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

nianticlabs.com

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

#101

Post by L_226 »

ay wrote: post #97
L_226 wrote: post #88

I built mirrorspace.net (beta up at https://app.mirrorspace.net/ ) which is a "mirror space" i.e. a virtual layer ontop of our normal physical space. Users can browse nearby landmarks (currently based on geolookup wikipedia entries) and also upload their own media. But the catch is, for anyone else to view your media and interact with it, they need to be within 50m of the upload location. This mechanic is meant to dr…

This is really cool even in its current form! Was very interesting to learn some new details about the local landmarks (center of Brussels). How did you determine the precise position on the map for the articles ? I have a long time toyed with the idea of notes-photos-locations-time-internet activity interspersed into a single environment, which would allow to find things by association. Having this onto a private ho…

Thanks! Actually wikipedia has already a geolocate param in the mediawiki API, and many articles have associated GPS coords.

A rather grim one I found in Sicily last year was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alitalia_Flight_4128, I could see the exact coordinates on the mirrorspace map where the plane went down...

I also think a hosted version, or secure (yeah I know) account for personal geospatial note type things would be useful; e.g. mark a location for a reminder to do something the next time you are nearby (store X has a sale, location Y has live music daily at 1300)

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

#102

Post by ay »

L_226 wrote: post #101
ay wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really cool even in its current form! Was very interesting to learn some new details about the local landmarks (center of Brussels). How did you determine the precise position on the map for the articles ? I have a long time toyed with the idea of notes-photos-locations-time-internet activity interspersed into a single environment, which would allow to find things by association. Having this onto a private ho…

Thanks! Actually wikipedia has already a geolocate param in the mediawiki API, and many articles have associated GPS coords. A rather grim one I found in Sicily last year was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alitalia_Flight_4128 , I could see the exact coordinates on the mirrorspace map where the plane went down... I also think a hosted version, or secure (yeah I know) account for personal geospatial note type things wo…

Wow, that’s cool! (and chilling for that flight article…)

I was thinking of an explicit personal instance (which may have selected shared components in a ballpark similar way as the open social does it), because the latest events with Apple triggered me to think again of a deaggregated personal device: a separate unit for mobile internet, a separate unit for GPS, a separate unit for camera, etc., all pushing the data to a “personal network cache NAS”, and replicating to the central personal server. This way the peripheral units can be made quite small, simple and modular, and the complicated logic can sit server side… I suppose it’s quite a drift from what you had as a use case, but FWIW :-)

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

#103

Post by L_226 »

ay wrote: post #102
L_226 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Actually wikipedia has already a geolocate param in the mediawiki API, and many articles have associated GPS coords. A rather grim one I found in Sicily last year was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alitalia_Flight_4128 , I could see the exact coordinates on the mirrorspace map where the plane went down... I also think a hosted version, or secure (yeah I know) account for personal geospatial note type things wo…

Wow, that’s cool! (and chilling for that flight article…) I was thinking of an explicit personal instance (which may have selected shared components in a ballpark similar way as the open social does it), because the latest events with Apple triggered me to think again of a deaggregated personal device: a separate unit for mobile internet, a separate unit for GPS, a separate unit for camera, etc., all pushing the data…

Hmmm yep, that is interesting. I am going down a similar route, but by replacing my phone with something that will become my primary computing device (either a pi-based cyberdeck, or something like the librem5). I want to effectively just carry around a SD card or small SSD with all my data, all the time. The peripheral to access this doesn't really matter to me. I never call anyone using cell networks, and only rarely use signal if I need voice/video chat which I do over wifi anyway. I guess I could also load English wikipedia onto it and directly run mirrorspace as localhost on my device...

The main blocker for me is that my partner wants to always be able to reach me in an emergency... haven't found a solution for that one yet.

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

#104

Post by Kye »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #99
hanniabu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> none of those people you're interacting with have any agency over those brands or IPs But they can with NFTs. This metaverse is currently being built on Ethereum.

You own an NFT of a Disney character, but that character is restricted to forbid performing the Vulcan salute, because that's from a different IP-verse. NFTs cannot be a fix for that. That's what's meant by not having agency.

The backlash from them trying to keep people from using a symbol that predates the IP it's often associated with would be interesting to watch.

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

#105

Post by visualradio »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #100
leppr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors With the prevalence of cleartext cloud-based workflows (Discord, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Github, ...) many people may already be living in a similar reality.

You just don't enter private thoughts into such systems. The line is pretty clear. The only problem is that if you want to WfH, it becomes nearly mandatory to establish side-channels for unofficial, non-company discussion between co-workers to replace neutral spaces in the office like the break room or cafeteria.

