Zuck is a pretty uninspiring orator, with a tendency to use flat metaphors and bland platitudes. He's also not much of a creative visionary. His version of what "metaverse" will be has Jetsons sort of logic. You get up, have some virtual toast and commute in a virtual car to a virtual office, then go home and feed your virtual pet. ... I'm exaggerating, but you get my meaning. JC, is, in contrast, quite inspiring.
Anyway, Zuck's easy to make fun of. Easy to underestimate too.
Back in the 90s, it was thought to have been proven that an AOL-like attempt to top-down control the WWW was doomed to failure. An open web was too powerful. Well... that was before Zuck.
In many countries, FB-only internet is free and that means FB-only internet is the internet for like a billion people. Meanwhile, lots of unsophisticated users who's first and only device is a smartphone are mostly just FB users. He defied conventional wisdom, made FB a walled garden. Zuck really did "do AOL."
Meanwhile, the IG & WA acquisitions are strategically flawless in retrospect. With his tactical skills in the early days, Zuck's managed to keep more shares and control over FB than other CEOs. He may not have style and he's not quite hip, but Zuck is effective in his strategies.
I'd like to believe Carmack is right and Zucks' lame, top-down VR metaverse is doomed... pun intended. But I also recall that Zuck bought John out, and he's the boss. That may not be coincidence.
Is underwhelming performance/delivery a deliberate strategy?
Carmack vs Zuckerberg I think can be summed up as follows: one builds things things people will genuinely like, and the other one force-feeds people until they like it and know no other option.
> In many countries, FB-only internet is free and that means FB-only internet is the internet for like a billion people.
I'm not so sure that this shows Facebook pulling off an odds-defying feat. AFAIK Facebook targeted people who would have never touched a mobile phone or have working internet otherwise. Any company with sufficiently deep pockets to subsidise internet for free could roll out a similar locked-down internet for these people.
Although Zuck is easy to mock about this move proves courage for a company as big as Fb.
In the end, zuck understands that the risk of not changing is much greater than the risk of staying the same. Technology is unstoppable
It proves he thinks everyone will follow along anyway
It proves Apple’s data labels and growing awareness digital ads drive little business, which proved Facebook is a non-contributor to the economy in a real way
Zuck is just looking to keep his good times rolling as interest fades. This isn’t courage, this is “the writing is on the wall, let’s try something sooner than later.”
That’s how I read the situation. I think FB is cool for Gen-X and above and they are trying desperately to appeal to a younger audience. They have no where to go but down if they don’t figure that out.
As I recall, the iPhone originally had little to none integration with enterprise infrastructure, as Blackberry and Windows Phone had .
In my view, The iphone was just too cool not to be in the hands of CEOs and CTOs , which most likely managed to bend companies rules to start allowing usage of iphones and basically making blackberry superfluous
Their problem with execution was the plan of vertical integration that Apple is known for. In particular, there's little that the first iPhone could do that Blackberry didn't already do at the time - except for one thing. Cost. Blackberry was a victim of their success in the business market segment, and Microsoft wanted to join them there. The iPhones initial launch included a deal with AT&T to make it a relatively affordable, consumer facing device, thus expanding the market as a whole, to the success we see today.
Error 42: not the metaverse, a metaverse. the intrusive advertising, click bait metaverse. funded by advertising and includes google, facebook, youtube etc.
A pretty poor one, as it does great harm to the inhabitants. Intrusive advertising is based on being able to target specific people with messages (tracking). Different messages for different people. Gee, its almost like this mechanism might engender mistrust and divisiveness. Which in turn might fracture communities. And gee, one might even consider that foreign governments might use this as a weapon. Or potential dictators and other bad actors. Gee.
The clickbait metaverse is only one of an infinite number of alternatives. Each metaverse has a set of rules for how the inhabitants operate. Wikipedia and craigslist come to mind as non-members of the clickbait metaverse. Other rules would - for example no tracking - would create other metaverses.
Computer people have been trapped in a Silicon Valley mindset for decades, thinking there are universal rules to human interactions (namely game theory). You're spot on that many different universes/cultures are possible, and desirable.
We need a radical alternative to this shithole that Nation States and corporations have designed for us, or our children won't even have clear air or water left because we will have polluted everything, and for what?
I thought the juxtaposition between the cringey, overproduced keynote and Carmack’s talk was amazing. Just a guy in front of some monitors telling you the whole thing you just watched was nonsense. It was beautiful.
Having watched Zuckerberg’s keynote, I get the feeling he wants to feel excited again by building something new. Maintenance is a bit thankless and boring.
There is another billionaire building a giant dorm complex with windowless rooms, if there's another deadly variant wave those kids will need the metaverse to see the sun.
