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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

#271

Post by sushsjsuauahab »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #255
sushsjsuauahab wrote: post #28

There will never be a metaverse! The amount of electricity and device manufacturing required for it to exist at scale will likely exhaust our capabilities as a planet and lead to yet more conflict and strife.

My take is almost the complete opposite. In the Metaverse, you can spin up a office building for an unlimited number of users who can access from across the globe. Please compaire that use case, and so many more like it, to the real world alternatives in terms of resource consumption. It's an economy of infinite bits, not limited atoms.

While it is true that concrete and steel cost resources as well, in a resource constrained world, we will use what we already have in place as these things are quite durable.

I don't envision a future of mega skyscrapers and bullet trains, nor do I envision a world of Oculus clad employees driving a virtual forklift.

Rather I view the world continuing to exist as we currently have it: forklift driver is prompted by his UI to go to the next location to physically grab an item.

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

#272

Post by vmception »

bluedino wrote: post #31
clpm4j wrote: 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,…

The amount of 25-35 year old adults that play video games is pretty huge.

and a lot of people that don't think they are gamers are the most lucrative set of gamers.

they are the freemium and mobile segment. dismissed by both the toxic gaming communities and themselves, but noticed by the companies who will change their whole trillion dollar business name to snag them further.

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

#273

Post by vidarh »

kibwen wrote: post #104
stormbrew wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only is it more than just doing things in VR, a metaverse doesn't even require VR. I'm sorry, I think if you want to broaden this term like this you're going to have to stipulate some new boundaries. Else, we've got the metaverse: it's just the internet, and metaverse is just the latest in a long line of silly names for it back to the "internet superhighway". And when Di died or 9/11 happened I had a "shared ex…

> Else, we've got the metaverse: it's just the internet, and metaverse is just the latest in a long line of silly names for it back to the "internet superhighway". Yes, this is absolutely correct. A "metaverse" exists in contrast to meatspace. In meatspace I walk down the street, I look through a shop window, I see you browsing inside, I spray some graffiti on the wall, you see the graffiti when you come out of the s…

Incidentally, those of us old enough may remember the number of websites having "streets" and "neighbourhoods" in the 90s while people were still trying to figure out how to translate things from offline to online.

Virtual shopping malls where you would "walk" around by clicking around websites.

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

#274

Post by vidarh »

mbesto wrote: post #178
kibwen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm frustrated that everywhere I look I keep seeing "metaverse" and "VR" used interchangeably. All of the things described above are VR, and none of them are the metaverse. Watching TV or playing a game in an immersive, distraction-free VR environment sounds great, and will happen, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR. Working in a virtual home office has the potential to be extremely productive, ergonomic, and s…

The fact that the definition of the "metaverse" is stipulating so much disagreement and discussion is itself the problem. When smartphones were launched there was a simple description - "oh cool, it's a traditional phone but it has a computer running inside of it? makes sense"

Not a problem. An opportunity.

It took a decade from the first smartphones until iPhone/Android like devices with a mostly uniform appearance and UI had decisively won, though. There was a lot of rapid exploration of design space first.

As for VR/metaverse, there's been constant exploration of this space for decades. The VR boom in the 90s was killed by cost and primitive hardware, but we still have surviving persistent 3d worlds that came out of that wave.

We've also seen a lot of non-VR exploration. Aside from Minecraft, we have Roblox, which while a lot more limited in some ways is also a lot more meta: you have an identity that persists across worlds, with a social layer across that. Minecraft looks to be slowly moving in that direction.

We'll see people exploring a lot of other variants, and most will fail. But in the process we'll start to learn what will work.

I doubt Facebook, or Minecraft/Microsoft, or Apple, or Google will turn out to be the winner though.

Maybe they'll manage to buy the winner.

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

#276

Post by nathias »

clpm4j wrote: 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,…

We don't have 16h each day if we're working and sleeping, we have 8.

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

#277

Post by jauco »

test6554 wrote: post #269
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MMO’s are almost exclusively played in 3rd person perspective in part because looking at eye level prevents you from seeing behind the person in front of you I mean, yes I agree. There are some workarounds, i.e. you could jump, in VR it’s very fast to swivel your head, look around the people in front of you or look behind you. That said, I very much agree, I wouldn’t want to play WOW in VR. The DBM style warning zo…

In a metaverse, you could put a 3rd person perspective with a higher vantage point on the character's arm/wrist display and use it to navigate.

There’s no physics. You can make everyone’s eye-level a few inches above the place their head is rendered for the rest. So everyone is just a bit taller than everyone else. Simultaneously

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

#278

Post by denkmoon »

vineyardmike wrote: post #41
clpm4j wrote: 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…

If you thought zoom/teams for 6-8-10hrs a day was bad, try doing it in VR!

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

#279

Post by randomsearch »

A little OT but related and want to bounce this off HN.

I think we’ve reached a turning point in history and society, aided by lockdowns, where young people spend more time interacting online than IRL. This has major consequences for society and tech.

Young people present themselves to the world primarily through their online persona. The physical world is secondary. To reiterate, what happens online, what is shown and seen online, is more important to them than the same in physical space.

You could probably write a book about the consequences of this (maybe someone has?) but two particularly salient points: (1) if you’re not an onliner then it’s hard for you to understand how the future will look, and (2) your desires are just going to be fundamentally different from other people.

I know from talking to CEOs that those entering the workforce now are most comfortable interacting through Slack and WhatsApp. Physical interactions are sometimes difficult, because people have less experience of it - usually it takes them longer to bond, and more formal social situations are challenging because they’ve not had much practice and to learn the rules governing behaviour in certain physical spaces.

It’s easy for oldies to mock Zuckerberg with his embarrassing meta presentation, and indeed I think his influence is waning (because he’s also out of touch) but for sure the future is going to be driven by people who are living online. Avatars may seem like a 90s throwback but that’s just because of how we conceive of them; the truth is _we already have avatars, they’re just messy and distributed and mostly text based_.

Personally I don’t like this conclusion. I think the physical world is superior in many ways, for example physical activity and exercise are fundamental to wellbeing, and I can’t see that being properly and healthily replicated in the virtual world for a very long time. I think there are more noble and worthwhile goals to be pursued in the physical world. But just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it ain’t true.

I’ve half a mind to join ‘em, half a mind to go build a log cabin.

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

#280

Post by randomsearch »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #204
randomsearch wrote: post #200

“What is so hard for people to understand” says HN commenter: “the metaverse clearly means [my definition of the metaverse] why can’t people see this?!!” Well, Zuckerberg didn’t give a clear definition, the term itself is made up, and it doesn’t currently exist (otherwise, what would we be building?). So no you don’t know what it means or how it will turn out, and neither does Zuckerberg. He might have a vision of wh…

>It’s obvious a deeply immersive experience will eventually arrive This is like "self driving car" obvious. It seems like we're close, but we're really really not.

I think that’s a very good analogy, not least because our incremental steps to self driving cars and similar to our incremental steps towards immersion - we already have some components (parking assist, social media) but there’s still a large gap.
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