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The metaverse was never alive in the first place

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Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#31

Post by tiedieconderoga »

Animats wrote: post #23

For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong. I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are tes…

>Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse.

IMHO, this is a crucial and often overlooked point. In order to gain popularity, a metaverse platform needs the sort of offbeat creator trendsetters who tend to push boundaries. Without them, the platform feels sterile and business-y. With the sort of content they will produce, however, family-friendly advertisers will run for the hills.

As Neal Stephenson wrote in Snow Crash (1992):

>You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#32

Post by Animats »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #27
Animats wrote: post #23

For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong. I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are tes…

I don't know what's next either, but it seems like the things you describe are not terribly existential? Technical problems and VR nausea will both be solved inevitably as hardware gets better and cheaper — which it always does, thanks to the magic of capitalism. There's also a lot of that magic happening in the world of GPUs right now. The boringness seems like a game design problem. Someone will crack it sooner or…

> There's also a lot of that magic happening in the world of GPUs right now.

I wish. It's not happening from NVidia.[1] NVidia will sell you an awesome GPU for an awesome price, but price/performance is advancing very slowly. NVidia's current entry level GPU card for desktops is $400. Also, NVidia's laptop GPUs that dissipate 130 watts are kind of a problem.

> The boringness seems like a game design problem.

Yes. We might see solutions from VR natives. See Phia's Virtual Reality Show.[1] Phia, in her early 20s and into VR for years, talks with insight about both gear and the social aspects of virtual worlds.[2] So far, though, no major breakthroughs.

The Yuga Labs / Otherside people tried making their virtual world a very expensive and exclusive experience to get into, in hopes of getting a non-loser crowd. But that turned out to be a Make Money Fast scheme that didn't deliver. Now the SEC is after them.[3]

[1] https://www.techspot.com/review/2206-geforce-rtx-3070-laptop...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg_XB8It240

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-11/bored-ape...

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#33

Post by Animats »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #29
Animats wrote: post #23

For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong. I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are tes…

> I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. That's cool, but...why would I want to use it? I think this is the fundamental problem that bullshitters like Zuckerberg can't actually solve. (And no, forcing employees to use it doesn't count.)

Good question.

When gamers try Second Life, they complain that it's s-l-o-w. That's a fixable problem for people with gamer PCs. They have enough CPU and GPU to do this right. The classic clients are single-thread and OpenGL, so they can't use modern gamer hardware effectively.

If you get rid of the sluggishness, user acceptance improves considerably. Or so says the literature on game design. You get flow. Performance and graphics quality alone are not enough for a win, but not having them means a lose.

I don't have all the answers. But I've pushed things forward a bit.

Lots of people are now making noise about metaverses and AI. Unfortunately, most of the people making noise are the same clowns that pushed NFTs. But there's some good work going on. This has the potential to make metaverses less empty, and human users will have NPCs with which to interact. It can definitely solve the emptyness problem.

NPCs are getting smarter. One of my NPCs in Second Life has a T-shirt that says on the back "Trainee - Someday we'll be in charge." That's less of a joke and more of a threat now.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#34

Post by fastneutron »

It seemed like the only people who could remotely have been considered excited about the concept was a very particular slice of the tech media echo chamber.

The Snow Crash Metaverse was kind of fun to think about. The Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse was DOA given the trashed reputation Facebook had by the time the pivot was announced.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#35

Post by al2o3cr »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #27
Animats wrote: post #23

For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong. I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are tes…

I don't know what's next either, but it seems like the things you describe are not terribly existential? Technical problems and VR nausea will both be solved inevitably as hardware gets better and cheaper — which it always does, thanks to the magic of capitalism. There's also a lot of that magic happening in the world of GPUs right now. The boringness seems like a game design problem. Someone will crack it sooner or…

    which it always does, thanks to the magic of capitalism
LOL sure, the Invisible Hand will reach right into people's ear canals and rearchitect their vestibular systems using the power of THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#36

Post by coffeebeqn »

fastneutron wrote: post #34

It seemed like the only people who could remotely have been considered excited about the concept was a very particular slice of the tech media echo chamber. The Snow Crash Metaverse was kind of fun to think about. The Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse was DOA given the trashed reputation Facebook had by the time the pivot was announced.

And the product wasn’t good.

Quest 2 is pretty good but it’s not ready yet for a few more years. Their software and “games” are just soulless

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#37

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

It’s a different kind of viewport for interacting with people and content. The better the content, the more people. Content will differentiate itself via the traditional mechanisms (effective storytelling, using the new capabilities of the hardware, etc.).

There has been a crack in a wall in Gorilla Tag for two years. My son has been telling me they are releasing an update that lets you go in the crack and explore. It has been really interesting to contrast the flailing of Meta attempting to coherently describe their vision of the metaverse with the ability of the Gorilla Tag developers to build a community around their game.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#38

Post by cloudking »

At a very rudimentary level, I feel like Roblox is the closest thing to the concept of a metaverse as displayed in Ready Player One.

You have an avatar, that can traverse in and out of thousands of shared player made experiences, and you take your things with you. Is there much more to the concept?

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#40

Post by nologic01 »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #28
nologic01 wrote: post #22

> The same criticisms don’t apply to the technologies that underpin the metaverse Interesting, so what tech are we talking about? > As it turns out, people really like collaborative open worlds, as evidenced by Fortnite’s estimated 80 million monthly players Ah, yes, 3D games. The metaverse killer app was hiding in plain virtual reality. But... this nagging doubt... > metaverse companies attracted $120 billion in fun…

1. GPT-0 doesn't reckon, it generates text that looks like the corpus it was trained on. 2. You shouldn't trust this as even a ballpark estimate. It seems ridiculously low, unless you're talking about a 2 or 3 person studio. (And see #1 above.)

GPT-0 was just a bad joke, I meant just googling it.

Yes this is the low end. But keep in mind you could also buy outright four Activisions with that annual spending.

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