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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?

#201

Post by elliekelly »

rswail wrote: post #142

I remember in the earlier web days, boo.com tried to get fashion on the web, before people had high bandwidth and the attempt failed (and for lots of other mismanagement as well). But now, people shop online all the time. The technology caught up to the point where people don't go to physical shops. VR/AR builds on that to allow for a more realistic display. So that's a natural extension that will come into play. The…

There’s definitely a “ripeness” factor to monetizing new technology. There were tons of grocery and delivery start ups during the dot com era, too. They never got traction because they were too early.

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

#202

Post by gfodor »

charlesju wrote: post #188
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…

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.

These trends are converging but the most valuable contribution of HMDs imo is remote social presence. It’s not their only contribution, and the economic revolution of web3 would have happened without HMDs imo.

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

#203

Post by wy35 »

tremon wrote: post #181
long_time_gone wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Instagram acquisition price (2012): $1B Instagram projected ad revenue (2021, projected): $18B

They do more than just buy apps. We shouldn't underestimate Meta -- they can do to Oculus what they did to Instagram.

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

#204

Post by gfodor »

twobitshifter wrote: post #197
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.

I agree I’ve been working in and out of VR for the last 8 years or so and it was the first thing I saw that made me question the assumption that VR was the only possible solution to this problem.

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

#205

Post by topkai22 »

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've for years argued that the iPhone didn't succeed because of the technology (or at least technology in solutions had been sufficient for a while). It succeeded because it was an iPod a phone- a logical progression of something people were familar with and loved.*

VR suffers from a number of technological problems still (eye strain, etc) but a major issue is how much a departure it feels like from other things we do.

* Apple also utilized the proved wild popularity of iPods to wield tremendous power over its carriers and partners to keep them from interfering with the experience. Other smart phones of the were sold with carrier firmware mods that kept you doing things like transfering photos unless you paid the carrier a dollar per photo.

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

#206

Post by ravenstine »

tjpnz wrote: post #152
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…

>Overall, I think Silicon Valley is overestimating people's willingness to wear headsets and paddles for extended periods of time. I think the issue is that a significant portion of the population will have issues consuming the content and not ending up with eye strain or getting sick. It was one of the factors which killed off the resurgence of 3D in the 2010s and VR headsets suffer from many of the same problems. B…

To be fair, after motion pictures was initially invented, audiences are legitimately frightened by things that were happening on-screen. Yet here we are today with over 100 years of cinematic history and nearly everyone watching some form of entertainment at home.

I have a feeling that future generations will simply know how to mentally process VR in a way that fully grown adults can't easily adapt to.

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

#207

Post by skinnymuch »

tremon wrote: post #187
skinnymuch wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You named Facebook and WhatsApp as being popular. Of course everything popular won’t be popular in your anecdotal experience. The difference is the OP dismissed a bunch of popular stuff without exception.

It is interesting you know many people with Playstation and HTC VR but none with Oculus.

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

#208

Post by TillE »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #193
charlesju wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> played up their cool factor

C'mon. This is very "rich nerds desperately trying to be cool", it's not an actual thing that normal people will ever care about. We already have status symbols that you can show off in the real world.

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

#209

Post by wy35 »

The comments here are much, much more pessimistic than I expected. Yes, AR/VR is still a novelty, and it has been for a while. However, anything innovative started off as being dismissed as toys [0]. VR tech has improved immensely from its inception, but there is a gap -- people need a reason to use it beyond its initial wow factor. The "metaverse" is the proposed solution for the gap.

[0]: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

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

#210

Post by gfodor »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #177
gfodor wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there is a study that was done on PC rift hardware that showed it was already competitive with f2f on most measures of social presence except for facial expressions (which makes sense, given the lack of facial tracking.) The bottleneck for adoption is probably mostly about UX, comfort, norms, marketing, etc. Not raw capabilities.

Laughable - that's like saying "this cake has 80% of the required ingredients, we're almost there with the exception of flour and sugar". The uncanny valley on the raw capabilities of these current products is a grand canyon. Holodeck it ain't.

Not really, I’d imagine if you ran the same trial today with face and eye tracking HMDs you would match f2f social presence scores. Wouldn’t surprise me if the study has already been done. You’re confusing graphics quality and realism with just the subset of what is needed to hit face to face social presence. That bar is much lower: high resolution, low latency, good tracking. The actual GPU power beyond that doesn’t put a ceiling since conveying non verbal communication doesn’t require expensive rasterization.
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