Personally I’m wondering why a billionaire hasn’t undertaken projects to explore the deepest depths of the oceans, and perhaps start ambitious projects like underwater habitats for small communities.
One smart thing with Buffett is he likes the day job and doesn't need to go off and build rockets or similar.
"""
I can do anything in the world I want to do but what I want to do is run Berkshire Hathaway. Now why do I want to run it that way? There's a couple of things:
A) I get to paint my own painting. I go down there every day and I feel like Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel or something. [...]
And the second thing I like, frankly, is I like applause. I like appreciation. So I like having shareholders who feel good about what I've done.... Everybody in our family has got all of their money in Berkshire, and so those people are counting on me. And that's kind of fun to have something where you can actually deliver for other people and change their lives in positive ways.
Carmack's point about it being about products is so important. Same way a game engine is an almost accidental side result from a great game, a worthwhile "metaverse" will be a accidental result of one or more great, useful products.
Have to say it's entertaining to see Carmack roast Zuck publicly.
The thing about the internet as we interact with it today that makes it so pervasive is that it generally enhances real world experiences. It doesn't replace them. It fills in the gaps in down time. People whip out their phones to text or take a video or catch up on social media or share something because the interaction is fast and the interfaces are complementary and the right balance of distracting enough to draw your attention, but not distracting enough that you can't convince yourself that you are loosely aware of what's around you. AR might work, but VR outside of your home seems like a stretch.
I'm a software developer and i pass literraly 80% of my time working to make my family survive to this world, and honestly the only thing that i have in mind it's to flippin go in the forest for a walk, i don't understand the thing of wanting so much to be isolated and wear a fucking VR mask, this world is fucked up !
I have an oculus, which I bought mostly out of interest. Not really a gamer.
Anyway, I use it once or twice a month to play a zombie shooting game with my brother, who lives overseas. We shoot zombies for an hour and chat. It feels kind of similar to golfing, bowling or somesuch. We can't do those in person, so we do it in VR.
So for me, VR is kind of a comms tool. A place to catch up. Alternative to video calls. Calling is great, but doing something together it just a normal way of bonding.
As always, the tech is a canvas. You can paint any pictures on it. That said, yeah... This kind of tech & gaming has shown a real proclivity for isolating us from reality and each other.
OOH, I think social VR has a lot of immediate potential, with current and next generation tech. It'll take a while before the user base, hardware, etc. will support blockbuster gaming, films and such. Social stuff can be more lightweight and simple. In that sense, fb is a sensible home for VR.
OTOH, fb's approach to software if goddam awful. Their whole paradigm is making software that makes people do things, not software that people do stuff with. That's likely to tip the balance in the antipattern favour.
VR has much more feeling of "presence" than just video calling, or texting. I've been doing meetings in VR for a few months now and it beats Zoom etc. hands down IMHO, being able to look around, coalesce around a whiteboard, positional audio - it may look a bit cartooney, but for me it's less draining than video conference and more engaging.
Yeah, but I actually think zoom meeting aren't the ideal proving ground. It's a head-2-head between two tools that can do the job, with certain advantages to both.
For hanging out with a younger sibling, zoom doesn't work too well. Video (or audio only) calling enables only a certain kind of interaction. In the physical world,we play tennis, have dinner, cook together, etc. We don't just sit in front of each other and talk intensely all the time.
It seems to me as if you're simply missing the fundamental difference in that you don't understand (likely because you haven't experienced it firsthand with a friend or loved one) the value of physical/social presence enabled by VR. There are two things so far VR does that 2d doesn't, 1) you feel like you are really in the room with someone even if you are not, 2) boobs look 3D in VR porn.
Remarks like these remind me of something John Carmack said in Joe Rogan's interview:
>“There’s this piece of art that goes around the internet of this dystopian kid in a corner, drooling, with goggles on with rainbow pictures and it’s a terrible looking place,” Carmack told Rogan. “And people say, ‘This is the world you’re trying to build, people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them.’”
>“Is his life really better if he takes them off and he’s in this horrible place?” he asked. “I live in Dallas. It’s 100 degrees there. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air-conditioning. People don’t generally go, ‘Oh, you’re not experiencing the world around you because of air-conditioning’ … That is what human beings do, we bend the world to our will.”
I guess it's a matter of perspective but I will say this: I had to isolate myself for months during covid, because of chronic issues that increase the risk of getting ICU'd. And while I missed social contact and leisurely walking under the sun, I can't say that I ever felt imprisoned. If anything, in times like these I would love to have even the emulation of the experience that is walking through a forest without having to worry about my allergies, my joints, snakes or getting lost.
