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The Great Bifurcation

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61–70 of 168 posts

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#61
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes the difference in my mind is that AR technology is gaining steam. There's a chance that we'll have a new desire to link the spatial, physical world to spatial and virtual interactions. The push to own the metaverse seems like a land grand.

really? I have yet to seen anybody that actually cares about AR at all in my day to day interactions

Microsoft is pushing Hololens dev, Meta is pushing AR features into the Quest, Snap just put out some AR spectacles. There's development interest but the consumer devices aren't quite ready yet so there's no real market quite yet.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#63
post #48
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes the difference in my mind is that AR technology is gaining steam. There's a chance that we'll have a new desire to link the spatial, physical world to spatial and virtual interactions. The push to own the metaverse seems like a land grand.

Hasn’t VR been gaining steam for a while now, as in, never coming around? All I see are companies massively pushing for it, but I don’t see any real take up. Anything that I’ve seen seems like a gimmick and not something that will actually stick or resonate with people.

There's ~15 million VR units sitting around and there's steady growth. That's much more than the zero from a few years ago but you're right its not massive popular. There's just enough that some VR game devs are finding success but by no means is it a gold rush and I don't mean to imply that.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#64

I'm of the age that I remember getting sucked in to the Second Life hype. MMORPGs were also becoming popular, and there was this narrative that "virtual worlds" were on a rocketship to the future. Universities and companies paid stupid amounts of money for digital real estate. Wired ran profiles of Second Life speculators who got rich in the bubble. Now I guess we call virtual worlds "the metaverse" and think it'll b…

Anyone remember LambdaMoo? This has all happened before.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

I think focusing on stupid looking headsets misses the author's point. He's looking toward a decentralization of thought aggregation and how that will impact the 'real world'. Maybe it'll be similar when cable happened and we all stopped watching the same three channels?

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you might want to leverage the reputation, credibility and following you built in one online community to another. Example: I learned about patio11 here on HN and was impressed by him actions in this community which lead me to follow patio11 on Twitter. I agree that one of the great things about the internet is that you don't have to have the same identity in different communities. It's optional. Facebook's b…

He's patio11 though that's his identifier like any in-game name, it make no difference if used as a username or as a 'metaverse' identifier. If I want to verify metaverse user 102372193, I'd go to their profile hoping they've linked their twitter

ENS is solving for this by creating a common identity across crypto wallets: https://ens.domains/

That way he can be patio11 across all platforms if he wishes (and doesnt need to worry about getting "patio11" on every new platform that's created). Or, he can just create a subwallet with a different identity but still rolls up into his main wallet.

It also protects against somoene putting their twitter in their profile and pretending to be patio11. i.e.:

Hey HN I'm patio11, here's proof, I linked my twitter: https://twitter.com/patio11

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#66
> Where I disagree is with the idea that the physical world and the digital world are increasingly “being overlaid and coming together”; in fact, I think the opposite is happening: the physical world and digital world are increasingly bifurcating.

Usually I agree with Ben, but on this I think he's dead wrong.

For a simple example, text messages are technically virtual, but they arrive on a physical device (your phone).

More and more we will see these sorts of interactions increase - whether it's maps displayed on your windshield (or your computerized glasses), the ability to checkout using crypto (Paypal, Visa, etc), or play games (Pokemon Go), we are at the very beginning of the integration of the virtual with the physical.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#67
The majority of this article is history telling, told through the lens of one persons particular narrative, cutting that history up into conveniently sized chapters (1.0, 2.0, etc).

Then the article shifts gears to the authors own transition to living in a new place, adapting to that change, and then describing the now as a bifurcated existence (real life proximal, and through the invisible network society/work).

The second part would have stood on its own fine and didn’t need the “history as I see it” preamble. I don’t know why authorship on the net, in this bifurcated space, has to choose between tweets and long form. It’s ok to write a longer-than-a-tweet developed point.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#68
post #35

I'm of the age that I remember getting sucked in to the Second Life hype. MMORPGs were also becoming popular, and there was this narrative that "virtual worlds" were on a rocketship to the future. Universities and companies paid stupid amounts of money for digital real estate. Wired ran profiles of Second Life speculators who got rich in the bubble. Now I guess we call virtual worlds "the metaverse" and think it'll b…

What makes the difference in my mind is that AR technology is gaining steam. There's a chance that we'll have a new desire to link the spatial, physical world to spatial and virtual interactions. The push to own the metaverse seems like a land grand.

It seems like AR is the key to making the Metaverse a thing. VR is neat, but the current experience reminds me of 3D TVs from a few years back - gimmicky and awkward. Even if parts of the physical and digital worlds bifurcate, I still think there's a lot more AR could do by linking them and making it possible to build a digital world on top of the physical.

The Daemon series by Daniel Suarez showed an impressive vision of what AR could do in a not-so-distant future where online information is linked to physical entities. The things to make it work like haptic suits or lightweight AR classes with overlays and a HUD are getting fairly close technology-wise.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#69
> why wouldn’t you want the most immersive experience possible?

That folks potentially don't want the most immersive experience possible would be the thing that will end up burning piles of money and sinking the virtual reality vision of the metaverse that some have.

It's not a given that people will want the immersion. After all, Facetime is a relatively extremely niche and rare way to communicate every day when compared to low tech texting.

Re: The Great Bifurcation

#70

How does one bet against the Metaverse? People hating on Web3 appear to do so because they aren't makers. They persuade and complain, but they don't build or risk. The Metaverse is just another centrally planned architected model that must be imposed from above. From what I can tell, that's just fancy communism meets Bentham and Taylor, all for your own good surely. The current platform owners are just not cool enoug…

> People hating on Web3 appear to do so because they aren't makers.

That statement is false.

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