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The metaverse is bullshit

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Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#161
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You can make a low end VR headset out of a $100 smartphone and a $5 plastic box" Have you ever tried that? Smart phones as VR are extremely disorientating and the latency of the gyro makes it unusable. I've got an Oculus Quest and it's amazing how well it works using the 4 camera vision-system instead of a gyro. What they were demonstrating in the meta-verse was facial-tracking attached to VR headsets, which is su…

I agree other than facial tracking being super expensive or not commercially available, because you can get it right now[1]. [1] https://www.vive.com/us/accessory/facial-tracker/ & https://www.hp.com/us-en/vr/reverb-g2-vr-headset-omnicept-ed...

Woah that's cool, I stand corrected. It's interesting they would demonstrate that as cutting edge research in the metaverse keynote then.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re seeing only the first iteration of NFTs. Gaming can be interesting. Like if WoW had some unique Legendaries in NFT form I think that would be interesting and lucrative. I’m not sure if the incentive is there for existing games because you’re giving away control of the economy. But for upstarts they can use this as a way to get players to try their game instead since you could maybe sell some of the items for re…

What on earth does the NFT part add here? WoW can add unique, auctionable items at any time using their existing tech. It's already a centralised platform, so decentrilisation doesn't add much...

A number of NFT promoters have made the argument that other video games could support the WoW NFT and then that content would be portable across those games!!!

Okay, but none do, and none will, and any other video game that did code in a substantially similar functionality would simply sell the same content in their own game, there's no benefit to the company to spend the time and money to make the content and not get compensated for it especially given radically different content architectures, visual styles, levels of detail, physics, object-player interactivity, etc. You can tell this is true, because they could already make it interoperable now and they don't -- like it's entirely possible that Marvel could sell "buy the Spider-Man game and get Spider-Man costumes in every other game he's a crossover character, across all platforms" and they... absolutely don't do this!

But also this vision is predicated on there being a small number of canonical NFT brands, when in reality you can open up Grand Theft Auto Online and there are literally tens of thousands of items made for the game. So if there's 10,000 items made for GTA Online and 50,000 items made for the Sims Series, then interoperability means that Square Enix needs to add 60,000 items to Final Fantasy to support subsidizing the NFT marketplace for the other two games? Or else you sit around trying to import your Mercedes Hood Ornament NFT from Forza into Mortal Kombat 13 and it tells you "hey, we don't support that one! Or that one! Or that one! Or that one!"

And you can tell this is true because Nintendo already has a system for this called Amiibo where you buy little figurines with fungible codes that putatively can work in any game that supports them. And 99% of games on Switch don't support any, the ones that support any only support 1 or 2, and only one game supports more than 10 or so, and it's a crossover fighting game called Smash Bros.

You might say, okay, but Amiibo are finnicky, they take up space, NFTs improve on Amiibo by not having you actually need a physical object. Okay, but the vast majority of the value is in the physical object. You can tell this is true because Nintendo has the capability of reprinting the relatively expensive physical figurines as marginally nearly zero cost trading cards and... they don't, because there's no real demand.

But then you say, no, the key thing to NFTs is their non-fungibility. Okay, but that's a horrid fit for games. Now instead of modelling Mario once, I need to model Mario a hundred thousand times. If the differences are small between each model, then I get the benefits of procedural generation so it's less work, but the market collapses because the token is as-if fungible and that means the supply is as-if unbounded. And as Nintendo, wouldn't I rather sell each Mario costume for $1 to every player that wants it rather than selling one Mario costume for $100 to someone and then establish an elaborate crypto-driven derivative market where I get a chunk of each secondary sale?

It seems like the most obvious way you can make NFTs actually be something different is when you overtly lean into the bizarre gambling, ultra-rare one offs, and big money market speculation stuff, and at that point you no longer have a game at all, which is probably pretty bad if you're a game manufacturer. But game manufacturers have tried this too, with limited edition sales (Nintendo sold a game last year that they discontinued after 6 months to preserve scarcity, both digital and physical; Nintendo has also done ultra-rare and non-fungible collectible Pokemon leveraging real world events), numbered editions (Atlus with Devil Summoner 2 on the PS2 in 2006 or so). Even one-off multi-thousand dollar stuff has been done in the gaming industry, with special issue collectible hardware (Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have all done this).

Like the issues raised in the currently top upvoted thread, almost everything about NFT in video games is pretty easily analogized to something people have already tried and failed at in video games or something people currently do in video games more efficiently without NFT. And it seems the people entering the space, rather than study what works or doesn't, start from the premise that they read a novel that described something they thought was cool and then trying to blue sky that in video games.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#163
Alternative title: Old man yells at metaverse.

