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The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

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Re: The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

#11

Post by g5095 »

kaetemi wrote: post #8

Any commercial company building a "metaverse" will to some extent just end up with another walled garden. Which, I suppose, goes against the ideals of a metaverse. Only a fully open source project could give the freedom to do anything in a virtual world. Something you can run yourself, fully modify, and connect to others. Then again, open source gaming isn't a very big scene. Something usable on this scale seems unli…

As someone who's been part of a number of communities in SecondLife for 15+ years, this is exactly the problem that platform has had in becoming THE metaverse.

Despite technically having everything required to tick that box, development is shackled to the funding capability of a single company, land values are extortionary considering the cost of server hosting these days ($300+ for a 'sim' a month, when they shard them up 100s to a server).

The solution has to be a set of standard protocols and interfaces that can be implemented by anyone, just as 'the web' was. Every time I see a 'Secondlife killer' come along I judge it's success at taking out the incumbent on it's openness, and I'm yet to see a real contender.

Re: The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

#12

Post by cblconfederate »

kaetemi wrote: post #8

Any commercial company building a "metaverse" will to some extent just end up with another walled garden. Which, I suppose, goes against the ideals of a metaverse. Only a fully open source project could give the freedom to do anything in a virtual world. Something you can run yourself, fully modify, and connect to others. Then again, open source gaming isn't a very big scene. Something usable on this scale seems unli…

There is opensimulator (open source second life server)

Re: The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

#13

Post by cblconfederate »

g5095 wrote: post #11
kaetemi wrote: post #8

Any commercial company building a "metaverse" will to some extent just end up with another walled garden. Which, I suppose, goes against the ideals of a metaverse. Only a fully open source project could give the freedom to do anything in a virtual world. Something you can run yourself, fully modify, and connect to others. Then again, open source gaming isn't a very big scene. Something usable on this scale seems unli…

As someone who's been part of a number of communities in SecondLife for 15+ years, this is exactly the problem that platform has had in becoming THE metaverse. Despite technically having everything required to tick that box, development is shackled to the funding capability of a single company, land values are extortionary considering the cost of server hosting these days ($300+ for a 'sim' a month, when they shard t…

Opensimulator exists

Re: The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

#15

Post by Animats »

kaetemi wrote: post #8

Any commercial company building a "metaverse" will to some extent just end up with another walled garden. Which, I suppose, goes against the ideals of a metaverse. Only a fully open source project could give the freedom to do anything in a virtual world. Something you can run yourself, fully modify, and connect to others. Then again, open source gaming isn't a very big scene. Something usable on this scale seems unli…

It exists. It's called Open Simulator.[1] Both server and clients are open source, and you can run your own simulator. It has more users than most of the federated chat systems. It's compatible with Second Life, but the server side is a completely new implementation. It has the usual problems of federated open-source systems - it's not well known, it's too complicated, and it's not well maintained. It does have respectable user counts. The biggest Open Simulator grid is run by a nonprofit. [2]

Second Life itself is rather open. Why this is so is interesting. Second Life isn't really run by Linden Labs. Linden Lab management is rather passive. They see themselves as a municipal government. Most things are run by land owners. You can buy virtual land, for which Linden Lab charges a fee for having it hosted. That's their main revenue stream. You can build things, and set up businesses. You can sublease. A few companies own large amounts of land and operate like real estate developers.

On your own land, you have considerable power over visitors. You can eject or ban them at will. Because of this, Second Life doesn't have in-world "moderators". There's a tiny "governance" team, and it deals more with land issues than user issues. There are some annoying people, but they get banned from popular spots and usually give up.

Advertising isn't a big thing. There are shops with signs, occasional billboards, and a web-based store. All the ads are for things useful within the virtual world, not real-world products.

So, while it's sort of a walled garden, it's not very. The client is open source, and more people run third-party clients than run the Linden Lab one.

