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Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

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Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#181

Post by tremon »

long_time_gone wrote: post #145
abvdasker wrote: post #60

Second Life allowed for a lot of the NSFW content and interactions that people tend to enjoy both in entertainment and in real life (this is also true of VRChat to some extent). Metaverse will be a sanitized, sterile project for children. Fundamentally the people like Zuckerberg responsible for its execution do not understand what people want, which is why Metaverse has no chance of success.

> Fundamentally the people like Zuckerberg responsible for its execution do not understand what people want I agree with the broader point, but Facebook owns three of the most popular apps in the world. They have at least some idea of what people want.

Do they really? Only one of those they created, the others they bought after they'd already become the most popular apps. You don't have to have any ideas to just measure what's already popular and buy it.

Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#182

Post by yokoprime »

The metaverse needs a killer app - something that makes it appealing for a large user-base besides gamers, academics and tech bros. At the moment the metaverse is simply a concept with some very interesting tech demos, but without any broadly appealing use cases.

Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#183

Post by nkingsy »

delecti wrote: post #171
charlesju wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this is one facet, but other is we now have a trustless ownership protocol (ie. cryto + NFTs) that will lay the foundation for people "caring" about the stuff and status you have in the metaverse.

The virtual stuff you "own" in virtual environments are going to be siloed in individual companies' ecosystems. Just like GTA Online is never going to give me any sort of benefit from the fancy sword I have in World of Warcraft, neither is Facebook/Meta going give me any benefit from the couch I have in whatever system Microsoft or Valve puts out. NFTs are never going to materialize into that sort of cross-ecosystem…

Never say never. A “stuff” import seems like the kind of feature that would have to be copied by other platforms as soon as one does it, but there’s a chicken and egg aspect.

I disagree with the whole “value of ownership” thing. Making knock off nfts is trivial, so this relies on people caring enough about provenance to police this and shame people that have knock offs in their virtual environment.

Digital goods can be copied for free. It’s the killer feature of digital. No more scarcity!! Any system that fails to embrace this will be outcompeted long term. See the music industry.

Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#184

Post by charlesju »

delecti wrote: post #171
charlesju wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this is one facet, but other is we now have a trustless ownership protocol (ie. cryto + NFTs) that will lay the foundation for people "caring" about the stuff and status you have in the metaverse.

The virtual stuff you "own" in virtual environments are going to be siloed in individual companies' ecosystems. Just like GTA Online is never going to give me any sort of benefit from the fancy sword I have in World of Warcraft, neither is Facebook/Meta going give me any benefit from the couch I have in whatever system Microsoft or Valve puts out. NFTs are never going to materialize into that sort of cross-ecosystem…

This is already happening. You're thinking about this in reverse.

The web 1.0 and 2.0 way of thinking if we build the product, then we own the community.

The web 3.0 way of thinking is there are existing communities out there (BAYC, Punks, etc.) that we can enable to use our product and come into our space.

And this is already happening.

Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#185

Post by TigeriusKirk »

mettamage wrote: post #169
somewhereoutth wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until we can see each other's faces in VR, this won't work for social presence. Shrinking everything down to contact lenses (even sunglasses get in the way of social contact) is likely to be beyond us for quite some while if ever. I'd rather not put something in my eye anyway. Further, VR does not work well for switching - you can't be in VR and scribble notes at the same time. AR might be an improvement, but not by…

You don't need to shrink down, you might be able to scan faces in vr glasses and put them in the vr world

Meta is of course working on exactly this.

Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#186

Post by charlesju »

roywiggins wrote: post #174
charlesju wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this is one facet, but other is we now have a trustless ownership protocol (ie. cryto + NFTs) that will lay the foundation for people "caring" about the stuff and status you have in the metaverse.

What stops me from minting an NFT that says I own anything I want? If platforms are only honoring NFTs minted by other platforms then they might as well just share that information in a database.

Same way you can't just print out a copy of the mona lisa?

People care about status and authenticity.

Imagine a virtual world where

1. You have the validate you are an avatar you own

2. You can be anything you want

The virtual world 1 is way more interesting because it's authentic and the people of status will want to use it and people of less status will build towards being higher status.

Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#187

Post by tremon »

skinnymuch wrote: post #144
herbst wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know a single person with a oculus. Many with the PlayStation or the HTC one. I also barely know people that use Facebook. And many that are not willing to create a FB account for whatever reason. It's just anectotal. But I don't see how this walled garden will find any widespread use around here. Just as I know no one who uses Apples walled garden chats, simply because apple never reached a critical…

Yeah. Like sibling comment said. You are already in your own wild bubble. You’re taking your anecdotes and having them explain why people are or are not doing things in general. When in reality things like Facebook, Oculus, iMessage/FaceTime are all popular.

I must be living in the same alternate reality as the GP, then. Facebook and Whatsapp are commonly used around here, but the others hardly exist at all.

Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#188

Post by charlesju »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #166
gfodor wrote: post #146

It’s simple really, and most commenters don’t “get” what is going on with all this. Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication. VR and AR have the necessary capabilities to do so, and deliver social presence on par with face to face. With a fully immersive experience, you can feel like you…

Until we can see each other's faces in VR, this won't work for social presence. Shrinking everything down to contact lenses (even sunglasses get in the way of social contact) is likely to be beyond us for quite some while if ever. I'd rather not put something in my eye anyway. Further, VR does not work well for switching - you can't be in VR and scribble notes at the same time. AR might be an improvement, but not by…

https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1442201621266534402

Please read this, and then read up on why everyone is talking about web 3.0.

This isn't a phase of the metaverse that is going to be different because of screen and control technology, it's an ownership and control shift.

Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#189

Post by kibwen »

hakfoo wrote: post #89
Shank wrote: post #33

Conceptually speaking, the difference with AR/VR is that you can have a truly immersive experience, which really does give you more possibilities than just Second Life, which was always just a 3D game world on a 2D screen. The pitch from Meta and with AR/VR is that with the ability to use 3D space, you can actually turn Second Life-style virtual worlds into something useful with actual tangible benefits. For example,…

To me, the problem is finding situations where immersiveness actually adds value. I think for a lot of social interactions, it doesn't, or it offers rapidly diminishing value. This conversation would not be meaningfully better as a virtual/augmented reality 3D live chat. The Google Hangouts (or whatever it's called this week) meetings with my team at work would not be better either. I'm not even sure it would beat pl…

Note that Amazon already supports product listings with interactive 360 degree product visualizations. It's only a small step from there to full 3D modeled product renderings. That said, I can't say I would find it especially compelling to peruse a 3D model in VR as opposed to perusing it on a normal screen. Either way it just involves rotating our perspective around the rendering and observing it via the 2D planes of our eyes. I can imagine some small utility if I could accurately measure the dimensions of the product at arbitrary angles in VR, as a sort of freeform replacement for schematic diagrams, but that requires trust that the product listers will actually get the scale correct, and it would not be an overwhelmingly common use case.

Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

#190

Post by rudian »

Reality is that this is just Zuck yapping his mouth. Nobody cares nor will care about this, video calls will continue as they've always done, Second Life will stay niche, there's no AR until my phone makes me hallucinate.

We got a couple more decades at least for AR to happen.

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