271–280 of 381 posts
The metaverse is noise. The interesting long term stuff that will come out of this is computing more integrated into your whole life with AR. This is going to need a more networked, spatially aware, OS like abstraction than we’ve had to date. The scary part of that is FB making the play to own it and presumably all the data that can be harvested by being implicitly jacked into your entire life. Apple are presumably w…
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The point is not that meetings are not a good application, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of useful productivity stuff beyond that.[1] Also in person meetings are useful over a video call largely because there is lot of information from body language you can pick up being up close to someone. There is a lot of information on how someone breathes, moves or posture etc. AFAIK there is no good VR solution that is…
> Also in person meetings are useful over a video call largely because there is lot of information from body language you can pick up being up close to someone. There is a lot of information on how someone breathes, moves or posture etc. I keep hearing this but don't feel I've lost anything working fully remote for the last five years. Are there experiments proving that a call with high quality audio is so much worse…
When people asked me questions, they walked up to the whiteboard and pointed directly, and then scribbled on it to clarify. I felt a lot more connected when I was able to make direct eye contact and get backchannelling. Perhaps it was my perception, but I felt like it was a lot better for communication as a whole.
I'm sure you can replicate all of this stuff in Zoom or VR, but it sure is a lot more clunky and annoying.
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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 mult…
The ting is the "felling together" part is less dependent on the medium (real workd, audio, video, VR) but on the way the meeting is held. Video conferencing didn't fail because video conferencing is fundamentally bad but because: - meetings are often done in a fundamental bad way, where people don't have any "felling together" even is they sit physically in the same room. - people having bad microphones, the video p…
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 see this conflation happening all the time from metaverse enthusiasts, but the metaverse != VR. Would a high quality VR version of Zoom/Teams be awesome? Of course it would, it would be freaking amazing! But the “metaverse” ain't that, it's supposed to be a virtual universe (hence the name), where everything happens, including games, watching movies, etc. A gigantic MMORPG, containing every possible kind of online…
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Sure, the argument made by crypto people is that is a transitional condition and in a few decades society at large will in general consider information on blockchains (or their descendants) as authoritative in many situations.
Sure, I can understand the vision. I guess the more salient "why?" question is the one that still feels lacking to me. Current easy money aside, it's not clear why society as a whole would be willing to cast aside the last 250 years of physical ownership and financial infrastructure in exchange for digital ownership(?) and immutable ledgers with irrecoverable error conditions.
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I have owned land in Second Life continuously for probably ten years or more. Haven't been on recently but very familiar with what you are talking about. NSFW is a big part of it but by no means the only part. Meta has a very dominant position in VR headsets. All they have to do is add add a "teleport friend" button to message notifications inside of Oculus Quest 2 when you are in the default home environment, allow…
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…
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Right but the point the grandparent I was adding to, and also what I understand delecti is saying is roughly: Meta or a similar platform is an "entity who has sovereignty". For users to have a coherent experience in the platform, it may essentially be required that the platform exercises some decision-making power on what NFTs to respect and which not to. Do I get to bring in and use item X just because I say I own i…
I would agree a centralized authority like Facebook basically “owning” what gets blessed is a world where the promise of these technologies has not been met. The hope is that we can have a more egalitarian outcome where there are a variety of actors who align based on shared interests to agree on what contracts to recognize and confer benefits based on. Of course, one challenge with realizing this can be seen elsewhe…
To my layperson's view (this is def not my wheelhouse), either such an authority exists (even if it's a foundation backed by several "actors who align based on shared interests"), in which case we're going to be required to trust it so we may as well drop the overhead of the blockchain, or no such authority exists, and there's a potentially high degree of fragmentation among platforms recognizing different subsets of ownership (or identity, or canonicity of speech or whatever), in which case ... is it a metaverse or just a bunch of distinct rooms?
> There really won’t be another platform turnover to try to correct the error and disrupt the existing players as there has been for the last several computing platform changes.
What makes you say that with such apparent confidence?
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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 mult…
Video conferencing has certainly been wildly successful in actually getting (collaborative) work done - though in fact it is screen sharing that is the secret ingredient here. Would screen sharing in VR be any different? I guess 3D models or images could be shared usefully.
It is notable the difference between tele conferencing and video conferencing - and that difference is faces (and screensharing). Until VR can show faces, it is basically a tele conference with a puppet show.
My point about switching is that in VR you are completely immersed, so are limited to what the VR provides, whereas with a vid conference I can e.g. go make some coffee while still participating. I'm limited mainly by social convention, not the technology itself. The nature of modern work is we are at the centre of various tools and technologies (half of which are a bit broken) that we choreograph together to get useful stuff done. No VR system could hope to replicate it all.
Actually I'm currently working on a VR project (amongst other things), so these concerns are real and pertinent to me.
(As ever with engineering there is a tendency to focus on the what and the how, instead of the who and the why. Furthermore, people will use technology as they see fit, which might be quite different from how it's inventors intended or envisioned. To develop on this point, even the most 'non-technical' human is an accomplished tool user, and they won't be reading the manual anymore than they absolutely have to.)
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…
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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.