[1] http://opensimulator.org

[2] https://www.osgrid.org/

Re: The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

#16

Post by gallegojaime »

jerf wrote: post #4

Alright, I smell a submarine PR campaign here. Who's trying to make "metaverse" happen and why? Some initial suggestions: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4... https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4... https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4... Although they could just be people trying to get ahead of the curve.

I've seen a few other links on these last weeks talking specifically about the 'metaverse', it doesn't seem implausible.

Re: The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

#17

Post by gallegojaime »

hprotagonist wrote: post #5
jerf wrote: post #4

Alright, I smell a submarine PR campaign here. Who's trying to make "metaverse" happen and why? Some initial suggestions: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4... https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4... https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4... Although they could just be people trying to get ahead of the curve.

Too late.

Posting on HN in work hours? Uncle Enzo will hear of this!

Re: The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

#18

Post by Animats »

g5095 wrote: post #11
kaetemi wrote: post #8

Any commercial company building a "metaverse" will to some extent just end up with another walled garden. Which, I suppose, goes against the ideals of a metaverse. Only a fully open source project could give the freedom to do anything in a virtual world. Something you can run yourself, fully modify, and connect to others. Then again, open source gaming isn't a very big scene. Something usable on this scale seems unli…

As someone who's been part of a number of communities in SecondLife for 15+ years, this is exactly the problem that platform has had in becoming THE metaverse. Despite technically having everything required to tick that box, development is shackled to the funding capability of a single company, land values are extortionary considering the cost of server hosting these days ($300+ for a 'sim' a month, when they shard t…

Actually, each full region (256m x 256 m) uses about one CPU and costs $350/month. Hundreds to one server, no. 16 on a 16 CPU server, yes.

The architecture is rather expensive to run. Operating cost is per region, not per user. Regions run 24/7 regardless of whether any user is in them. Trains continue to run, crops continue to grow, grazing animals graze, a few cars drive themselves around, traffic lights continue to change...

Improbable's Spatial OS tried a more flexible architecture, where regions were dynamically resized as users entered and left. It cost US$400 million to develop, was expensive to run, and all four games based on it shut down due to high costs.

A big seamless virtual world is a hard problem. Except for the voxel crowd (Roblox, Minecraft, Dual Universe) who seem to be good at scaling, at the cost of being blocky.

Re: The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

#19

Post by mattkevan »

titzer wrote: post #3

After you upload your brain, how do you pay them to keep running you?

You’ll get stuck on the equivalent of cheap shared hosting.

Try to think and you’ll crash from hitting memory limits. Hit your processor quota and you’ll be spun down for the rest of the month. Like a forgotten Wordpress install you’ll be ravaged with malware, only able to talk about cheap v1agra, frantically spamming all your contacts.

Re: The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

#20

Post by sceew »

jerf wrote: post #4

Alright, I smell a submarine PR campaign here. Who's trying to make "metaverse" happen and why? Some initial suggestions: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4... https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4... https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4... Although they could just be people trying to get ahead of the curve.

I think Matthew Ball on Twitter is responsible for the increased usage of "Metaverse" amongst investors, business strategists, etc.

He recently launched an ETF ($META) that indexes to "Metaverse" companies (Roblox, Unity, etc.).

I have always been pretty cynical about his takes and usage of "Metaverse." There's a lot of hand-waving and ted-talky grandstanding to make the "Metaverse" concept seem like something new, exciting and inevitable. But using "Metaverse" seems overly complicated, its just describing a large, centralized online community which isn't a new concept. World of Warcraft or Minecraft may have been the peak of the "Metaverse" so far, so it seems disingenuous to treat the "Metaverse" as something new and novel.

Kinda've stream of consciousness from me - but all this really seems like is someone with a consultant background applying frameworks and buzzwords to concepts that felt childish and unserious for so long (WoW, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc.), but now people are realizing that these companies and games can spit out serious cash, so they love someone who can package it together nicely through these frameworks and thought pieces. Boomers love this!

https://twitter.com/ballmatthew

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