Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft

clivethompson.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 377 posts

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

#351

Post by dmonitor »

nightowl_games wrote: post #265
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook over the years had several opportunities to buy game studios and become a gaming company themselves. This metaverse is a VR video game and Facebook has demonstrated zero abilities to make a video game. I would bet on Minecraft and Fortnite creators to be a better position to create this "metaverse" because they've done this before.

Fortnite, yes, almost definitely. Epic is a true leader in videogame technology. Minecraft, no. Minecraft has failed to truly innovate since Microsoft acquired it, imo. I think the evidence of this is apparent in the existence of both Minecraft Bedrock and Java editions. The metaverse is about creating the one true videogame. The final videogame. The holodeck where gamers themselves can make new games at a rapid spee…

My bet is on Valve being the dark horse in this race. Gabe already has expressed interest, they're assisting development on Garry's Mod 2 (s&box), and they have the highest quality VR hardware. They also have consumer trust, everyone with VR has a steam account, they have a method of sharing user-generated content (and making money off of it!) with the workshop. If they can coordinate, they can take off in this area

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

#352

Post by WorldMaker »

vineyardmike wrote: post #243
WorldMaker wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not the garden walls to which I refer. I remember trying to program against Facebook even in the pre-Cambridge Analytica days. Sure the APIs had way more data, but it was all still siloed in that only apps that Facebook "vetted" were allowed in, and they were always strict about the CSS and components you were allowed to use and tight on the ways you were allowed to link people outside of Facebook itself.

I don't care if the data is locked down or not, the social graph isn't the interesting part of a "metaverse" and in some ways it is probably better locked up and that can remain Facebook's lock in to keep them interested in the project. The kind of garden walls I was talking about are more federative: bringing external content in, but in ways that are true to the outside content; not just confined to Facebook looks and styles and components, not confined to a bare amount of customization of boring card styles, not embedded in a "Facebook way" but in a "web way" (whatever that means, and it doesn't really feel like it means much at all after the imagination and wilds of the 1990s).

I referenced the anarchy and chaos of blogs and MySpace, specifically: it's about user control to "do ugly things", to escape the gray walls and graffiti "their spaces". If Facebook is a "space" today, it's a building full of cubicles all alike. Sure, you can hang photos in the cubicles and they've got colorful stock ones, but your still constrained to just those cubicle walls and they mandate a lot about the allowed size and frame styles. That's almost directly the antithesis of a user owned "metaverse" whether 2D or 3D.

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

#353

Post by moffkalast »

hoseja wrote: post #299
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…

And it turns out it's been pwned for a couple years by people inserting a vulnerability into a dependency by masterful social engineering where the vuln was introduces as an obvious fix to another less exploitable bug.

I've never seen people social engineer codebase maintainers into patching them an exploit into it, that was absolutely brilliant.

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

#354

Post by WorldMaker »

imiric wrote: post #199
WorldMaker wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That Requiem for the HMD article has not aged well. All of those issues are a matter of iterative improvements over what we have today, and the devices will be ready for mass adoption. Have you seen the leaked Quest Pro design[1]? It's already close to being ski goggle size, and it's only a couple of generations away from something the size of sunglasses. Displays are getting cheaper, better and higher resolution. UX…

Right now the public perception remains that "good" VR/AR headsets are always five years away, since the 1990s.

Whether or not they did their research, whether or not we are just a few iterative improvements away from mass adoption, there's still just too much feeling of "same hype cycle, different day" from the average consumer (which is the point of that article, and my implication that VR is dead right now but it was Facebook's lucky albatross so they're tying it around their necks in the hopes it is still lucky while dead [1]).

[1] Spoiler alert for a classic poem used as a metaphor here: in the poem things do not go well from here. I am pessimistic about this marketing play for "Meta".

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

#355

Post by moffkalast »

nottorp wrote: post #315
1ibsq wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that is why the "metaverse" will succeed if it's decentralized. I wouldn't touch a MC server that has no grief prevention. But you can have your 4chan and I can have my builder server and we're both happy. Because there's no central authority telling us how to run our pieces of "metaverse".