What this all means is that, you're not "better" or "worse" than me for wanting to go in the countryside. You're only different. The whole notion of "you have no life if you work in front of a computer most of the time" was absurd to begin with. How is doing something that I enjoy doing "no life"? The solution to that is simple: Instead of applying societal pressure by pointing out that someone refuses to have a life by focusing too much into games, programming, anime or whatnot to inspect the reasons why they're not attracted to what you claim to be as "having a life".
What I'm saying is, getting out once or twice a week to get my sun exposure for some vitamin D works just fine for me, and I hope people will stop pointing out that "I don't have a life because I prefer X over Y". It's wrong, it's borderline "no true Scotchman" and pivots over the real issue that is respecting people's preferences without feeling that you have "more life" than others.
> And we see that it clearly has a very negative impact overall so idk what kind of argument is that.
You're talking about AC? Surely the climate dialogue hasn't devolved to the point of "uses energy == bad".
We can reflect on its role in shaping society/living spaces and its costs and benefits without being so reductionist.
I really don't think most of the good that comes from tech required the bad enabled by tech.
Humans are just really good at externalizing costs on the environment and on each other.
And enough humans are driven by motivated reasoning so that entire organizations are devoted to disrupting any attempts at fixing things.
Those are human problems. Facebooks social problems are not caused by the evils of digital scrapbooking with reliable write/read coherence over shards. They are the evils of humans redirecting information based on perverse incentives, taking profits from others pain.
It can be a pretty novel experience- neither VR headsets nor walks through a forest are substitutes for each other.
I have access to many many acres of forest, and am quite familiar with it. For reasons unrelated to this discussion, I am unlikely to see many interesting places in person around the world... Pictures are nice, but will never do them justice. I wouldn't mind being able to take a 3d VR tour of them one bit.
Edit: That said, living in VR and never going for a walk through a forest would be utterly dystopian and nightmarish for me. The only thing keeping me from daily walks in the woods right now is hunting season.
In my mind the primary issue is the lack of quality of replication. VR tech is fine, but the quality is just not there. iPhones had a screen quality where you could barely tell there were pixels and eventually got to a high enough quality where no matter how close you looked you couldn’t see the pixels. That is the level of detail needed for VR to be get truly beautiful and our screens and processing power are simply decades away from them, let alone the quality of sound and the other senses.
I don't think any of these things are substitutes for each other. A book about the arctic is not an alternative to a visit. It's a substitute for another book, maybe.
The main way VFR competes with other stuff is competition for time, in the sense that TV, social media and such are.
This isn't for you. It's for the current generation of kids who've grown up having their attention spans destroyed by having a screen in front of them their whole lives.
A good chunk of them live online, having parasocial relationships with Twitch streamers and Youtubers, or buying skins to put on their characters in Fortnite. I have almost no idea what Roblox and Minecraft are besides world building, but kids get addicted to that too.
This reads very much like a “kids these days!” Complaint lodged against the next generation since time immemorial. Sure, some parasocial relationships can be harmful, and video game addiction is something to watch out for (though I’m not sure why you singled out Minecraft and Roblox specifically, they’re just fun creative games), but there’s nothing preventing a healthy balance of screen time, activities, and outdoor time with a bit of parental guidance.
If I had a kid, I’d be encouraging them to play Minecraft. I’m 25, and played during the very early days around 2009. I can’t see a way in which Minecraft was anything but good for my brain.
I regret the amount of my teens that I spent playing video games in general, but I don’t regret Minecraft. It’s such a genuinely positive and constructive experience in its openness. It’s like life - there’s no endgame or goal. No single way to play. You can decide you want to build a megabase connected by rail, you can decide you want to terraform a mountain, you can build crazy automatic machines to grow food or kill enemies for you. But it’s your choice, the game doesn’t push you in any direction outside of the very early game.
It also served as my introduction to computing - the in game wiring system is Turing complete. I learned about logic gates from Minecraft.
Yeah as a trail runner and technologist, I enjoy VR but I'm not sure anything could replace the sights, smells, and feeling of going on a run through the woods. Similarly I think there is room for both VR-sports (and e-sports) and traditional IRL athletics. One doesn't replace the other, but the skills, strategy, physical performance and endurance are very different to watch and to experience (each great/ fascinating in their own way).
Physical and virtual sports are similar in most regards, except when it comes to environmental impact. Taking a walk/swim in nature does little to no damage to your environment, unless you make it a big competition.
In comparison, any computerized activity will require tons of resources (and related industrial pollution) and slave labor to produce the hardware you're using, and more energy/resources to power the device. I'm not against video games, but do we need more hardware? Our hardware is extremely powerful already (though games are rarely optimized in any way) and as much as i can see human progress via Internet connectivity, i don't see any "usefulness" for VR technology: it seems to me that apart from requiring more hardware and potentially fueling gaming addictions and social isolation, there is little to no value proposition compared to Second Life and other software we've had for decades.
