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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?

#331

Post by herbst »

dvh wrote: post #290
herbst wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This so much! I earned money in second Life. Back then I exchanged it all to bitcoin and lost it gambling, but the fact that SL was rewarding my real efforts in real world money was amazing. Investments I did in current projects (ex. Sandbox) also doing well. Facebook is going to have nothing of that. Money will flow into one direction only and it essentially never be more than an VR entertainment hub. I honestly fee…

So basically all Facebook need to do is allow people to earn money from day one.

It's a lot more than that. It's porn, gambling, freedom. 3 things Facebook will never allow.

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

#332

Post by herbst »

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.

Maybe for your bubble. You may realize not everyone is living in america ;)

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

#333

Post by EdwardDiego »

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.

There used to be a lot of money to be made in designing scriptable Second Life dragon dicks.

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

#334

Post by Ekaros »

snarf21 wrote: post #175
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…

Yeah, I think the main use case for VR will be just be porn with connected devices. I do think there is some ability to do a VR-ish remote tele-presence use case. Think Google Street View data capture for walking the Great Wall of China. So real life data used to power a VR world you can explore as you wish.

There are reasonable industrial and commercial uses for VR. Product design, architecture, interior design. Where VR is actually a superior way to virtualize the product. Still, most of the work will happen on as it does now.

I don't see any reason why I would want to have VR meeting. I can see point with in person and white board, but VR? Not really...

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

#335

Post by ENGNR »

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…

You say that chat is not better in VR than on a 2D screen

I’m just curious, have you ever actually used it? Caught up and had a beer with an old buddy. There’s a reason chat is currently the killer app for VR

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

#336

Post by shetill »

Feel like they're solving problem that doesn't exist. Who in their right mind would bother with VR facebook when it's something that mostly grandparents use to occasionally see family pics. Honestly if facebook disappeared tomorrow I wouldn't even notice.

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

#337

Post by krageon »

mherrmann wrote: post #40
legostormtroopr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the most dystopian thing about this - the best, most aspiration use for VR they can show case is… meetings, but in VR.

What's wrong with that? That meetings are necessary in modern working life is a fact. So might as well have products and services that make them better on some axes. And it doesn't necessarily have to be just office meetings either. University lectures or tutorials this way also sound pretty cool to me. You could have a student from Taiwan, the US, Germany and Sweden sit in the same classroom and interact, without ha…

> That meetings are necessary in modern working life is a fact.

No, the fact is that they happen. Whether or not they are necessary is a matter of opinion.

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

#338

Post by littlestymaar »

gfodor wrote: post #274
littlestymaar wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Frankly there are like 50 working definitions for “metaverse” at this point so it’s not really worth the energy of trying to unpack it as a way to ground an argument.

The relevant definition in this discussion is the one described by Zuckerberg in the Meta presentation video.[1] Have a look a the 4' mark, the only missing part from my comment is the virtual car travel. (But there's “chose your virtual outfit” instead).

[1]: https://fb.watch/98Vt421zcF/

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

#339

Post by gfodor »

Nasrudith wrote: post #298
gfodor wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly last man standing phenomenon after a few decades of turmoil unwinding present day nation states.

Sounds like the same fallacy as preppers getting ripped off buying Krugerrands at a premium to keep value safe after a complete collapse of all civilization. When it is like putting platforms on the boughs of a tree to stay safe when the trunk is cut and felled. It fundamentally misunderstands the order of dependencies.

I think that’s actually it’s own fallacy: presuming that one can predict the dependencies and survivorship of various elements of society in a scenario where one or two larger ones go through a disruptive transition. This is a contradiction in many cases, because if you could know how such a disruption was actually going to play out, it would be unlikely to actually happen. If our kids are growing up in a world that is fundamentally different than ours in terms of sovereignty, it is very hard to know what the side effects of that transition will be.

You’re presuming a scenario where the structure of government changes is the same as a civilizational collapse. That’s not a given.

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

#340

Post by gfodor »

abeppu wrote: post #277
gfodor wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're perhaps escaping the reasonable scope for a thread like this, but can you point to something that describes a potential version of "the metaverse" where no such authority exists in any form? 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…

I think the web and Internet have some centralization obviously but they are good counterexamples to a theoretical corporate monopoly or duopoly over a computing medium.

As far as “the final platform” bit, it’s an opinion but if you presume we get to a point where most humans are having their auditory and visual systems being overridden by a hardware/software computing stack, it’s hard to think of a breakout event from that that is analogous to eg PC -> mobile. There will be competition and iteration, but overall the inputs and outputs to that system are (body state) -> (photons, sound) and that seems like it won’t really change for a long time, if ever, so harder to disrupt at the root.

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