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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?

#301

Post by Nasrudith »

tomc1985 wrote: post #229
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.

Yes let's crystalize greed and avarice into our brave new virtual meta world thing How about a virtual world of no ownership? Why must we give the wealthy yet another venue to lord their status over us?

Like the answer to all of the juvenile notions of "the rich" - because they are the ones making, running, and maintaining the goddamned servers in question!

NFTs are dumb but so is the concept of no ownership in a way that conflates definitions so.

If it is popular to have say a World Tree in a pool as your spawn point and said map is a popular one you would still have instance ownership even if the map itself is free software. Having your own instance would be found preferrable to most compared to a common flooded one with millions clipping through each other and trolls rampant.

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

#302

Post by Nasrudith »

tomc1985 wrote: post #294
gfodor wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who want to create works that can be infinitely copied, will. People who want to create works that have various kinds of cultural norms imposing scarcity, will. There is no “fight”, it’s just saying that you’d prefer less options for people to choose how to expend their creative energy. Nobody is stopping a person from turning the knob all the way to “infinite free copies,” but the idea here is to make a knob…

While they permit infinite copies, the ownership bit strips away potential egalitarianism. Scarcity needs to be stripped and not an option. There shouldn't be a knob that allows one to select 'infinite copies', that should be the default. And ownership should either be collective or none at all. Permitting ownership enables an unnecessary layer of stratification that humanity is best without, in a rare environment th…

You don't get to decide that. Your prejudices and carefully bonsaie gardened imperatives about how you think the world should work be do not change that fact any more than the tantrums in congresses and parliaments demanding encryption that doesn't work for "bad guys". It is fundamentally about information and its shapes.

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

#304

Post by gfodor »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #299
gfodor wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It feels like you're just moving goalposts by defining some arbitrary metric of "f2f social presence scores". It doesn't really matter how much any individual test does against these "scores" if your average person walks away feeling "That felt nothing like a face to face meeting I'm used to having with actual, live humans."

You’re just arguing at this point. The scores I’m talking about are not arbitrary, there are a few standardized measures used in social presence research to attempt to make apples to apples comparisons between communications tools attempting to compete with f2f. The point is that the scores people give are literally asking users to convey their feeling that the experience met the baseline of face to face, or not, along various dimensions. You sound like you have an axe to grind, and aren’t actually looking to understand anything new here.

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

#305

Post by DigitallyFidget »

I think this "metaverse" concept is going to turn into yet another VRChat clone and flop. Sansar is a great example, made by Linden Lab. The problem I see is that it fails to have a demand for it to exist. There will not be an emergent userbase that will flock to it. There's already alternatives. VRChat, NeosVR, Sansar, and others I'm not even aware of. Anyone with VR already knows of VRChat, or isn't the type to care or be interested. So my question is this: How is it going to be an effective VRChat killer? How is it going to make people switch from a massively established community and virtual world that's known and enjoyed by so many people? How is it going to compete as a (probably) VR-Only against a platform (VRChat) that allows both pancake (flat monitor) and VR modes?

I feel like the concept is pure hype with a trivial amount of userbase interest (at best). They're late to the party. I don't see it as anything except a failure in waiting. Secondlife is still holding up to this day, since its creation in 2003. Try and figure out why SecondLife is still around and you may see why I see no future for this "metaverse". The only way to bring users is to have users and content, and the only way to bring content is to have users, and they don't have the users. I don't know a single person who is looking forward to it. Of all the social chat groups I am in, it's come up in only one, and the overwhelming response was just pure negativity about it sounding dumb, being a waste of money, and a failure in the making.

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

#306

Post by gfodor »

indymike wrote: post #287
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…

> Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence When we have Star Trek's transporters, we can achieve "social presence". Until then, you can have "this is cool". There is a real problem with VR: it requires way more focus and attention that being live, in person. Where VR does shine is shared experiences you can't have in real life. Those shared experiences ar…

No, you don’t need transporters to archive social presence, this is a specific measure that is quantifiable to a large degree via standardized surveys and measurements. Doesn’t require transporters, just the ability to deliver the feeling of unmediated communication. VR gets closer than any other tool I know of on this specific measure, though the recent google work on their magic light field window may also be able to compete with face to face.

Note this has nothing to do with photo realism, seeing the physical form of people, or cool immersive environments. It’s the feeling of unmediated communication.

I suspect you haven’t actually tried hanging out with your kids in VR on a reasonable setup when they are physically far away from you. I’d suggest trying it to get a more concrete view on what is probably going to happen with regards to physical co-locality and it’s value prop.

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

#307

Post by gfodor »

umvi wrote: post #283
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'll believe it when I see it. I think most people will find the cost of strapping on headsets to be greater than benefits of the social presence it provides

For a given headset there is an activation cost and presumed benefit that gets someone to use it. The activation costs will continue to trend downward as passthrough AR gets deployed and size/weight goes down, among other things, and the presumed benefits will go up as cultural norms start to interface with this technology and more and more applications come online.

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

#308

Post by ghaff »

buu700 wrote: post #250
gfodor wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the headsets are a distraction, the way to think about this is there are three distinct tech tracks: - full photonic override (HMDs -> passthrough visors (lynx-r is a half step) -> passthrough swim goggles -> contact lenses) - partial photonic override (HoloLens -> AR glasses -> contact lenses) - magic windows (google’s thing) They all have trade offs but the first track in particular it is an error to look at c…

Rather than contact lenses, how plausible would it be to project an image into someone's eyes from a distance? As in you'd have an external VR unit that's as bulky as needed to handle face tracking, photonic override, etc. without any direct physical contact or uncomfortable accessories. Does that kind of tech sound further or closer than contact lenses, or would it be so different as to be hard to say?

There was some pro type contact lens technology in a talk at Hot Chips but nowhere near prime time yet. Saw a thread. Forget if it was here or Twitter.

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

#309

Post by tomc1985 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #302
tomc1985 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While they permit infinite copies, the ownership bit strips away potential egalitarianism. Scarcity needs to be stripped and not an option. There shouldn't be a knob that allows one to select 'infinite copies', that should be the default. And ownership should either be collective or none at all. Permitting ownership enables an unnecessary layer of stratification that humanity is best without, in a rare environment th…

You don't get to decide that. Your prejudices and carefully bonsaie gardened imperatives about how you think the world should work be do not change that fact any more than the tantrums in congresses and parliaments demanding encryption that doesn't work for "bad guys". It is fundamentally about information and its shapes.

> You don't get to decide that.

Such is the nature of idealism. It is a shame we allow a world of plenty to artificially lock up value so a few people can feel better than others

Alternatively, why is a piece of data not allowed to just be? You can see this everywhere, even outside the digital world and in the realm of the mind. An idea is never allowed to stand on its own merits, we always have to attach our bullshit culture to it

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

#310

Post by ChildOfChaos »

I think that is only one part of the metaverse, which will likely floop or at least struggle, the real metaverse is still further away and that is when things will be more interesting.

Like AR, basically getting rid of phones and a lot of computers and integrating digital into our real world, rather than just having avatars moving around in a space.

I'm talking about, putting on a set of AR glasses to watch TV, instead of having an actual TV, this way you can watch movies, your GPS not being google maps on your phone but in your glasses that point you in which direction to go.

The Metaverse is basically what Google Glass was trying to be, but will include a lot of other tech as well.

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