Nobody really wants that; which I think is what Facebook is missing (sorry, not calling them Meta just like
we still call Alphabet Google). I personally like VR, but in no way do I think it’s a replacement for the real world. For me, it’s just a more immersive video game experience that I can only handle for about an hour at a time.
IMO Facebook wants you to experience life entirely though their platform, because once you take a step back you realize that Facebook is this weird alternate world where everyone is angry all the time, truth has no meaning and there are no social norms.
Meanwhile, when you DO step back into real life, you realize many of the people who probably want to murder you online are perfectly nice in person. Or that most of the people you talk to on Facebook are people you used to be friends with but would never make time to see in real life because you’re not that close anymore. And that Facebook might not be reflective of reality, which threatens their engagement metrics. So they want to shape your reality to be less threatening to them. I couldn’t think of a more dystopian concept — fortunately the value proposition is not appealing to most.
I agree with you completely. It actually makes me angry that corporations will seemingly stop at nothing to rape the Earth for their own profit and control. They want to
replace everything natural and beautiful with a cheap simulacrum, and hope that the SSRIs and porn keep the population complacent while they take everything away from them.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's "fucked up". Do you think that about all things not aligned with your personal and subjective preferences?
I agree totally. All I want is to be more efficient at work and reduce the screen time so I can enjoy what the real world offers. Taking the red pill guys, not the blue pills!
VR has been a bust because decent VR requires a heavy thing attached to your head, basically an empty room in your house, and a computer that (at least pre-covid auto prices) cost more than many of the cars on the road in the United States.
My friend has had a vive for years, he has an entire room dedicated to it so you can actually walk around. Its being driven by a several thousand dollar computer and makes the room unusable for anything else as you have to keep the floor vacant so you can actually walk around. If I had a room to spare, and 5-6k dollars to drop, I'd have it but when you're taking home about $500 a week and don't have an empty room...
The cheaper options, where you're just sitting on your couch, aren't nearly as engaging or interesting (at least to me). Another thing to consider is how many people wear glasses, and how poorly these things work while wearing glasses because they mask them into your face and/or fog. If I want to get custom lens inserts, I'm looking at another $300-500 cost every 12-18 months (that's assuming any can actually accommodate my astigmatism and the prism requirements I need).
And all that money is for a VR that doesn’t fully replicate normal vision - the number of pixels is just not there yet. I doubt even quadrupoling the number of pixels in current vr systems would get there.
That's definitely better pricing than I found last time I looked, my lenses end up being $163. My left sphere adds $7 and both cylinders add $19 each + $49 for the prism.
Whether or not more and more people will be unemployed or not due to advances in technology and shifts in society is probably up to debate. I personally think that we'll see more unemployment with uneducated folks. And even if they work it will be paid badly, unstable due to being easily replaceable and rather stressful and dull.
Same for having a family. Finding a spouse will be difficult for the disposable and getting children risky. So, also not an option for many.
And access to a forest - as in a place with nature where you can walk for half an hour without meeting anyone. Good luck with that living in the middle of some ghetto without public or individual transportation options.
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Those products will be the new Opium for the People. The new couch with chips in front of the TV. A sedation and escapism.
I share your feeling, but most people i know who grew up in the big cities don't even have any form of connection with or appreciation for nature. It's just not part of their "natural environment".
Nation States and corporations have rendered the western world so meaningless and painful that most of us will do anything to get out of it for a while... whether it's via drugs or VR or whatever means at our disposal.
it’s strange, i think it’s because the fact the we work with computers all day, to others it’s play time because it doesn’t remind them of fixing bugs or working with spreadsheets all day
We should talk more about that ‘crappy life’ outside the virtual world. China reduces kids computer gaming sessions and invests in actually improving living conditions. Facebook’s ad sponsored empire turns productive members of society into zombies amidst a crumbling infrastructure. There surely is room for VR and AR in improving aspects of life but Mark’s vision has a taste of dystopia.
The only thing China can reduce is online gaming. A reduction that will cause the kids to have less opportunity to connect with others, make friends, learn to cooperate, learn to trust people, learn to protect their identity and learn what to do when the trust is betrayed.
You know, the things that might come in handy in 20 years in toppling oppressive regime.
Meanwhile taking Chinese kids out of global shared culture that is increasingly more interconnected, virtual and gaming related so they only trust and feel at home when they are fed familiar government messaging.
But I'm sure goal of Chinese government is strictly improvement of peoples conditions.
As if China does not resemble a mass-surveillance state dystopia already? I'm not sure "improving living conditions" in a country where The Party dictates every aspect of life is something to aspire to.
