81–90 of 381 posts
There are three “branches” of the metaverse concept today: 1. VR rebranded (Facebook’s approach) 2. a specific family of games that allow you to buy and own land/territory, mediated by the blockchain (see Bit.Country[1] as one of many examples) 3. a term used widely in crypto/web3 world to refer specifically to the fact that we can finally build networks that people can own (buy/sell but also control directly via pro…
Second 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…
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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…
But there is clubhouse (presuming it’s still popular?) which has turned strangers into friends but maybe that’s because of it being pure audio and minimal interface. It’s possible someone will create a similar popular “gameplay” in vr?
If 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…
meh. it's a fun conspiracy theory.
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They are spending insanely on r and d on this compared to companies their size. 10b a year.
honestly I am not sure how actually are they spending that kind of money. I dont see a ton of fb recruiters hiring for VR skills, I dont see a lot of training/certifications /open source libraries /platform Sdks for other devs etc that feels like $10B a year kind of budgets are behind VR/AR. That's a lot of money, Hard space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin which have big hardware expenses spend only 1-2 billon/y…
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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…
> Meta-not-Facebook I am going to start using this term to satisfy people that argue its not called Facebook anymore.
would be better, because in case of the Meta-not-Facebook, 'not' might be strong enough to remember that way.
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,…
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 playing a pen-and-paper RPG with friends over Discord and Roll20.
Now, there's two ways this could end up panning out:
1) The "metaverse" ends up sticking to the scenarios where immersive experiences add value. I'd expect this would be mostly gaming, media consumption, and some specific built-for-the-platform educational products.
2) We figure out new paradigms that make it worthwhile to replace current collaboration or communications tools.
What confuses me on point 2 is that I think we're going to have to basically invent new paradigms for "window management". The thing I'm picturing is doing a PowerPoint presentation in VR. We'd have people jostling for the best view, and whatever "immersive" metaphor for presenting is likely to be clunkier than a classic Zoom call where the slides are just walked through on one big window.
I'm not sure the 3D shopping model will come to meaningful fruition. We have plenty of retailers who can't even get text descriptions right, especially when it comes to huge catalogues. Are they really going to spend bazillions of dollars building accurate models, making sure the sizes track properly, etc?
My 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.
t. Worked more than 16 years in ad tech.