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The metaverse is bullshit

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Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#321

Post by unglaublich »

fredophile wrote: post #110
dandotway wrote: post #71

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.

The books took one person a lifetime to create. The series took billions of dollars and hundreds of lifetimes, even though the story was already there. The books were extremely effective.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#322

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

Jasper_ wrote: post #136
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #63

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…

SL was great and a lot of fun. It just had a rather clunky user interface, and probably other issues (nobody said it was easy). Nevertheless there was an explosion of creativity for a while.

Nowadays Minecraft and Roblox seem to fill similar niches.

That many attempts failed doesn't mean all attempts will fail. You may not know this, but there were other social networks before Facebook. There was Orkut and MySpace, for example, both disappeared. Yet Facebook now is a billion dollar company.

VRML appeared at a time when people were still using dial-up modems. Things change - eventually technology may be good enough for people to adopt VR on a larger scale.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#323

Post by agumonkey »

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #270
dandotway wrote: post #71

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…

Text is definitely a more versatile, low-effort, high-value and ubiquitous medium that will never be beaten for human information exchange. It's perhaps not the best medium for all context but it is the best generic medium for interoperable information exchange (unix was right all along!). Entertainment is often more enjoyable with rich sensory experiences and some amount of novelty. People with great imaginations ar…

I wouldn't describe it as low-effort / high-value, or at least I'd put the emphasis on density of information. We can embed concepts in a very few words, visual information adds a ton of data but not much information.

I often like to compare the post web 2.0 era (ubiquitous, high bandwidth, highly lubricated UIs) with mailing lists (limited, slow, bare). People think more before chatting on MLs, their messages can be short but mean a lot, or can be long and tell even more. Video feels a bit like the former.. you get more data, it's more pleasing for a while, but it doesn't give much more. Sometimes visual / geometric media add some value (when balanced and tuned to massage viewers mental model) but often its just redundant fat.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#324

Post by agumonkey »

verve_rat wrote: post #215
wruza wrote: post #171

This thread feels like 1860's consilium on what future will look like 500 years later. The shape of the metaverse will be formed by a new generation, not by older guys (and not by fortnite addicts who play by the rules of the former) who know nothing better than drive a fancy “car” on the “road”, as if roads or a concept of physical movement or the euclidean rule would still be there for common use and not for museum…

Without the "concept of physical movement" how will "food" get to your "house"?

quantum emergence

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#325

Post by lucasverra »

Jasper_ wrote: 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,…

Had the same sentiment when watching MZ presentation. Why on earth would my avatar be standing like regular people in the crowd in a concert? I want to be in the scene with hot shot musician, not in the tribune.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#326

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #103
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #47

Yes, we have the internet, but Facebook managed to dominate a huge part of it. No wonder they want to keep their dominance in the next level of it. And I would be careful about calling their domination plans bullshit, seeing as they already succeeded once before. Second Life was phantastic, I still miss it to this day. It just had a very clunky interface, which modern devices like VR gear might improve upon. (I know…

>Yeah, the "absolute hell" of billionaires investing lots of money to create fun and immersive entertainment options for the rest of us. Truly the worst dystopia imaginable? Yes, the "circuses" part of "bread and circuses". Superficial appeasement doesn't really outweigh the all the many other unethical actions made by billionaires - in this case, vying for be the proprietary controllers of the literal reality of the…

I don't like centralized control, either, but to claim that we are living in an "absolute hell" right now is just ridiculous.

You are not forced to attend the "circus", either, if you don't like it.

As for centralized control, that is actually the one thing that disappoints me about the future. Somehow all the SF books glossed over the immense cost required to develop the cutting edge technology. How much money did Facebook spend to create the Oculus Quest? I just don't see hobbyists and hackers create the same level of technology - or think about the Apple M1 SoC. Would hackers have been able to create such a thing in their mom's basement eventually? I rather doubt it. So centralisation is an issue, simply because development costs are so high. It's not simply a conspiracy by evil billionaires.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#327

Post by edanm »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #227
fredophile wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I could not find much data but it seems that the finale of Games of thrones had 19 million viewers [1], while the books sold 90 million copies [2]. Since I guess the latter are cumulative over all the five books, it looks like books and series have a similar performance. Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while th…

> I could not find much data but it seems that the finale of Games of thrones had 19 million viewers [1]

Umm isn't that just on the date it airs? That's like comparing it to the people who read the book in the first month (year?).

There is no way as many people read the books as saw the tv show. I would bet it's at least one order of magnitude difference, if not possibly more.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#328

Post by Talanes »

bombcar wrote: post #228
pmontra wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Flying? I hope I can teleport as easily as I can jump to a web page by clicking a bookmark or typing its URL. Second Life had teleport. I walked, drove a car, went flying only for the fun of it or for very short distance movements.

Any game that implements a form of fast travel finds 95% or players use it all the time or most of the time. Sure you could run to Stormwind - but even the tram was completely dead one griffon flight points were usable.

Weird example. That Gryphon ride is slower than taking the tram, or at least it used to be. The advantage of the Gryphon ride is that it was automatic.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#329

Post by sneak »

dandotway wrote: post #71

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…

> Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.

Well, there is that whole snapchat thing.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#330

Post by meheleventyone »

snovv_crash wrote: post #255
Animats wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to tell you this, but in most driving games, the center of gravity is so low that it's below the ground. That keeps you from rolling the simulated car.

If it was below the ground, the car would roll in the other direction.

Gravity acts downwards so having a low center of gravity resists rolling forces. This works in reality as well with vehicles with a high center of gravity being at increased risk of rolling over those with a low center. Games often take this a step further as physics engines let you manually specify where the center of gravity is so you can make it artificially low compared with the actual mass distribution.
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