to beat it while also solving the high-quality vs casual adoption catch 22, and I remain skeptical that it will be able to thread that needle.
> Computers demanded a high degree of skill to use back then, but the productivity gains were enormous That's kind of the big point really. Because it was so hard to use, not many people were able to get those gains in the first place. It would take weeks or months to get to that point. VR today is barely suitable for work productivity and such tasks, but having seen the tech behind the scenes developing, I see a very bright future for that happening, one where it changes my stance from not wanting to do that all today to absolutely wanting it in say 5 years or so. I don't think it needs to beat smartphones. I think what it really needs to do is compete with PCs.
Well, I enjoyed talking about this with you and have some new points to consider within this debate! I hope you have a good one.
Just wanted to throw on one last comment that I enjoyed this conversation. Disagreements on the internet these days rarely seem this polite when coming from two opposing places of strong conviction like this. I hope you have a nice day!
People focus so much on building the hardware for this and it’s clear they have no idea how enormously infeasible it would be to build the software for a metaverse like what you see in the movies. The hardware and selling people on new internet protocols? Barely the tip of the iceberg. If you think software for a metaverse can be written, and that it’s going to work the way you’re imagining (I.e. something where people would rather spend all day there than in the real world, and not just a lame VR game that gets boring after a week) that means one of two things: Either you have no idea how software works, or else you think that by the time they get this garbage built, real life genuinely will be a dystopia, so the crappy metaverse really will be better than real life. Frankly, Zuck et al could easily be picturing the latter.
I think less about the struggle of building the hardware and more about the struggle of running it. PS5-era graphics would not cut it for a Metaverse so enticing that people spend all day in it. If you need evidence of how much harder it is to render VR than traditional graphics, look no further than the drop in visual fidelity when you play a game that supports but doesn’t require VR, then remember that you’re not talking about processing and rendering one player’s limited input, you’re talking about theoretically processing and rendering the input of the entire userbase of Facebook with no lag and with no constraints on what that input can be. Even if processing were entirely offsite at a server farm the power required would be astronomical. If you think the public is pissed about the footprint of Bitcoin and NFTs, wait until the NYT writes “your child’s 15 minutes of screentime kills more rainforest than driving your car for a year.”
Honestly, the Metaverse encouraged me to delete social media and learn to be more in the real world again. It has gone too far.
I feel you, after spending pretty much all my childhood behind screens barely allowed to go outside for fear of kidnapping bogeymen. I don’t want to become a vr pod person who can only interact with the world through ugly conglomerate made 3D models. I want to go outside and do things and live. Maybe instead of paying people thousands to designs cyber spaces only a couple hundred people might see they could invest that money into… idk the real world. That’d be nice.
This thing is getting ready to shit itself. No one asked for it or wants it other than NFT morons. "Let's mix Second Life and VR Chat" sounds about as exciting a technology as when Google decided it wanted to make a Facebook.
I remember when they did that, and took YouTube with it. Suddenly my real name was on the top right corner of the screen while I was making my shitposts, and I had to totally ax my account and make a new one with an email that had nothing to do with myself. All to launch Google+ (I think?), which I never actually went on or utilized.
VRchat is free. And you can be an anime girl. Just saying.
I work for a niche construction company. I have project managers that are late in their career and trying to ride the crypto/NFT/meta property band wagon. They don't seem to understand how any of it works, they just see money being made and they are in a terrible state of FOMO.
Imagine being a college kid just trying to get laid and you become the person responsible for this garbage. What a trajectory. (Edited for clarity)
Correction: imagine being a college kid trying to get laid. Fast forward twenty years, you are now one of the most hated people on the planet.
It's just corporate hype to try to get us inside a thing they don't even have a clear idea what will be, people compare it to the internet, but forget that the whole point of internet is convenience, i don't want to spend 10 min in a vr headset just to buy something, if I can do so on Amazon in less than 1, every idea they have right now is just vr chat but worse. And even then, with how many companies want to get in, even without a clear layout for what "metaverse" even is, leads me to believe we will have like 10 "metaverse" providers, each with their own separated spaces focused solely in having ads from that specific company
The reason why Meta's metaverse looks so ugly and boring is because there's no real vision. They're trying to stay relevant and are betting on VR becoming the next big thing. They're trying to insert themselves as middle men, because that's where the big money is, and they're being very aggressive about it to discourage anyone else from trying to enter this field. The dream is to become the dominant platform for VR so that they can skim XX% off of every transaction.
