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The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

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Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#241
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm incredulous that having a screen strapped half an inch from your eyes for 8+ hours is desirable. I have an Oculus Rift, my face is sweaty/red in a couple of hours and there is an indent around my eyes. I'm sure newer tech can be much better, especially with airflow and an AR set that lets in natural light. We're not there yet, though.

I just got to try an Oculus Quest 2 and I was really blown away by how advanced it is, I didn't expect that. But at least in my case and at my age after a 2-3 hours of full use (when you run out of battery) my eyes are really tired and I was scratching them for a few days after. So, it still need one extra generation at least, probably an "iPhone-like" moment but it's definitely addictive.

The Quest gave me persistent "seasickness" after use the first half dozen times I used it (this was last winter, I had nothing better to do than see if I could get better at tolerating it). I eventually got more tolerant of it, but after not using it for a while I'm hesitant to pick it up again in case I am back to square one. During use I could handle stationary scenes okay, but the after-effect was nasty. An incredible piece of technology, though.

The VR-sickness persisted for hours until I realized that the solution was to try and reset my system by walking outside and gazing at the horizon (which also works on seasickness to a point).

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only is it more than just doing things in VR, a metaverse doesn't even require VR. It does not matter because for the public and the media Zuckerberg is redefining the meaning of the word right in front of our eyes. Give it a few years and everybody will believe VR is an inherent feature of metaverse. Just like those of us who had been using the word "crypto" to mean "cryptography" for decades were trying to ex…

Arguably that's probably why Facebook's efforts are doomed to fail before they've even started. By branding and marketing and tying all of their "metaverse" activities to VR they've already lost in a lot of user mindset. The retrending blog post on the Requiem for the HMD [1][2] is more than enough reason to believe that VR (at it exists today, as it existed in 2019 when that blog post was written) is an albatross th…

> Tear down some of the garden walls,

They used to be open. Cambridge Analytica came along and congress made them decide open was a liability. Sure they were starting to close down before congress, but now they're sure as hell not opening up.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is touch typing (or lack of it) related to working in a home office?

Most office work that I’ve seen requires text entry (email, spreadsheets, proposals, etc) and that’s always today done through a keyboard. Doing that work in VR where you can’t see the keyboard is surprisingly tough, even if you can touch type! I’ve switched out my keycaps for blanks recently to try to force myself to get better at working in VR but I’m still struggling a bit with all the symbols.

When I was in college with a time-sharing system, someone as a joke removed all the keycaps from one of the CRTs. Didn't stop me, I'm a good enough touch typist that I just sat down and started using it.

Good typing skills are a super-power in today's world.

These days in Teams it will tell you when someone's typing. It amazes me how long people need to type just to get a simple point across.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#245
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a recent interview from mark zuck about the metaverse and someone asked him a similar question. He had an actually really insightful answer. 1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games. (The actual per-person-per-day numbers are very high compared to the average 2hr/week i watch tv but whatever). Most of TV and Video Games are about ignoring re…

But the metaverse itself is not content. Instead it’s another medium to consume content. Therefore the metaverse isn’t a replacement for a video games or TV. You would simply watch TV or play a video game while in the metaverse. The metaverse in that regard isn’t a new concept, because VR spaces have existed for a long time now. I’ve watched movies in Minecraft more recently, for example. I’ve seen every idea in the…

> Therefore the metaverse isn’t a replacement for a video games or TV. You would simply watch TV or play a video game while in the metaverse.

Thats the point. The answer to "when do I have time to use the meta verse" is "you have time to watch tv/entertainment, so yo have time to meta verse". Because people think of this as _something added_ to their life, not something augmented.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minecraft is actually a great example here—the client and server ecosystem is extremely, extremely diverse, with lots of different choices for users. Almost everyone who uses Minecraft on desktop is running some mod, if only Optifine, and the server landscape is even more diverse, with dozens of competing reimplementations, all communicating over a shared protocol. I think Minecraft is a great example in the current…

Agree with everything you said, but to me one key piece of the minecraft ecosystem rules it out as a meta verse contender - every one of those permutations you mentioned drops players into their own isolated environment which does not interact with any others. At best you can pop a few hundred people into a server specially configured for that, or use a discord/irc shim to bridge chat across a few instances. I get th…

A server-interconnect mod sounds like just the ticket; something that connects servers together into an "internet" of sorts.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#247

No, it is not. Neither is Roblox or Fortnite, or VRchat. A single game or world is NOT the metaverse, what is so hard to understand about that for journalists and companies? The metaverse is the immersive internet, as a successor to our current one that is more 2D oriented around photos/videos/text today. It's a paradigm shift in how we interact, but most importantly there will be many of these virtual worlds/spaces…

Plus if it doesn’t look good and have porn it’s no good.

I don't know about porn, but Minecraft has shaders and the very pretty RTX version.

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#248
post #18

(Aware of the fact that I'm taking time out of my day to read HN) I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in,…

I read a recent interview from mark zuck about the metaverse and someone asked him a similar question. He had an actually really insightful answer. 1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games. (The actual per-person-per-day numbers are very high compared to the average 2hr/week i watch tv but whatever). Most of TV and Video Games are about ignoring re…

I'll bite back on these 2 points, even though you're just paraphrasing Zuck.

1) I'm definitely willing to believe that most adults spend a lot of time vegging out, even if I/we don't. Does this mean that one goal of the metaverse is to suck cash out of those folks? "People already waste a lot of time. The metaverse is great because it makes money off of that." I could also interpret this one in a lighter way. Perhaps the metaverse is somehow better than regular vegging out; gives you exercise or something.

2) My take here is similar to some sibling comments. This just sounds like a VR application, and I'm not sure where the "metaverse" comes in. Unless by "metaverse" we mean "internet", which already exists and is (thankfully) not run by Facebook. And even then, I don't see where the internet comes in either! I can dev/create offline, can't I?

Re: The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

#250
post #18

(Aware of the fact that I'm taking time out of my day to read HN) I really wonder how many adults > 25yrs and < 60yrs have the time to immerse themselves in any type of digital world / metaverse experience. If I was a teenager or in college, then yeah I can see it... but there are so many things to do in the 16hrs we have each day, and I already kick myself for not finishing that book, or getting an extra workout in,…

I read a recent interview from mark zuck about the metaverse and someone asked him a similar question. He had an actually really insightful answer. 1) Most american adults watch several hours of TV per day. alternatively, many play a few hours of video games. (The actual per-person-per-day numbers are very high compared to the average 2hr/week i watch tv but whatever). Most of TV and Video Games are about ignoring re…

Ah yes... The company that created the biggest productivity sink ever will solve all of our work from home issues...
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