Sometimes I dispare! Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, <insert-other-multinational-big-US-company>, all seem to be a threat to the open internet they themselves used to become what they are. Obviously MS and Apple were big prior but they did use the internet to become bigger and are a threat with their respective walled gardens.
I am not here to pretend I know anything about whatever the metaverse is, but I do know one thing if it's controlled by any of these companies it's gonna be bad for the people using it.
FB execs aren't stupid. This is not about the metaverse, it is about deflecting from bad press and ill will into mockery about this aloof nonsense.
A few weeks or months ago you probably noticed your sentiment towards facebook turn pretty negative. Just thinking about the company as dorky instead helps their bottom line.
We all know this project isn't going anywhere, including maybe everyone but zuck.
The more noise about this lame ass project instead of how fb is ruining society, the better for them.
It’s smart, the same way Google made alphabet. The rebrand of the name is not the point at all, it’s the fact they want to avoid the appearance of monopoly like power and all the regulation that comes with it. Having separate companies that aren’t under you primary brand name essentially gives the illusion of less dominance by that brand and makes it easy to split off should the government require them to be split at some point. Just saying Facebook now controls devices with cameras in your home is worrying - versus saying, Facebooks parent company owns another company that controls cameras in your home makes people feel the illusion that power is not too centralized by Facebook.
> In the end, the metaverse will be the internet, but mostly experienced through the medium of VR/AR.
Depends on who gives the smart glasses it's 'killer app' and the ecosystem it needs to take off and who ever executes that properly, will win. The games are going to come first.
Probably will come from either Meta, Apple, Google or Microsoft. Most likely from Meta with the support of the Web and PWA's first.
> In the meantime, all we can do is make sure that Facebook’s cut of VR social networks stays as small as possible.
I don't see anything out there right now to counter what Meta is about to do, unless Mastodon or something else is planning to persuade the masses to not make money on the metaverse and stay on the fediverse.
Either way, this decade is going to introduce the smart glasses and it will come from Big Tech again as it did with smartwatches. Sorry.
Smartwatches aren't new in the same way smartglasses will be new.
Watches weren't new, calculator watches were introduced almost half a century ago, the concept had a ton of time to mature. A HUD/AR capable smartglasses will be an entirely new concept that has so far failed spectacularly every time it has been tried. Not saying it won't happen, just that it'll need a lot more time to mature as a consumer product than smartwatches did -- there's a lot more to it than waiting until the technology is capable.
< Smartwatches aren't new in the same way smartglasses will be new.
My whole point is about execution, rather than something being 'new'.
It's not about being first or introducing something 'entirely' new, it's about the overall execution of the concept which then leads to mass adoption and who ever does that properly with a 'killer app' and ecosystem behind it, wins.
Can you tell me who currently leads in the smartwatches market?
> unless Mastodon or something else is planning to persuade the masses to not make money on the metaverse and stay on the fediverse.
Exactly this. Mastodon on its own is clearly not enough. And cryptoeconomic systems still have to navigate financial regulations successfully before they ever become legitimate contenders.
Not sure I see another macrotrend out there to help counter this. Except crypto. And despite all my faith, I remain skeptical.
And a 720 degree fully immersive virtual reality has successfully existed in human society for thousands of years. It is called the written word, and in story form is 100% successful transporting an individual anywhere, realistically, and fully immersive. The Metaverse is simply an immature projection of what some early thinkers imagined, and whatever the Internet becomes it is not going to be that stupid commercial fantasy.
How come that the same company that ruined countless people's mental health announces that they want to completely immerse mankind in an alternative reality and take over human senses in a much more potent way, yet the most discussed aspect of it seems to be whether it's possible, and what problems need to be solved in order to make it happen.
Let's about devastating mental health problems that this will cause. To me it's obvious that they will majorly fuck up human perception of reality like they did with social interactions.
Oh, and what do you think which age groups will be mostly drawn to it?
All we really need to collectively build up a metaverse is the HTML of VR, where experiences can be linked together. Web browsers can already launch 3D experiences in VR its just clunky and I switch it off because ads on some sites start VR for some reason. We already have quite a few 2D into VR desktops too and they work. Seamless transition and placement appears to be a bit lacking but it doesn't feel all that far away.
The metaverse is the internet we just need a bit of linking it all together, one company building it top down isn't going to beat out the obvious open internet approach.
So I totally agree we need to build a metaverse collectively. Letting it go to Facebook would be very bad. Most people here totally dismiss the whole thing, which isn't helping.
Anyway, back to what you said, I agree that seamless transition is the very big factor. IMO, "metaverse" requires seamless transition between assets not worlds. Current VR experience, even assuming a perfect browser, means that you switch between world when switching between websites. I believe that most usages would be that pages are mostly assets, not whole worlds. Kinda frames I guess. I don't think there is any specification at the moment for such a thing.