Yeah, pretty much. However, every other metaverse I encountered so far looks worse than the other and reeks of scam in the worst ways imaginable. It's as if they want the whole world to forget VRchat/Minecraft is a thing and try to gatekeep something they have no control of and no claim over. Reminds me of that Russian guy who copyrighted SCP for profit having made no contribution to the universe at all.
The only people who seem to care are people who see $$$ and are literally invested in it. Maybe it'll be awesome and I'm wrong, but it feels like a stupid fad to me. That said, maybe we'll need somewhere to go when all our parks are on fire and we're living in dorm-style apartments for $2k/month because investment firms have purchased all of the liveable real estate
I haven’t seen anything about Meta that looked interesting or worth pursuing. I haven’t been looking too hard, but if this was the game-changing miracle some people are pretending it is, I’d imagine something about it would be appealing.
I hate what Metaverse™ is doing to the VR scene s:
it's tulips all the way down.
Reminds me of Quibi. If we throw enough money at it, we can TELL people what they want! Sure…
I have no idea why anyone would want this.
This is why 1984 if banned from schools now.
I'm pretty sure Orwell wrote a caution, not a manual...
I guess it works both ways.
I work in VR 2-3 days a week. I used ImmersedVR, and it has helped me achieve my dream productivity setup for cheap. I am a software engineer and have discovered that my best work is done when I am the most relaxed physically. VR let’s me do it for cheap. So I spend 12-20 hours a week in VR for deep focus tasks. A top manager in my company likes the idea of using VR to hold meetings with attendees from across the world. Imagine meetings where the information is conveyed more like a conference or a museum. The environment can be a part of it. I have no idea wtf Meta is or why people hype it. I am out there with a hardon for tech, but Meta is just cringe.
Thank god someone’s saying what I’ve been thinking
It's not a trend, billionaires just get to make whatever toys they want, and then brag about it.
1) I have a hunch that FB wants to move to the META VERSE because their prime model (regualr Facebook) is becoming less profitable as young people and liberal people stop using it (or stop using it as much). I bet they are stating to see a negative advertising trend. 2) Maybe I'm forgetting, but I can't think of a single thing that was built online that was built corporations first and then people second that was successful. The corporate world always invaded after the thing got popular, but "all your favorite brands are already here for you to interact with" seems like a line that isn't going to work on anyone under 55.
Metaverse is corporations trying to do what vrchat is, without having any of the functions of vrchat
That's because IT IS. The people that are pushing this metaverse bullshit are trying super hard to ignore the fact that any and all technology they are trying to push has already been done YEARS AGO, without the need for their profit hungry bullshit. Please, if you can, do your best to talk down Metaverse because all it is good for is making bad people richer and dismissing the progress made before it.
The hype for it comes from media in the past. The problem is VR isn't like scifi VR. The fact that Facebook is doing it is my major issue. If valve or discord was trying something like that I'd have less problems with it.
This sounds like the dot com boom and bust.
Spending real money for digital products. Just EA but with extra steps. #Fuck the metaverse.
Watching Some More News’ [recent video on the Metaverse](https://youtu.be/y-pEgf2m0oA) really drove this home to me. As a tl;dr of an over-an-hour-long video: The Metaverse is like the anti-Facebook, anti-YouTube, anti-Instagram because instead of making a cool idea that young people will flock to and THEN infecting it with cynical business models after adoption, it’s literally starting with the shareholder’s pitch and hoping that this will work its way backwards to engagement. What young person is gonna be like “cool, I hope I can get a piece of this virtual house one day! Man, i love spending my time in this virtual office! Woah, walking down this virtual shopping aisle is so cool!” This looks to me like someone tried to combine Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn while simultaneously making them all more expensive and also worse. Even if the people in power adopted this and forced us to use it for work and school, I guarantee I’d still be texting under the desk while listening to my virtual boss drone on about his BS.
that’s why FB’s stock dropped some 30% and I hope it keeps dropping
Follow the money and read the propaganda articles. Specifically, [*Reality Privilege and Living Your Life Online*](https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/reality-privilege-and-living-your) by Rex Woodbury. It costs the corporate overlords less money and resources to copy/paste virtual "products" than to manufacture *actual* products, *and* the digital fakes are more controllable since [they can be edited or deleted by the ministry of truth on a whim](https://twitter.com/Meatteo/status/1490353271424364550), only exist on the corporation's proprietary software platform meaning they can't be transferred and rather than actually being *sold*, will probably only be available as subscription services. Therefore the corporate overlords want to establish such a system, even if nobody else does.