I think the only long term solution is to establish or work for a cooperative which does not patent ideas or which only patents ideas defensively to protect the free use of ideas for its members, to establish public banks, to levy distributive taxes on private land and natural resource holders.

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

#106

Post by visualradio »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #100
leppr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors With the prevalence of cleartext cloud-based workflows (Discord, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Github, ...) many people may already be living in a similar reality.

You just don't enter private thoughts into such systems. The line is pretty clear. The only problem is that if you want to WfH, it becomes nearly mandatory to establish side-channels for unofficial, non-company discussion between co-workers to replace neutral spaces in the office like the break room or cafeteria.

Break room and cafeterias can be bugged, company phones and email addresses can be bugged or monitored. With externally controlled neural implants I'm not sure if there is any means of avoidance, the majority of the human race may simply end up as slaves, to provide extra brain matter and creative visual processing cores to a corporate computer network.

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

#107

Post by kmeisthax »

ursugardaddy wrote: post #78
kmeisthax wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The metaverse has a consistent definition - at least, if you read Snow Crash. It's just not what any company would actually want to bring to the market. 3D game worlds have value, open systems have value, but in completely opposite and contradictory ways. The value is in the entertainment of playing a well-built one, which means there has to be monetization and centralization. In other words, they have "production va…

I'm really not convinced that what we're communicating on isn't already the metaverse

HTML and HTTP are open standards, but they're not the metaverse. The "metaverse" is supposed to be an open standard for interoperable 3D game worlds.

You could build a 3D game world inside of a browser, and people have been doing that since the 90s. We've had multiple different open and proprietary technologies that allow this: VRML, Java applets, 3D Groove SX/GX, Shockwave 3D, Flash Stage3D, WebGL, and WebGPU. However, most game worlds built this way are less like "websites but in 3D" and more like Facebook. Yes, Facebook uses HTML, but it's not part of "the web" - most of it's content requires a login and can't be scraped or searched by external sites.

An actual "metaverse built on the open web" would be possible; in the same way that comment sections, trackbacks, Gravatar, and so on made blogging into a shared space decades ago. You would need standards for a whole bunch of problems unique to 3D game worlds, including presence, chat, avatars, asset inventories, and so on. All of these would have to also be integrated with existing content-management systems (WordPress, Drupal, etc), which would also have to serve up a viewer application that actually handled our "web metaverse" thing (in the same way that browsers don't need to know about comment sections, they just need to know how to submit a form). That in and of itself has significant UX problems: maybe, you go on one particular metaverse site, and suddenly you have entirely different player movement from the last site you were on, because it loaded a different viewer.

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

#108

Post by hanniabu »

cloudking wrote: post #77
hanniabu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m surprised there aren’t more “metaverse for crypto” initiatives There's a few projects working in this space, but individual components. The NFT space will converge onto what I believe will be the winning metaverse vision. Participants own the IP, the land, the characters, the tools, the weapons, etc.

https://decentraland.org/

Another cool one is https://somniumspace.com/

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

#109

Post by spywaregorilla »

horrified wrote: post #86
spywaregorilla wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to gripe about "Ernest Cline's" Ready Player One. There was an element of dystopia to it, yes, but it was only the movie adaptation that came away with the takeaway that the virtual world was bad. In the movie they decide to add in the protagonist making the executive decision to shut down the virtual world on a couple weekdays or something. That pissed me off. That world was people's livelihoods. This…

I guess one problem with the virtual world in RPO is that it is centralized, and therefore people are fighting each other to control it.

You'd think the creator would have thought of something like that, but nah, he wanted to leave it to the coolest teen. Or, in the movie version, the teen most able to identify weirdly personal details from the author's private life.

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

#110

Post by selfhoster11 »

visualradio wrote: post #106
selfhoster11 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just don't enter private thoughts into such systems. The line is pretty clear. The only problem is that if you want to WfH, it becomes nearly mandatory to establish side-channels for unofficial, non-company discussion between co-workers to replace neutral spaces in the office like the break room or cafeteria.

Break room and cafeterias can be bugged, company phones and email addresses can be bugged or monitored. With externally controlled neural implants I'm not sure if there is any means of avoidance, the majority of the human race may simply end up as slaves, to provide extra brain matter and creative visual processing cores to a corporate computer network.

I would be surprised if break rooms or cafeterias could be legally bugged without displaying a prominent notice where I live.

That said, I totally agree about company phones and email addresses - those are under employer control and so could never be trusted, which is why the side-channel would be something like an unofficial WhatsApp group of a few co-workers who know each other well. Brain implants are not part of the threat model just yet, and I was sharing my observations purely in the context of my own recent experience.

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