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The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

clivethompson.medium.com

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

#281

Post by tlrobinson »

kibwen wrote: post #49
vineyardmike wrote: post #41

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…

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…

When people talk about VR experiences in the context of “the metaverse” I assume it’s implied there’s a shared space connecting those individual experiences.

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

#282

Post by 1ibsq »

sweetbitter wrote: post #60

Yeah. The totally lawless environments that can be present in Minecraft servers are awesome- the best example of which being 2b2t, a vanilla gameserver running the same map since 2010 that is essentially the 4chan of Minecraft (it even originated there). Despite allowing users to hack to their hearts' content and having no rules, the creativity and sheer amount of media produced by such an environment is stunning. He…

2b2t is a fascinating place. I always thought, this is the way Minecraft is meant to be played.

The comic series is legendary, but I don't think people can make something out of the animation video without context.

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

#283

Post by tlrobinson »

Retric wrote: post #237
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly the problem is, none of these are really well defined. I think Zuck wants the general consensus to lean towards: VR - Is a user interface. Metaverse is a network built for that user interface. Historically, we had screen and keyboard based user interfaces, and with it text based gaming like Zork. Then we had screen and controller based user interfaces, and with it games like Pong. At a certain point we got th…

The issue is VR is in practice a really terrible interface for widespread shared user experiences. 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, and removing collision detection doesn’t help. Think of walking around a crowded convention and you really can’t see many people at the same time. You can of cour…

> missing out on facial expressions

Give it a few years and every new VR headset will have facial expression sensors.

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

#284

Post by meheleventyone »

randomsearch wrote: post #279

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 a…

It’s not either or. These are complementary things. I’ve been extremely online since the mid-90s for example. There’s nothing sinister or world changing here. Online isn’t a separate universe it’s just a part of IRL.

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

#285

Post by itronitron »

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,…

Maybe thinking of it as a separate experience is limiting how people make use of it.

I wonder if anyone has run remote team meetings or virtual classrooms in Minecraft as I imagine it would be a lot less fatiguing than Zoom style teleconferencing. The fact that in MC you can easily see where other players are looking adds a lot to the experience.

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

#286

Post by cblconfederate »

randomsearch wrote: post #279

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 a…

I agree. There is a more general point that we underestimate that human persons are to a very large extent informational creatures. It's not just young people, look how everyone and their grandma embraced technology once it became easy to use. The world is increasingly informational, people become increasingly rootless and travel and the economy is turning to a vending machine where ubiquitous services deliver most of the things a person needs anywhere in the world. In this world, digital personas and digital property are more permanent than physical possessions. So i expect more of the economy to move to digital assets over time. Zuck is probably realizing that there the opportunity offered from pseudonymous avatars is bigger than the current one which depends on very public, "real names" communications. I think he is right, but i think he is wrong about how much of it he can control.

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

#287

Post by InvisibleUp »

astlouis44 wrote: post #87

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…

The thing is, this was tried already with VRML in the 90s. And that totally flopped, because as it turns out, people would rather not deal with the clunkiness of excess skeuomorphism when they can instead just type in a text box or click on a button. Perhaps actual VR headsets could ease the pain of that, but it would have to be incredibly good for it to be a preferable alternative to just directly producing/consuming the relevant data via text messages, video chats, etc.

On that note, I feel that Microsoft has a better approach here of just "Teams but in VR", a nice simple scope compared to trying to reinvent the entire internet.

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

#288

Post by sabujp »

If you feel handicapped now without your cell phone, just imagine what's going to happen when you lose/break your AR headset you wear everywhere (hopefully except when sleep) or when the bionic implant Elon plugged into your brain stops working. Pay up peasant.

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

#289

Post by meheleventyone »

pitched wrote: post #175
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #150

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.

Bringing physical keyboards and other peripherals into VR is just a matter of time though. There’s already a lot of experiments doing exactly that.
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