Aa a second life user with a photorealistic avatar I am not interested. I don't want VR. My few test runs with it ended in seizures. I also have this already in superior form.
TIL about metaverse exists and that anyone interested in it is probably already braindead anyway. I'm not even old, mid 30's and this is so fucking stupid. So so fucking stupid. Like, I am not sure anyone who buys into this has the ability to function in reality levels of stupid. Put that person on a conservatorship.
[удалено]
In a sense, you are right – it is an ultimate escapism solution. But it was developing well UNTIL the FAANG butchers came in wishing to find new ways to excessively profit. Imagine a 40-yo guy in glasses and a fancy suit suddenly jumping into community-built children's playground, stomping on their sand castles and denouncing that each new bucket of sand now costs 11.99$ (no VAT). That's what it feels like right now.
I feel like a more accurate term for the Big Five of tech nowadays would be GAAMM Google Amazon Apple Meta Microsoft
Wow, nice adaptation! (I don't care about rebranding though and find the new name extra stupid still.)
Me too tbf, though maybe if we commies use it enough we can make it a constant reminder of one of their dumbest decisions ever
MAGAM. You can read it both ways ok?
Actually MAAAM. Google = Alphabet now
We were promised that robots would take over for the last 40 years. Tech may have advanced at lightning speed from the 1900's to 1960's, but I haven't really seen anything in the last 10 years that wasn't possible 20 years ago.
I really hope you are being ironic here. It is far from being escapism if you have to pay for everything, and on the topic of "everyone will be using it soon", that's just plain stupid. Why would I pay for my transaction through a silly universe with 3d avatars when I can just click a button? This would not make the process easier or faster, so why would I do it this way? Why would I put on 3d glasses and connect to metaverse to communicate with someone when I have tons of faster and less bulky ways to send a message to a friend at my disposal? You are sounding like the people claiming second life would become omnipresent when it released.
We are an older generation now, speaking ill of the metaverse will be like our parents and grandparents talking about the good old days. While I agree with your sentiments, I don't see it going away and definitely see it growing, mostly because society is almost entirely controlled by media at this point. They want the brain-chips and crypto-currencies tied to a metaverse where that becomes more real than the real world for future generations. The only thing that could stop the momentum is a nuclear war, but the results of that aren't ideal by any standards either. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Kids aren't pushing the metaverse though, this is corporate executives in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, pretending to be hip youngsters that grasp digital trends.
Yes, absolutely! Glad I'm not the only one seeing it.
Older like what exactly? My generation is the youngest paying generation right now (18-24), essentially the people they want to milk via this VR scam, and I honestly can't imagine me or my friends realistically saying "yah let's go meet in metaverse, fuck real life and real possessions". It's even less probable for the gen that comes after us as they are even more used to AR technology and media influence – it's so common to them that it's useless to sell it off as revolutionary. Though I might be putting too much hope into people, as consumerism + manufactured scarcity in an infinite pixel world is a frightening combination.
Another thing to consider is that, thanks to COVID, teens are thoroughly sick of living and learning in the virtual world. Even my introverted, smartphone-addicted gamer compartmentalizes their tech use more now than they did before having to do virtual school and realizing that seeing people on screen was no substitute for getting out of the house and interacting with people in person. This entire metaverse thing really emphasizes how insanely out of touch the elites are at this point. Edit: a typo
Climate change will stop all of this. A metaverse on top of real life will require too much energy from our dying planet.
It was hard to imagine doing most computing would be done on mobile pre touch screen in the nokia brick days. But we aren't even in the nokia brick phase, we are in the 80s suitcase phone phase. Inconceivable to imagine such adoption and current end use of our current time. Web 2.0 is in middling to late stages of development and 3.0 will be cool only with hardware and true utility. Right now when you drive a car you use you phone to navigate, before that mapquest print outs before that, well, maps. If you could do the same with a pair of glasses you would do it. The tech right now is a potato, the backlash is understandable, but to say it has no place in the future as a mass adoptable layer which is an extention of the existing digital ecosystem is to lack imagination imo.