(Now I'm daydreaming of a VR RSS reader, where I move in my various news. Nope that doesn't sound like a good UX)
> VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language, pronounced vermal or by its initials, originally—before 1995—known as the Virtual Reality Markup Language) is a standard file format for representing 3-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graphics, designed particularly with the World Wide Web in mind. It has been superseded by X3D.
X3D is a royalty-free ISO/IEC standard for declaratively representing 3D computer graphics. File format support includes XML, ClassicVRML, Compressed Binary Encoding (CBE) and a draft JSON encoding. X3D became the successor to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) in 2001.[1] X3D features extensions to VRML (e.g. CAD, geospatial, humanoid animation, NURBS, etc.), the ability to encode the scene using an XML syntax as well as the Open Inventor-like syntax of VRML97, or binary formatting, and enhanced APIs.
I think there’s prior questions of what does interoperability actually add and why doesn’t it already exist?
For example with the web the interoperability is really between the browser and websites rather than between websites. Although a few do interoperate. This is more similar to how Roblox or Steam works where one program lets you join lots of different games and maintains some common state than common ideas of interoperability in the metaverse.
Interesting question, but doesn't a "metaverse" require interoperable applications to some extent?
I think the Zuck use case was buying a t-shirt for a virtual avatar and I want to use that t-shirt in other applications. There is a matter of interoperability required at the level of the data that sits behind both applications as it pertains to the user that sits on the other side of those applications. (meaning just sharing data isn't enough, there is user level context as well).
And if you reduce interoperability to a single entity owned platform (like Steam), well other platforms will exist and the interoperability problem will be recreated.
I don’t think it’s axiomatic that the metaverse needs interoperability of t-shirts. What I’m asking for is arguments for why that is the case and given that the current Internet is basically a metaverse sans interoperability why we haven’t seen it done yet. It’s not really a technical hurdle IMO.
It's not an entirely technical hurdle, but eventually you run into repeated issues when trying to recreate application context across different applications. That means to do so at scale can be solved by a technology solution.
To me the issues that require addressing are things like standardization, general uniqueness proofs, Cross-app total order broadcast, identity and service discovery, to just name a few.
My feeling is that the internet does not solve these problems, especially at the application layer, and therefore interoperability is a technical solution that is required for a metaverse like vision.
If that t-shirt isn't created procedurally, then any interoperability between differently themed worlds will just make everything look like 2nd Life, since an artist would have to create another, similar shirt in a style that fits.
I think this is exactly their aim. Zuck mentions "links" to other places and making it a standard. I'm very nervous because Facebook is the last company that I want leading this yet they are the only ones who seem fully invested.
I think what is sorely missing from the entire debate, is a clear definition of what a metaverse actually is.
This article here seems to believe that the metaverse is nothing but "internet VR". The talk by Carmack for the most part equates the metaverse with MMVR - massively multiuser virtual reality.
But according to the explanation that Raph Koster (the mind behing metaplace - the only prior attempt at ever building a metaverse) recently posted at the Playable Worlds homepage, what Facebook is trying to do, is building a mirror world - which is just one world out of many in a multiverse, which in itself is just one small part of the metaverse...
All that enthusiastic talk about "it's the future!" isn't helping either - if anything that muddies the waters even more.
Right now, we are on the best track of turning "metaverse" into a completely meaningless marketing buzzword. Everyone uses the term, behaving as if it was totally clear and obvious what it meant - but nobody seems to be able to actually produce a clear and to the point explanation or definition.
It's easy to get entangled in definitions, metaphors and such. It's kind of pointless though. They aren't precise anyway.
Instead of clearly defining what these things mean, I think it's better for clarity if we just focus on implications. That's what we care about anyway. We care that "The internet will be the metaverse" inasmuch as this statement has implications.
"VR Internet" implies, IMO, decentralisation standard protocols. Zuckerverse implies centralisation.
The WWW didn't grow because with one or two companies controlling it. It grew out of a mass of individual webmasters.
That's why I'm asking for a more precise definition.
To me, it seems kinda hard to discuss the implications of something, when you don't understand what it is - or when the people discussing it, have incompatible ideas of what it is.
For example, by the arguments of this article right here, AR/VR is not a requirement for a metaverse (otherwise the current internet could not be a metaverse, right?).
According to the keynotes/talks of Facebook and John Carmack, VR seems to be the most central ingredient though.
Raph Koster seems to rather agree with the notion that VR/AR is not required. It only has to be multiple virtual worlds that (at least some of which) can interact with the real world somehow.
As another example, Raph Koster thinks, that there must be many virtual worlds in a metaverse, and that this virtual worlds must be able to be significantly different from each other - visually and mechanically.