Maybe someone can make the backend run on a blockchain and it's settled.

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

#356

Post by scoopertrooper »

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…

VR brings limitations and capabilities like any other mode of interaction. Mobile games don't play well on PC and PC games don't play well on mobile.

I'm sure some clever folks will find a way to build a MMO that works for VR. Maybe characters will have magical x-ray glasses that renders other characters semi-transparent, so they can look through the crowd? Perhaps VR MMO games will be grander in spatial scale with lots of small towns to limit players clumping together city centres. Maybe, trying to find something in a crowded marketplace with lots of distractions, could be a part of the quest?

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

#357

Post by filoleg »

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.

Luckily, tracking your physical keyboard in VR has already been a thing for a while, and it has both quite solid third-party[0] and first-party implementations[1] by now.

To clarify, when I say "tracking", I don't mean just being able to use your keyboard in VR. I mean being able to actually see your keyboard in VR, along with being able to see keycaps on the virtual representation of your keyboard.

0. https://uploadvr.com/immersed-real-keyboard-support/

1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/typing-in-vr-how-to-connect...

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

#358

Post by Zababa »

zemo wrote: post #345
Zababa wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I thought of replying with something like > "Yes, everything is possible with enough engineering time. My point is that you can easily do horizontal integration (lots of simulations, mostly cosmetic, almost no behavior) or vertical integration (lots of behavior, few simulation). Both of those have a small surface. But if you want the two at the same time, your surface begins to grow rapidly. You have to impl…

> what would the Staff of Westfall be in a virtual coworking space? Could you beat up people with it? You’re still limiting the question to the plane of content: the object’s physical (virtual) characteristics. Consider the staff as it exists in the plane of expression: what is the person expressing by displaying the item? It would express that you play WoW, are an Alliance player, and play a caster of some sort. Tha…

> If the object doesn’t mean anything, then there’s not much point in moving it from space to space.

Again, that's if you consider that the only value that exists is showing and signaling. That's, in my opinion, a really limited view of things. Objets are not just here to mean something, but also to do something. In fact, that's the main point of most objects. If your objects are only here because they mean something, they could very well just be a list of facts. Linking a list of facts to your identity, even if it's decentralized, is trivial. But it's not the everything you can do. I have a pickaxe in Minecraft. If I could use it to break rock in , that would be great. If I can just show a pickaxe, what's the point of the pickaxe?

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

#359

Post by Zababa »

PeterisP wrote: post #344
Zababa wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I thought of replying with something like > "Yes, everything is possible with enough engineering time. My point is that you can easily do horizontal integration (lots of simulations, mostly cosmetic, almost no behavior) or vertical integration (lots of behavior, few simulation). Both of those have a small surface. But if you want the two at the same time, your surface begins to grow rapidly. You have to impl…

My argument probably is that establishing some base rules that all simulations follow and some interchange standards is the key part of the metaverse concept. If you don't have that, then you have x separate unconnected "universes", but you can talk about a metaverse only if you have linked them in some ways. You go in a lot of detail about the "Staff of Westfall" topic which rises some very hard problems, but not al…

I think at this point we basically agree on most things. The only differences might be on what is an "ideal multiverse", what would be a "mvp multiverse", and what it means for two simulations to be different.

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

#360

Post by ZephyrBlu »

meheleventyone wrote: post #335
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're proving his point beautifully. You've been online since the mid-90s, so you're ~40 or older? I don't mean to be derogatory, but you sound exactly like an "oldie" who is out of touch as described by the GP. Zoomers are absolutely spending more time online and less time IRL than previous generations. I'm only 23 and the difference between my childhood and my younger siblings is massive. They generally pr…

Don't worry you can be an oldie too if your childhood is massively different to your siblings! You're looking at your younger siblings and I'm looking at my kids. We see different things and honestly I think this is a bit of a moral panic like we saw with rock and roll, comics, TV, video games during my youth, kids playing online games when I was your age and so on.

How old are your kids and what's their behaviour like?

I used my siblings as an example. The impression I get is that behaviour similar to that of my siblings is very common in general.

Btw I do actually feel somewhat like an "oldie" already.

Post reply on HN