It's popped up again because they made a movie out of Ready Player One, so now lots of people are talking about the VR immersive world concept after watching that movie.
Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
51–60 of 381 posts
Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
#52Earlier 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.
Well, or you can meet privately on Zoom, or in VR if you prefer to see fake bodies instead of actual faces. I mean. My friends from around the country have a Zoom poker night every week or two which we started during the pandemic. I'd rather just see their ugly mugs and their kids in the background than sit in a fake room with a bunch of cartoon avatars.
Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
#53Second Life required you were at least 18 at one point. It was meant more for social gatherings and meeting spots and I think (though I'm not 100%) that they shifted toward "virtual" office spaces with a focus on community building and digital trade using real-life currency. The metaverse, as I understand it, is just Facebook Games but in VR, for kids and bored adults. I think the outcome will be the same, though. I…
I'm shocked people are taking "Meta" at face value. To me it's a way to signal to outsiders that Facebook is still cool and hip. That's it. Now when recruiting they can play the Meta-not-Facebook angle. Now if they can pad earnings calls with the amazing success the metaverse is seeing (so what if it's losing us money, that's the future!) - It's like an inverse Alphabet. Where Alphabet silently serves as an umbrella…
They are spending insanely on r and d on this compared to companies their size. 10b a year.
Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
#54My question with the metaverse concept is always, "Why? What's the point?"
I can think of two parties that have their own answers:
1) A certain group of people who like computers and grew up reading sci-fi think it would be cool; some even tell themselves it's very important, but for vague reasons that they can't really articulate
2) Centers of capital are interested in it as yet another platform for consumption, attention-capturing, and rent-seeking
I think Zuckerberg is both. But I'm not convinced that society at large has any real motivation to buy into something like this, unless the sheer novelty ends up being powerful enough to rope people in.
Note that a world without a "metaverse" still has a place for VR/AR. Having a complete, interconnected virtual world is not a prerequisite for all the utilities and entertainment that that hardware technology can be used for. And to me it just feels like an incredibly unnecessary layer on top, which serves no real purpose to anyone outside of those first two groups.
Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm shocked people are taking "Meta" at face value. To me it's a way to signal to outsiders that Facebook is still cool and hip. That's it. Now when recruiting they can play the Meta-not-Facebook angle. Now if they can pad earnings calls with the amazing success the metaverse is seeing (so what if it's losing us money, that's the future!) - It's like an inverse Alphabet. Where Alphabet silently serves as an umbrella…
They are spending insanely on r and d on this compared to companies their size. 10b a year.
Their market cap has risen over 70B since the announcement, so I think they'll be ok
(Yes I know market cap != war chest, but expenditure on Meta is nothing compared to the "soft power" it provides FB)
Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
#56My question with the metaverse concept is always, "Why? What's the point?" I can think of two parties that have their own answers: 1) A certain group of people who like computers and grew up reading sci-fi think it would be cool; some even tell themselves it's very important, but for vague reasons that they can't really articulate 2) Centers of capital are interested in it as yet another platform for consumption, att…
You wrote the exact same thing I wanted to write. I still haven't got a satisfactory answer to that question though.
Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Well, or you can meet privately on Zoom, or in VR if you prefer to see fake bodies instead of actual faces. I mean. My friends from around the country have a Zoom poker night every week or two which we started during the pandemic. I'd rather just see their ugly mugs and their kids in the background than sit in a fake room with a bunch of cartoon avatars.
The photo realistic avatars they showed off change this. They were impressive - still in research stage, but it’s not just a cartoon.
Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
#58My question with the metaverse concept is always, "Why? What's the point?" I can think of two parties that have their own answers: 1) A certain group of people who like computers and grew up reading sci-fi think it would be cool; some even tell themselves it's very important, but for vague reasons that they can't really articulate 2) Centers of capital are interested in it as yet another platform for consumption, att…
I have a similar take on how VR lets you show ads much beyond a rectangular screen, so plausibly commands higher ad revenue if monetised. FB needs to grow the pie bigger: the user growth is flatlining.
Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
#59If you strap enough rockets to a pig, it will fly. If you throw enough cash at a problem, it will be "solved". I remember google wave. Remember that? The noise it made when it came out. What a mess. And then we got slack and discord and we must admit it somewhat solves the same ideas. So I don't know. We might very well be in VR goggles in 10 years surrounded by 25 virtual screens, 5 notification systems and parallel…
Google wave was largely about real time collaboration.
Most of those ideas live on Google docs , SharePoint and notion and other tools. Am not sure how discord or slack solves the same ideas.
it was a hard problem to solve especially back then CRDTs were not baked in to any out of box large scale db, however it wasn't premature .
To me it always looked like an experimental product from which mature product took the good parts, no different from Gmail incorporating ideas from Inbox
Re: Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?
#60Second 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.