Facebook seems to think that having just one single virtual worlds (Facebook's own VR-world) is kinda enough to create a metaverse.
This article right here implies that no virtual world is required at all - as the internet doesn't qualify.
As a third example, both Facebook and Koster seem to agree, that it is important that a user in the metaverse be represented through some sort of Avatar. They seemingly disagree on what constitutes an Avatar though - Facebook's ideas imply a full 3D VR Avatar - while Koster counts MUDs as virtual worlds, where you get nothing but a handle (username) and maybe a small "description" text-box.
This article seems to deny even that notion, since in the internet you are just a more or less random IP-address. You can have all sorts of Avatars on various places on the internet - from usernames to profile images to fully customizable 2D or 3D-models. But all of those are separate and siloed.
And that's just the first few examples that came to mind - there's a lot more contradictions like these.
There isn't a precise definition. How precise can "metaverse" be? You can't get the implications from the definition. That's why I suggest going directly for implications.
"Cloud" was a very ill-defined term once - many companies threw it around, often in completely nonsensical fashion. The cloud turned out to not be that magical future some where predicting back then. It's basically a new-ish way of hosting virtual servers in data-centers, that allows more flexible forms of deployment and new accounting methods - like pay per actually used compute power. Also more dynamic scaling. It didn't quite completely change the internet, and people's lifes like many claimed it would.
Blockchain is another such concept, that saw a lot of completely over-blown and outright nonsensical claims at first - and many companies claimed to use "blockchain" even when they didn't, just because it helped attract investment money.
That's what happens when terms get thrown around, that aren't properly understood.
Back to your suggestion of going straight for the implications.
So, for example, let's ask the question what implications the metaverse might have on the future of VR and VR adoption.
If the metaverse is defined as "it's just the internet and already exists" - like this article claims, then I see no special implications for VR here at all.
If the metaverse is defined as massively-multiuser-VR, then the success of a metaverse is going to have huge implications for VR.
So, how do I go straight for those implications, without knowing whether the metaverse has something to do with VR or not?
Today Facebook steals your time by locking your attention to their web page or mobile app. Tomorrow they do it by locking your attention to their VR headset or AR glasses.
And each time, the whole Facebook ecosystem comes with you.
This is exactly what they do and Meta is a natural extension that is betting in a cultural change as much as it is a continuation of everything Facebook is.
Instead of Metaverse can we call it "Adverse" as in "Ad"-verse. You know there will be ads super-imposed on objects everywhere. Some obvious, some subliminal. It will be small at first until investors realize the potential benefits and then you will need some advanced AI/ML ad-blocker to virtually remove all the ads and that will be yet another artificial multi-billion dollar industry. AR/VR ad removal. This was depicted in a scene from Altered Carbon where officer Ortega had to put a physical ad-blocking patch on Kovacs neck to block the insane ads. I predict AR will eventually be outlawed in vehicle use when enough distracting ads cause car accidents. Will people draw the line at ads being super-imposed on their families faces? Will ads below the neck be permitted or will consenting adults opt-in to full body ads?
> You log in with your VR headset, create your avatar (that can look like anything you want) and spend all your time in there because it’s so much better than your pathetic real life.
All your time ... or rather until the skin on your face gets irritated due to weiring the headset with a microatmosphere within. Man, this must be a bummer returning to your dystopic shitty apartment. We already consider social media interaction as kin to regular drug consumption (stimulants I suppose) then that experience will be sort of a come down hang over.
> The metaverse is already here, and it’s called the internet.
I beg to differ - experiencing a virtual reality through a comfortable 3D head set is more immersive and exciting.
> Mark Zuckerberg is touting open protocols and interoperability.
"Open" probably just means that they will openly document their APIs.
Something sorely missing from the conversation is the infrastructure piece of all of this. It's much sexier to talk about VR experiences or whatever digital activity resonates with you, but none of this works without the infrastructure to connect, share, and engage across individual experiences.
I was (and reluctantly remain) so excited for cryptocurrency and blockchain networks because of this aspect. Broad open networks interoperable at a data level seemed like exactly what is needed to create more dynamic interconnected digital systems. To some extent this is what is happening in the background.
But the obsession with individual experiences, in crypto it is thr scam coins or ridiculous yield products, dominates the conversation. I think this has greatly derailed the other conversations.
Now I worry that we're left with the only other reasonable answer. Facebook builds this infrastructure as their platform and the market ignores all the problems and flocks to it.
Doesn't seem like there are many entities in between these two places that are working on a more robust, and healthy, "metaverse".
I'm on the side of "this is a new interesting platform and worth exploring"
I am determined to try and set up a coding environment in one. I get the feeling it will transform the "laptop experience".