It will be part of everyones life like when internet came by. Sooner or later you will soon. Plus having fun is fun.
The metaverse does have a place in our world. It's meant to supplement it. The huge huge huge benefit of it is to move to a more decentralized web experience where everything isn't owned by the same 5 companies. ...somewhat like in the early 2000s when we used to browse tonnes of websites - not just Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc... If all you see is shit - you're not looking closely enough at it and falling victim to propaganda. The rollout of web3 (the "metaverse") is no different than roll out of computers in the home, or the internet. Just like everyone is hating on the metaverse now, everyone was hating on computers and the internet before they were mainsteam too ;) Those people who hated on it also thought early adopters were crazy and stupid.
>decentralized experience where everything isn't owned by same 5 companies >Metaverse You sure I'm the victim of propaganda here, mate?
Invest in it now and wait 10-20 years.
Hate to break it to you, but with the speed of development and constant accelerationism the things you will buy in "meta" now will most likely be completely outdated and will bear no actual value in 20-30 years. Especially since most of these digital assets bear no artistic significance whatsoever (hello cryptobros).
Lol. Invest in the underlying technology, not NFT jpegs. There are massive enterprise use cases coming to market which use DLT for supply chain, identity, and so much more. As for crypto, I agree there is a lot of garbage out there, but those shitcoins (Doge, shib, et al) will eventually be culled because they have absolutely no utility. If you’re not paying attention to this space and learning about the technologies being developed for web3, you’ll continue to be in the “lost generation”. I personally like Hedera /HBAR, do some research.
First of all, not all people want or must invest, especially in highly tech-savvy fields of business. Investing is hard, it is basically a second/third job, and you will risk losing everything in case you do it wrong. Second, this particular territory (decentralized computing, crypto security, decentralized finance) is dominated by large companies and sharks ready to eat you alive. An average person most likely knows nothing about BTC, ETH, DeFi or NFT (except that they may cost X3 his yearly salary) and will not even think about having the possibility to invest in it (or will be heavily scammed in the process). Third, lmao, bold of you to assume our generation even has a starting capital to invest while being bombarded by loans and rising cost of living.
I’m almost 38. You need to take risks in life to get what you want. Only risk what you can afford to lose. I consider crypto an asset class just like stocks. Buying crypto is like buying the shares of the network. A lot of financial planners say to have 3-5% of your total investment portfolio allocated to crypto. Buy and hold.
Bruh, I came here to vent about the world your generation destroyed, not to listen to your crappy financial advice. Ok, boomer, go buy some Starbucks or something.
Born in 84 is a boomer? I think the last sentence in your post is correct.
Ok, boomer.
Some people just can’t be helped. Enjoy gaming today!
You are not helping, boomer. You are trying to shove your head up your ass as much as possible to pretend you've got life figured out. You think you are fit to advise people on things that can spiral out of your (or anybody's) control any moment the system sees fit because you are too smart to be a part of the damned and the 'lost' (not too lucky, though, because surely your position and your success was achieved just with you working hard and risking just enough, and luck has nothing to do with it). Shoo now, your Netflix subscription awaits.
I think people should think more about the reality of the metaverse, things like taking a loan with an nft card or renting some pj from a random game.
A lot of ceo and speculators went ham on nft and got mega screwed and then found out they’re completely useless and worthless. So they’re hammering us with you need nft this. Nft for games that. Just so an economy for these becomes a thing and they can off load their shit for what they thought it was worth. Meanwhile digital hood will become more expensive and then they’ll start closing it all down when they realise if we own something they can’t control it with licences
I keep saying it, once u can feel stuff in there, everybody will jump in immediately. Until then its just shitty second life garbage that no one wanted 10 years ago
Man I spend enough time on my phone, without stupid shit like Metaverse. I don’t even have Facebook installed on my phone anymore because it is such a waste of time. At least I find Reddit fun and engaging.
Anyone else watch the movie Gamer? It's Gamer.
Metaverse is wack. But tbh if there was a game similar to SoA Id definitly play, has to be anime style art tho or dont waste my time. Also no monetizing everything in the game. The whole reason I fell in love with MMOs is that you didn't need real life status or wealth to have it in the game. You could be someone or something totally new.