The year is 2030. A 5 year old Timmy is bored and demands attention from his mother, currently hooked in VR doing her remote job. She excuses herself for a moment, straps Timmy into a special harness and puts his VR goggles on. Timmy is now in a virtual playground with other kids his age. All his movements, especially facial expressions, are reproduced in virtual reality. There's an option to use an automatically generated avatar that sort-of reproduces how Timmy looks, but he can also look like a cartoon character. His mother is happy - she doesn't have to drive him to a kindergarten and he stops impacting her work. There are early brain implants that greatly expand immersion, but they are so expensive they are limited to multimillionaire nerds.

2040. Overwhelming majority of kids in developed nations attend virtual schools in VR. Brain implants got better and cheaper, allowing full virtual body control. They are now within financial reach of the upper 20%, not just a tiny financial elite. They start to be required in professional settings as they greatly increase efficiency, with companies sometimes funding them for their employers on a payment plan.

2050. An entire generation now greatly prefers communication in VR to real world interactions and self-identifies more with whatever they chose as their avatars rather than with their real body. Their friend networks are global - quite possibly they don't have any friends within 100km. They spend overwhelming majority of their waking time in metaverse. Brain implants are ubiquitous in people below 40, with most expensive versions allowing a full dive experience.

Most of physical work happens in metaverse, with workers controlling humanoid robots remotely. It's not perfect yet - but it's getting there.

---

Compared to the growth of 2d internet, metaverse is now in early 90s. There's no need to buy a vr kit right now - but once facial expressions tracking arrives it's time do it, otherwise you risk permanently losing touch with the zeitgeist.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#164
This is sounds just like when Apple released the first iPhone and a lot of critics wrote articles about how we don't need the iPhone because we already had are Blackberries that could do the same thing and was cheaper.

Now look at the iPhone today, literally one of the most popular devices in history.

A lot of similar vibes today as there was around the release of the first iPhone.

If I had to bet, I would be betting on Mark even if I don't like Facebook or their other products.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#165
post #52

> In a September 2021 Washington Post interview, Tim Sweeney imagined the future of advertising. "A carmaker who wants to make a presence in the metaverse isn't going to run ads," he said. "They're going to drop their car into the world in real time and you'll be able to drive it around. And they're going to work with lots of content creators with different experiences to ensure their car is playable here and there,…

The metaverse (not Facebook's/Meta's version) can be whatever you want it to be. That's the point.

You could sign into different worlds, or turn different layers of reality on/off.

Perhaps you choose to use a reality where the rules are more akin to the real world, and so the best way to get around is a car... a car that looks and behaves like a car.

And then 15 minutes later you get bored and jump into a world where you can have rocket boots instead.

There will be markets for all different types of realities.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#166

Text is mightier than the Metaverse. Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text. News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors. Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed…

sure, for information density, text is always king. But real-time chatting is not dense, it s in fact very reduntant with lots of information being discarded left and right, and avatats can still text each other. The idea of 3d stuff is just an evolution of that imho, a messenger with extra stuff We have this stuff already btw, second life users do that every day, but Zuck didnt even mention it.

Because acknowledging Second Life would mean acknowledging the appeal of the most established virtual reality is that you can be someone/something different, and that goes against Facebook's real name identification.

Also, they probably want to keep the nsfw aspect synonymous with Second Life out of the discussion.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#168

Text is mightier than the Metaverse. Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text. News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors. Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed…

> Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear. How many people watched game of thrones? How many people read all of the published books in a song of ice and fire? The book might be better but movies and TV are a lot more popular.

After how it ended I’d argue that they are way less popular now than any of the books

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Second Life, you could create islands with their own rules, for example you could create a car racing game. Then when you enter the game, you can not fly around while you play the game. It really was very interesting, and amazing how many things people created in a very short time span.

You might not know this, but Second Life was not, uh, a wide success. And Second Life is the one we remember from that era. There are dozens of these metaverse things from the mid-90s through the 2000s, none of which achieved the notoriety anywhere near Second Life. Off the top of my head: Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Live…

Geocities and Xoom were all the metaverse we needed back in our day.

You know what? the internet was better when it topped out at 56k for mortals.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#170
Yes we had SecondLife in the past, but the billions of new internet users that came online with the second Eternal September caused by internet connected phones don't know about it. Expect to see the same pattern being followed to the letter (virtual estate bids, token currencies, furries, character skins being sold at a surf prices, politicians and pop culture personalities trying to jump on the bandwagon, etc.), but with two big differences: it's not going to be a "thing that outcasts do", and it's going to be run by a company that wants your work to happen in the same place (as opposed to second Life which by definition was a way to promote escapism from real life); Facebook execs understood well that it's critical to make business believe it's ok to have meetings and business development running on their advertisement platform, to the point there's a whole chapter of the official keynote about this aspect.

> ll just be a natural extension of the gig economy, some poor soul being paid .00000000001 bitcoin an hour to virtually dress up like a carnival barker and shout about the latest horrible news out of Syria on some virtual street corner.

It's not going to be real people but scripted animations, Meta is a way to automate marketing so that even influencers are redundant (after ads and companies with their ads budget).

Enjoy the second pre crash bubble and brace yourself for another 2008.

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