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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

#121

Post by otikik »

chaostheory wrote: post #71
crazygringo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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... Users need a midrange gamer PC (NVidia 1060 or better, at least 6 CPUs). Well yeah. Horizon Worlds runs directly on the Quest 2, not on a gaming PC. Obviously anyone can achieve GTA V quality if you're power…

I agree. This is what the VR purists are missing: normal people are not going to spend about $2000 or more for a desktop gaming PC, and another $1000 for the VR headset and base stations. The setup even for techies isn’t easy and straightforward either. Wires are also no fun for VR Regardless of how you feel about meta, it’s really impressive that they were able to ship a decent 6DOF, standalone, VR headset at $299 w…

> VR headset at $299

Wasn't Facebook losing money on each headset sold, though?

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#123

Post by shafyy »

Animats wrote: post #83
crazygringo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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... Users need a midrange gamer PC (NVidia 1060 or better, at least 6 CPUs). Well yeah. Horizon Worlds runs directly on the Quest 2, not on a gaming PC. Obviously anyone can achieve GTA V quality if you're power…

> Obviously anyone can achieve GTA V quality if you're powering it with a gaming PC, just by basing it on Unreal Engine. Unreal and Unity do much preprocessing and optimization of game content. All that takes place long before the game runs. Much of the smarts in Unreal Engine resides in Unreal Engine Editor, not the runtime. A metaverse client which displays dynamic user-created content from many creators doesn't ha…

Sorry but you're not even answering the quoted part of the person you're replying to in your reply. Their point is that games on the Quest 2 standalone don't look like AAA PC titles because of the hardware limitations, not because of the missing technical chops of the programmers.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#124

Post by JackFr »

charcircuit wrote: post #107
pjmlp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using tiny screens a few cms away from the eye makes a big difference, I am also not able to use it.

The screens are usually moved to be from 1 to ~infinity meters away by the lenses. Unless you mean that glasses are hard to use with some headsets because there is not enough room to fit. Lens inserts are typically the solution for that.

There are more eyesight than those which can be addressed with simple corrective lenses.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#125

Post by devnullbrain »

charcircuit wrote: post #57
devnullbrain wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>about 5% - 15% of the population becomes nauseated. That's just those who can use VR at all. Three members of my immediate family can't because of eyesight issues, including one who's blind in one eye. According to the Quest manual, I have a condition that means I should contact a doctor before using it. If I worked for a company pushing this, I'd have a hard time believing any claims they made about supporting dive…

>family can't because of eyesight issues, including one who's blind in one eye Eyesight issues don't stop you from using VR. In VR you will have the same eyesight issues as you do in real life. If you use glasses, then you can still wear glasses when you use VR.

I'm not saying that all eyesight issues stop you from using VR, I'm saying theirs do. This is not theoretical, they have tested it.

Did you miss that I said one of them is blind in one eye? What glasses fix this?

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#126

Post by jillesvangurp »

It's a bit of a repeat of the early nineties and various companies trying to own the internet. None of it worked until people rallied around a bit of technology that worked based on open standards. Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash around the same time Tim Berners Lee worked on Mosaic, the first proper web browser. One of those things worked. In the years after we had crap like Compuserve, AOL, and others trying to sell off their walled gardens as the Internet. But about ten years later it became clear that the internet really just meant tcp/ip, email, browsers, and all the rest. The lowest common denominator that worked across the thing became ultimately the only thing people wanted.

Of course there have been attempts at open standards for VR. Things like VRML existed 20 years ago and there have been more recent efforts. You can buy VR goggles from a range of vendors and there are lots of games and other things you can use with them. But it's all disconnected stuff and little walled gardens. So, none of that adds up to a coherent web like experience where you can move from one thing to another without leaving your browser just by clicking links.

You can of course run a browser and project it onto your goggles but that seems a bit pointless as the content is almost exclusively 2D. But why is that? Movie producers have been producing 3D movies for ages. Why don't Netflix or Amazon or anyone serve any of that? Reason: standards are missing and there's a huge chicken egg problem of no audience and therefore no content. What little content there is is rotting away in archives owned by companies interested only in walled gardens that don't actually exist. So most of that content is basically unused after it leaves the theaters where people can enjoy it in 3D. And that's just movies.

As long as companies insist on walled gardens, this chicken egg problem is theirs to solve. No content means no users show up and the only people that buy VR goggles are gamers interested in checking out some of the walled gardens.

I hear Apple is about to join this party. They love walled gardens. I don't have high hopes for theirs.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#127

Post by totetsu »

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…

Pardon my ignorance .. but what exactly .. or technically .. is the metaverse? how does one go about building a client? Are there api docs to refer to? is there like an equivalent to the 3gpp documents defining the standard of 5G?

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#128

Post by wkat4242 »

pmontra wrote: post #113

> people really like collaborative open worlds to do things that they cannot do in other ways, but there are plenty of other effective and more comfortable ways to do business meetings than wearing a visor or special glasses, maybe over prescription glasses. So it's a solution looking for a problem. No wonder that it was a hit for gaming or for very specialized tasks where a 3D representation of a subject is an impro…

> By the way, everybody spends at least half of their career with prescription glasses: presbyopia hits as early as 40 if you're unlucky. Even at a more normal 50 it's a long time to retirement. Imagine the success of mobile phones if you had to slowly use them less and less after you turn 40.

VR headsets are focused about 1.5m away. You don't need glasses even if you need them to read normally. Unless you can't see that distance in real life either. But reading glasses are not necessary.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#129

Post by dkersten »

shafyy wrote: post #123
Animats wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously anyone can achieve GTA V quality if you're powering it with a gaming PC, just by basing it on Unreal Engine. Unreal and Unity do much preprocessing and optimization of game content. All that takes place long before the game runs. Much of the smarts in Unreal Engine resides in Unreal Engine Editor, not the runtime. A metaverse client which displays dynamic user-created content from many creators doesn't ha…

Sorry but you're not even answering the quoted part of the person you're replying to in your reply. Their point is that games on the Quest 2 standalone don't look like AAA PC titles because of the hardware limitations, not because of the missing technical chops of the programmers.

That may be the technical reason, but end users don’t care about the why, when they can get superior visuals on even last gen game consoles.

Sure, that’s not VR, but I would argue that VR actually needs better visuals to be compelling to avoid an uncanny valley-like effect, unless you go super stylised and cartoony, which may work fine for many entertainment virtual worlds/games but good luck with real world brands and business.

Personally, I don’t even want VR, for two reasons: 1. it shuts me out of the real world too much, I don’t want to be that disconnected for long periods of time because I have coworkers, family, deliveries, my cat, whatever other things around me that I need to be aware of, and 2. in its current form factor, it’s simply tiring. I was playing with a PSVR2 recently and it was cool, but after about 45 minutes my face just got tired of wearing a headset and I wanted to do something else, even though I would have happily kept playing the game itself.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#130

Post by rippercushions »

himinlomax wrote: post #119
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…

> Third, there's the VR nausea problem VR nausea wouldn't be an issue if they focused on making the thing accessible without a VR set to begin with. With the exception of a tiny minority of early adopters, people are not going to buy a VR headset nor even bother with the setup if they have no killer app to use it with.

Immersion is pretty much the point of VR, and until Elon's Neuralink gets their shit together (not holding my breath) VR headsets are the least bad option we have.
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