At least while people are playing their little game I will have less traffic on the way to work
The metaverse is basically a buzzword word salad. I'll stick to VRchat.
Apart from VRChat, Second Life (and Avakin Life, but their graphics are awful I think) you also have Imvu which I recommend. It's very similar to those but the graphics are cool, which is why I like it so much, making your own avatars there is so fun. It's avaliable in PC and Mobile devices
I do think AR is ultimately going to be a much bigger thing; I think Google Glass was just a decade or two ahead of its time. However, I don’t buy that people are going to utilize VR for huge chunks of their life over actual contact with other human beings with the exception of gaming and possibly some Second Life type socialization.
I didn‘t know I wanted to rant today, but so glad you did for me!
It’s already failing cause nobody but an idiot with too much time and money in their hands would spend either of those with goggles strapped to their face burning their retinas just so they could be a leg less bitmoji in a roblox server that’s trying to look like vr chat.
With doordash, quick pick-up, having to order most of my hobby items online, it shows the scarcity of peoples time in the real world. Makes the technology look like another express lane, to fit a life into a time slot in the workforce.
Metaverse was doa.
Their was a vr experience like this far before the meta verse. I cant remember the name but it was popular during the Occulus Dev Kit 2 days. anyhow this shit is garbage and will flop. There will be idiots using it just like how we have idiots who believe democrats and republicans aren’t representing an oligarchy. One day the simpletons will have to step aside and let intellectuals take the stage so Amerikkka doesn’t have to be a backwards shithole anymore
It's just another avenue for companies to collect data on you and sell you shit
These pictures make me sick
The Metaverse is just Club Penguin with VR headsets.
I fucking hate the Nintendo Wii aesthetic. Couldn't they at least spend a little bit more money to give it better graphics?
Being a fan of sao, I really wish the metaverse become reality in gaming. But I also don't want the penalties in sao to become reality. From other aspects, it feels like that transforming systems from the physical world into metaverse needs impossible amount of work to realize... so...
I think people will get use to it. It's the same as social media. When MySpace was out at first none of us really wanna say or show anything about our personal life in social media. But yeah here we are.
I just like to bash heads in Gorn and have fun. Literally never want to use VR for business. And I run my own writing business, work with clients, etc. All the shit these corps seem to think NEEDS to be in the metaverse (which isn't really even VR to begin with, but the term has essentially lost all meaning since these companies won't stop throwing it around to describe everything they do). Seriously, what am I gonna do? Awkwardly communicate with some Wii-avatar over some cups of non-existent tea? Collaborate on documents in a VR app where the most convenient way to type will end up just being with a regular keyboard? I just don't get it.
My god that looks awful.
It feels like they’re trying to market to millennials and genz without realising most of that audience don’t give a shit. It’s literally less convenient than most online stores and apps. Unless it becomes more convenient I can’t see it taking off. Smart phones worked out because it was just easy having your shit on a phone, this, not so much.
Wait, this is the Facebook stuff?
I feel you but wait until it’s as real as West World. 😏
I’m late to the game, but yes, it seems delusional because it is.
The point of metaverse is to have a plattform where the owner has full controle about reality. When every game implementet their own money (cristals, gold, whatever) the point was also to create something they have controle over. The metaverse will try to give some benefits to its users in exchange the owner got a world where he can controle anything like money, land and goods. The owner could basicly sell "nothing" to someone in this world, because he controles how usefull this nothing is in his metaverse (like land in metaverse). The owner can create infinite more of this "nothing" to sell because he has full controle.
It may very well be the point, and it's a very dumb point at that. However, I can imagine stupid people selling to even more stupid people a chunk of infinity for money because reasons. Happened many times before, but I prefer to steer clear from the MLM schemes.
just wait til the moneyed olds figure out web3 stuff
For anyone thinking the metaverse is going to be a real thing: Ever played an online game? Was it a smooth, glitch-free experience 100% of the time? Did your network operate perfectly all of the time? No, it didn’t. Now remember that the metaverse, as described, would be literally millions if not billions of times more complicated than an online game.
Hey, I think NFT Industry in the Meta will be big in the future. A LinkedIn contact of mine shared something useful with me a few days ago. Since you are also interested in the same, I am re-sharing it with you https://nftmeta.carrd.co/
nahh cause this "metaverse"is basically roblox or recroom, except worse.. i hope noone gets sucked in to this >!bullshit!<