But hours drooling in the corner. No. My son spends waaay too much time online gaming, it does so alsost exclusively with a roster of friends - chatting laughing organising new lands or strategies.
It's not my grandfathers way to socialise. But it is socialising. And we parents occasionally use the internet to co-ordinate chucking them into the outdoors to basically talk about the game they would be playing if their parents weren't so awful :-)
I am beginning to think of parenting in the web age as managing in the remote working era. You cannot rely on just being in same room / house as kids as some metric - we need to decide what are the activities we want to see, what are the outcomes (hours spent laughing, maths problems solved, time spent bullshitting with friends)
How do we describe the "meta" phenomnom anymore, we need a new word for "meta" and I've been struggling but can't figure it out. What replaces the word "meta" if someone takes it, "gist"!?
Nothing. Meta is meta. Facebook can go find another name, they dont own language or the internet. Metaface or metabook sound good, they are free to steal them from me.
That’s different. “Apple” is a very common everyday word, plus it’s arbitrary as a tech company name so the two are never confused in any reasonable context. “Meta” is a niche but useful word used in intellectual discussions, and Meta’s usage of it is relevant to its meaning. This means “meta” is far more under threat from Meta than “apple” was from Apple, because whenever someone describes something as “meta” in an ambiguous context (where they might be referring to the company or the concept), there will be a need for a little flow-interrupting clarification, and then people will just learn to use the word less (and thus the concept), because inconvenience is inconvenient.
It’s easy to dismiss concerns like this with “well another word will just appear in its place” but linguistic history will disagree with you. Sometimes we just lose things, and it’s sad.
okay - so you’re concerned there is a high chance of collisions in this case as apposed to companies like Stripe, Amazon and Oracle where there is less scope for confusion.
> Meta’s usage of it is relevant to its meaning.
Is it though ? - I thought Meta the name is just a shorthand for Metaverse, so the confusion is bounded to discussions on that topic.
Maybe I’m unable to see the issue. Can you give an example where this overloaded word will cause confusion ?
We definitely need to have a conversation about the pro’s and con’s of various things associated with Meta and the metaverse. This name collision thing just feels like a non issue to me.
I agree it’s not the most important issue regarding Meta, and I don’t think there’s anything useful that can be done about it now anyway, I just reject the outright dismissal of it as a complete non-issue.
Yes, the company name Meta is relevant to the actual meaning of the prefix “meta-“, as in metaverse, a word coined in 90s sci-fi as a contraction of “meta-universe”, meaning a universe that is not the universe but is “beyond” or “about” it, which is a very reasonable use of the prefix when applied to a virtual world, in line with other uses like metadata (extra data that isn’t “the” data but is “about” it).
This whole metaverse thing reminds me of VRML websites in the 90s. IIRC, VRML creations were even called “worlds”. My guess is that this attempt suffers the same fate and takes Facebook as a company down with it.
Yes I thought the same thing. We can only hope Facebook does go down the pan with it as it appears to be a cesspit of self-serving self-obsessed commercialism - kind of like a microcosm of the Internet actually..... Sad.
Facebook should try first and fix their horrible advertising platform that their users cant figure out basics before they try to jump in any into sort of VR world.
Elon wants to go to Mars while earth needs fixing more than ever. Electricity poles that power pretty much all devices across US are rotten. Roads have potholes deeper than cavities. Average IQ is declining back to chimpanzee levels.
I think we are already in cluelessverse of nothing productive but just hope and dreams or lot of zeros and ones. 010101101110001 = just bytes.
I was going to come in and rant that Internet in this context should be capitalized as it’s the specific Internet and not the general concept of an internet, but then I found https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_of_Internet. Lol.
No one has answered the question yet as to why this will succeed where Second Life failed. Is it the power of market coercion and the ad revenue stream?
Anyway, Zuck's easy to make fun of. Easy to underestimate too.
Back in the 90s, it was thought to have been proven that an AOL-like attempt to top-down control the WWW was doomed to failure. An open web was too powerful. Well... that was before Zuck.
In many countries, FB-only internet is free and that means FB-only internet is the internet for like a billion people. Meanwhile, lots of unsophisticated users who's first and only device is a smartphone are mostly just FB users. He defied conventional wisdom, made FB a walled garden. Zuck really did "do AOL."
Meanwhile, the IG & WA acquisitions are strategically flawless in retrospect. With his tactical skills in the early days, Zuck's managed to keep more shares and control over FB than other CEOs. He may not have style and he's not quite hip, but Zuck is effective in his strategies.
I'd like to believe Carmack is right and Zucks' lame, top-down VR metaverse is doomed... pun intended. But I also recall that Zuck bought John out, and he's the boss. That may not be coincidence.