The metaverse is a dystopian nightmare – let’s build a better reality

There is a good reason to do something and there is a real reason.

Coming from Niantic, who is a proponent of AR, it seems like the good reason is to care about building a better reality, but I'm curious if anyone knows enough to comment on their 'real' reason?

Whenever a company describes their vision of "the metaverse" (or I guess "reality channels" in this case) it's always exceedingly vague and never really explains in concrete terms what sort of utility or entertainment a person would derive from it.

I guess it's just the latest vehicle to get investors or stockholders excited without needing to rely upon any work or logic beyond the unclear promise of technologies that themselves haven't even been proven out yet. (And this is coming from someone who does think VR is really cool -- with respect to some of the discrete, packaged, and targeted immersive experiences that are already available.)

I mean the real reason is clearly to inspire people to work for / with them on their projects, the last section is hardly subtle on this front.

It is just a hype cycle, yes.

Propose some use cases for it, preferably ones that involve lots of people throwing money at the people you're pitching to.

Then do the other end - pick a market segmentation and explain why they are going to feel dumb, fat and poor for not jumping in.

4 iterations later, it becomes apparent it has replaced first person shooters, is good for trying on clothes and sex with robots, and is the favored environment for low-end interviews.

Putting more flat screens atop the real world has lost it's luster for me.

I'm very much a fan of ubiquotous (& pervasive) computing, still as much of a torch for it as ever. But these days I tend to think more ambient, non-visual modalities & connecting the network fo devices is more interesting. Efforts like Web of Things standards (a web standard for exposing devices) and WebThings (a unrealted semantic-web powered iot engine spun out from Mozilla) talk to creating awareness & control over the seas of devices about us (& afar too). Systems like Eddystone/PhysicalWeb/Bluetooth-beacons provide ambient awareness of local systems & endpoints, and one day I hope people & interests too (that want to be so locally digitally available). These, to me, along with good interoperabile standards (like ActivityPub), feel like the seeds for a Rainbows End scenario, where comment trees hang in the world, where everything is annotateable.

But I tend to think these connective mediums are well served by the screens we put & pull from our pockets, served by watches & vibrations and bluetooth headsets.

I don't know what the metaverse might be. But back when ubicomp was younger, I remember being absolutely floored by Steve Mann piping his worn camera sensors over analog TV signal to an SGI box, processing it, and beaming it back to his immersive display. He was reprocessing reality, not simply overlaying digital atop it. I doubt there was all that much really going on on the SGI, but it filled me with the ideas of a world which was visually editable. And I think that's where we've seen little progress.

Some of the hololens & magic leap demos were very compelling... 5 years ago. First Person Shooter type things played in the living room. And there are a steady march of really good phone based demos of virtual objects dropped into a similar camera-view of the world. But really, we need to get much better at having digital systems ingesting the world about us, and we need to start unleashing human creativity that people can redraw & reimagine the physical world. We need procedural toolkits galore to re-simulate environments. An augmentative metaverse needs filters, well beyond what a photo filter is, requiring both that input of the world, and the flexible programmatic world-shaders we can orchestrate & lean on to rewrite the world, before it gets to our eyes.