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The metaverse is bullshit

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Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#451

Post by [deleted] »

ianai wrote: post #415
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…

“News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.” I’m not sold on this. Twitter is more of a mechanism for group totalitarianism than productive conversation.

[deleted]

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#452

Post by qorrect »

mox111 wrote: post #420
lordloki wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the 13-25 year old males who are excited about this will tire of VR quickly. VR is comparable to 3-D movies and televisions, exciting the first few times you try it but once the novelty fades you just don't care enough about it.

Sounds like you're speaking from experience here, so it's not for me to tell you you're wrong to feel that way. But from my POV, we've started using VR for work meetings/social gatherings (we're a remote company, myself in Spain, the majority in SF), and we've been able to achieve a level of rapport with each-other that's just not possible via a webcam. We will definitely continue to use it.

I got the impression he has not used it ( or at least not the latest iteration ).

I believe it's a game changer, it definitely holds my attention I even use it for exercise.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#453

Post by yoz-y »

reaperducer wrote: post #447
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…

Along those lines, I don't care how interesting the title, I don't click links to YouTube vlogs posted on HN. If you can't be bothered to write down your thoughts, they must not be worth very much.

That is odd. A well made video takes orders of magnitude more effort than writing it down. Already the first step of making a video is writing the script down and iterating over it.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#454

Post by q-big »

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.

The reason: the movie is often the worse copy of the book. Very often, movies get made of successful and often well-written books. So, the movie has a high hurdle to overcome to be even better than the book.

(if movies were made of "average" books, this would likely be different, but this typically makes no commercial sense)

On the other hand, literary offsprings (books based on and book spin-offs) are created from movie. These are, by the same reason, also typically worse than the movie.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#455

Post by machiaweliczny »

mox111 wrote: post #420
lordloki wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the 13-25 year old males who are excited about this will tire of VR quickly. VR is comparable to 3-D movies and televisions, exciting the first few times you try it but once the novelty fades you just don't care enough about it.

Sounds like you're speaking from experience here, so it's not for me to tell you you're wrong to feel that way. But from my POV, we've started using VR for work meetings/social gatherings (we're a remote company, myself in Spain, the majority in SF), and we've been able to achieve a level of rapport with each-other that's just not possible via a webcam. We will definitely continue to use it.

What tools are you using?

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#456

Post by qorrect »

gfodor wrote: post #445
pennaMan wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that this technology forum is in the sad state of being consistently dismissive of novel technology.

Yup HN is legacy at this point. A bunch of old people yelling at clouds. It’s the new Slashdot. So it goes.

I'm going to go ahead and ask you to get off my lawn.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#457

Post by JohnAaronNelson »

mox111 wrote: post #420
lordloki wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the 13-25 year old males who are excited about this will tire of VR quickly. VR is comparable to 3-D movies and televisions, exciting the first few times you try it but once the novelty fades you just don't care enough about it.

Sounds like you're speaking from experience here, so it's not for me to tell you you're wrong to feel that way. But from my POV, we've started using VR for work meetings/social gatherings (we're a remote company, myself in Spain, the majority in SF), and we've been able to achieve a level of rapport with each-other that's just not possible via a webcam. We will definitely continue to use it.

That’s super weird. I’d look for a new job real quick if I was required to do stand up with be goggles in. WTF is wrong with people…

Rapport is built through authenticity and vulnerability, not fucking avatars.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#458

Post by mox111 »

IshKebab wrote: post #446
mox111 wrote: post #416

I think that a lot of the cynicism about this space comes from theorisers who have not yet tried VR for themselves and experienced viscerally + emotionally for themselves, the fact that it is a total game-changer for work and play. The thing with this space is, enough smart people are sufficiently excited by this new media and working on realising its potential, that it will inevitably end up producing value that can…

I don't know, I own an Oculus Quest and some games are definitely amazing. Beat Sabre and I Expect You To Die for example. I love them. But I still rarely use it. Even completely wireless it's still a hassle to get out, and not especially comfortable or easy to wear. And even shifting it slightly results in things going out of focus so you need it lines up just right. Plus very few people have big empty dedicated VR…

I hear you. For months I had my Oculus sitting in the corner of the room gathering dust. Unlike a phone, it's not pinging notifications at you all day so it's easy to forget about.

But you know that saying "come for the tool, stay for the network"?

Right now, we are super early in the adoption phase. You can tell by looking at what fraction of your Facebook network are on Oculus (in my case it's about 2%). That's why most of us are playing solo games which feel a bit like mere novelties.

But now that all of my work colleagues have one, I'm using it heaps. The value of VR grows the more your buddies have access to it.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#459

Post by tailspin2019 »

The Facebook presentation struck me as a vision that’s about 20-30 years out of date, just with “better” graphics.

There didn’t seem to be anything new in there and it feels detached from any reality - even a reality in which we might find ourselves in 10-20 years.

I’m generally bullish on VR/AR in the long term. But this is not it.

What also frustrates me with these types of presentations is how misleading they are about the current and near-future state of technology. Much of the general public will be totally misled by what was “demonstrated” here. Particularly once it’s been processed through the bullshit-adding filters of various news outlets who will further degrade the signal to the point where it’s almost entirely noise.

Normal people can’t easily distinguish between utterly fabricated pre-rendered nonsense which has a very low chance of coming into reality in their lifetime, and what’s actually realistically possible in the near-term future (5-10 years).

Microsoft did this with their Hololens presentation years ago. You look at the visuals being presented and you may as well be watching an episode of Star Trek. (But even that was anchored more to reality than this).

Having said that, the scripted dialogue, forced hand gestures and weird facial expressions throughout did get me wondering whether they are actually further forward than we thought, and the entire thing was presented not by humans but by a rough draft of some AI-driven avatars, which look almost real but where they haven’t sufficiently nailed the “acts like a convincing human” feature just yet.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#460

Post by ftwynn »

I'm always surprised that people don't cite the economic and physical limits for the metaverse more often.

Light only moves so fast through cables. Average ping time between New York and LA is in the high 60's, and that's assuming a wired connection.

I think often about the old talk [1] Web Design - The First 100 Years, that talks about why planes never went supersonic. The alternatives were good enough, and the costs rose exponentially for linear (or sib-linear) gains. Transmitting information across the wire is an obvious win on value. Transmitting experience seems like a whole different order of magnitude that might just not be worth it.

[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

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