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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?

#191

Post by kibwen »

kristiandupont wrote: post #44
noduerme wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty skeptical it'll ever take off. Having tried to hang around in the Oculus Go spaces early on, it was pretty clear no one really had a great reason for being there. You'd sit around a badly rendered bonfire and hear people talking, sometimes interestingly, but it had about the same level of interest as getting on a CB and talking to strangers. There are two kinds of people you can meet in VR: Friends and str…

>Friends, you can meet privately if you live close to one another. If you don't, I guess this could be interesting? I don't really see myself using it but I am so old fashioned that I prefer my laptop over my phone so I get that the world doesn't always agree with me.

My friends are far-flung and we meet privately in our Discord. We have an audio channel, and anyone who's free hops into it at their leisure. VR wouldn't add much there; to take advantage of it would require us to look at each other, which precludes doing an actual activity like playing a game together.

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

#192

Post by nkingsy »

jostmey wrote: post #148
ravenstine wrote: post #136

I would not take marketing around things like VR and AR very seriously because nobody knows whether any of them will catch on, and their track record isn't very good. Oculus, for the most part, is a niche. A lot of people have an Oculus but it's primarily for games, and it hasn't reached the level where everyone's gotta have one . Only time can tell whether Metaverse has something that Second Life did not. My guess i…

Palm pilots didn’t become pervasive. So you could have applied that argument to iPhones. It is a matter of if the technology is ready. When it is, it will take off

I feel like most people got it as soon as they saw the iPhone in action.

A similar “you’ll know it when you see it” applies here I think.

For iPhone it was “everyone has a phone, and now that phone can give them turn by turn directions anywhere. Everyone will want this.”

For vr, there’s no incumbent device to disrupt. Glasses are the obvious choice, but they’re not in the same category.

I don’t think there’s room for more than one digital device that people carry everywhere, which means vr will need to disrupt the phone again.

Carrying that to logical conclusions, apple seems like the best bet to pull this off.

Facebook making this move seems very strange. Building tools for a gold rush that isn’t possible yet or even in sight. I’d imagine it’s more about recruiting than anything.

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

#193

Post by TigeriusKirk »

charlesju wrote: post #184
delecti wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

BAYC is light years beyond everything else in the NFT space. The way they've built a community and played up their cool factor to make you want to be a part of it all is impressive.

Their parties this last week in NYC for NFT week pretty much locked them as the model to strive for. I don't know if others can do it, but they've set the standard.

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

#194

Post by L_226 »

Personally I think the "metaverse" will not be a thing until climate change makes going outside impossible or at least extremely uncomfortable for a large percentage of the global population.

Covid did increase teleconferencing software usage (Meet, Zoom etc) - but I think that work-related (i.e. forcible) usages can only go so far. Online education solutions were lacking this time around, but I think next time there might be better options that end up "sticking".

Imagine a holistic lockdown going on for years at a stretch, and your only possible respite is to explore some virtual worlds, or meet others in an MMO style setting.

Something I would personally enjoy is wikipedia converted to a VR "Library of Alexandria" - which you can browse at will, or take guided tours, or attend lectures by subject matter experts, or just chat in general with others who are browsing the same topics as you. Just need to write an engine that converts the wiki graph into some rooms....

EDIT: this is not bad: https://wikiverse.io/

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

#195

Post by bingohbangoh »

ravenstine wrote: post #136

I would not take marketing around things like VR and AR very seriously because nobody knows whether any of them will catch on, and their track record isn't very good. Oculus, for the most part, is a niche. A lot of people have an Oculus but it's primarily for games, and it hasn't reached the level where everyone's gotta have one . Only time can tell whether Metaverse has something that Second Life did not. My guess i…

Oculus devices have this strange effect. The first time I got one, it was a total "wow." Then I put it on the shelf after a week and never touched it again.

Talking around, I don't think I'm the only one.

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

#196

Post by abeppu »

charlesju wrote: post #186
roywiggins wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who arbitrates which NFTs-based claims are respected versus not? How does one decide authenticity? And once you have an answer to such a question (relying on some preexisting system of ownership in the real world), then why should we care about tokens?

E.g. if someone _does_ try to create an NFT for the Mona Lisa, our ability to refute / accept its authenticity is premised on the knowledge that in the real world, the French Republic itself owns the work. How would we trust that the keys associated with minting the NFT were controlled by the French Republic? Presumably we'd need some public statement of attestation from an official French government body, and perhaps with the concurrence of others, to have confidence that this wasn't a rogue intern at the Ministry of Culture, or a hacker that got control to some official accounts or pages.

But applying this logic to "avatars" seems to be either broken or creepy. Who has the authority to say that you are or aren't you?

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

#197

Post by twobitshifter »

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…

If that’s the plan, Google is well ahead of Facebook for recreating presence with their starline demo. That gives you body language eye contact etc without the big headset and paddles - and you’re still able to interact with your real world environment.

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

#198

Post by psychlops »

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…

I have a feeling that part of social presence will require absolute privacy among participants. Once we see permanently recorded leaks of these social conversations, there will be a halt of adoption.

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

#199

Post by egypturnash »

This time it’s being pitched by a company who’s expanded about as far as they can across the existing internet, with the goal of replacing it with a new 3d world where everything happens, and where they get a cut of every transaction.

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

#200

Post by gfodor »

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…

What you’re posting here is “common knowledge”, but it is actually in conflict with social presence research. VR beats video conferencing even without any facial tracking, and the abject failure of video conferencing in the pandemic to replace most of the feeling of face to face communication should be enough to convince people there is merit to the studies that have been done showing it scores poorly.

In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment. So there is no deficit there. I think you haven’t tried these things before so you are just speculating.

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