The metaverse is bullshit • Hacker News Board

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#471

Post by stuart78 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

finebalance wrote: post #187

kingkawn wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's kind of astounding how rapidly the series has disappeared from the mainstream. Couldn't have bungled it up worse had they tried.

I think that happens to just about all Dramatic shows. Same for Mad Men, Breaking Bad and other popular shows. Without the scarcity of yore, we have a constant buffet of alternatives, so who has time to rewatch (or catch up). In contrast, The Office, Friends and Seinfeld are apparently still bringing people back, perhaps because it is comforting to spend time with those characters and the viewer doesn’t need to make a big commitment.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#472

Post by mlac » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

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 will use VR when I can put on my headset, anywhere, and be transported to my "desk". I want to be able to take documents and move them around in VR, read them, put them on my "table", and then have apps that appear as monitors. So I can move and pull up email in front of me, "grab" an attachment, and "put" it into another email that I will compose.

And have emails look like a stack of papers that you could actually process - pick up, hold, throw in a trashcan or put in an archive folder. It'd be amazing if I could just crumple up garbage emails and throw them on the floor behind me, or light them on fire.

May still need a physical keyboard, but voice recognition could work. Or voice memos sent to people. I think we don't do that today because most people don't have a private office or headsets on. But it would be a lot more efficient in some circumstances if you could just leave a voice memo.

And "apps" become screens - so you can pull up PPT, see it, work on it, and then push it to the side. It would be virtually unlimited and scalable screen real estate purchased with just one headset. You could have different flexible workstations (e.g. one for music production with 6 screens in front of you, one for each project). Sort of like desktop environments, but actually changing the desktop so that the files you leave around and windows you have up are saved in their state until you return to it.

Writing a new book? Pull up a writing environment template that minimizes distraction. Ready to be social? News feeds? Gaming?

There is a lot of potential there...

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#473

Post by zephyr9 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

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…

> enough smart people are sufficiently excited by this new media

> Large swathes of smart people who see unrealised possibilities

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#474

Post by mlac » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

mlac wrote: post #472

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 will use VR when I can put on my headset, anywhere, and be transported to my "desk". I want to be able to take documents and move them around in VR, read them, put them on my "table", and then have apps that appear as monitors. So I can move and pull up email in front of me, "grab" an attachment, and "put" it into another email that I will compose. And have emails look like a stack of papers that you could actually…

Not to mention the separation it would give you working from home / or wherever. You could disengage from your whole work environment by taking off your headset, and have a very minimal tech setup outside that space. It would be a clean transition from work and home. You couldn't text with your phone, have TV in the background, and be in a room with someone at the same time. It would be fully engaged in tech, or not. (I admit there will likely be more opportunity for distraction in the virtual environment, because the friction to add an additional data feed or notification will be low).

And watching sports on the weekend? Throw up all the games on multiple big screens.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#475

Post by notindexed » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

ngmi

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#476

Post by mensetmanusman » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

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…

Books as art take on the order of 10-100 hours, that is 1-2 orders of magnitude longer than the movies.

This is why longer series are so popular, see: the Mandalorian

It’s possible that as digital tools make it easier to make hundreds of hours of high quality content the ‘metaverse’ experience will become on par with the books.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#477

Post by Dangeranger » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

justapassenger wrote: post #444

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…

And that’s why text based games dominated the world and no one is playing 3D games?

Communication and entertainment are fundamentally different things.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#478

Post by Naracion » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

DeusExMachina wrote: post #407

edanm wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Since your premise is that there is no way to know, your speculation is then as (in)valid as any other.

On the contrary, edanm's premise is that the number of viewers cited in the parent comment was the number of viewers on the day of release, and the number of book sales mentioned was cumulative. If that premise holds, then probabilistically speaking it'd be very safe to say that more people have consumed the visual media than the literary media.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#479

Post by verisimi » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

"Why don't the tech billionaires chasing after sci-fi metaverses get that these fictional virtual realities seem great on the page but would be hell to actually live in 12 hours a day? I truly do not know, but I think it may have something to do with their refusal to admit that they are the baddies."

They are the baddies. Let's not forget WEF's aims that we "will own nothing and be happy" by 2030.

My impression is that this is the way they aim to achieve this. They'll have us hooked up to something or other, and harvest our 'free cycles' in our wetware to decrypt encrypted thoughtcrimes. Lol :)

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#480

Post by notSupplied » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

The whole point of games is that each game invents its own rules, unaffected by the real world, including the rules of other games. Works of creative authorship operate because the author can establish clear walls, then reinvent the rules of that world.

Games are cool because they each are separate universes. They are closures. Metaverse billionaires who want to break the boundaries between games by connecting all game economies are simply trying to rake all games. They’re trying trans-dimensional conquerors like the Combine.