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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

#151

Post by shepardrtc »

zmmmmm wrote: post #132
Kapura wrote: post #6

In my mind, the ambiguity of what "the metaverse" actually means allowed a bunch of people to sell it as panacea in different realms. When the smoke cleared and you were left with MMOs, video chat, and vr setups people don't buy or use, a lot of those castles start to fall over. However, stuff like Fortnite or Roblox, which seemingly fulfill many of the Metaverse promises, continue to be reasonably successful. But th…

> the ambiguity of what "the metaverse" actually means If you root cause on that you come back to, Zuckerberg made a big splash with his announcement and then followed up with .... nothing . As much as anything, these other things were filling a vacuum. Of course it got filled up with toxic garbage. The inexplicable thing to me is purely that Meta has failed to deliver anything closely resembling an experience that r…

Honestly, in my opinion, only Mark believes in the Zuckerverse. Everyone else at Meta is just trying to keep their job at this point. If you directly ask them about it, they'll hem and haw about the future of interaction changing and how business meetings will be conducted with headsets and all that. But do they really believe in it? I don't really think so.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#152

Post by jurimasa »

charcircuit wrote: post #144
devnullbrain wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>What glasses fix this? One with a strong prescription. If you are fully blind in one eye you can still use VR. You will just see monoscopic just as you do outside of VR.

No it doesn't work like that. I'm amblyopic. I only have like 10 or 20% visual capacity on my right eye. Using those devices suck even more than a 3D movie.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#153

Post by dkersten »

dkersten wrote: post #129
shafyy wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I should have said: I don’t want VR for metaverse/virtual worlds, outside of pure entertainment. I don’t mind the negatives I mentioned for short bursts of entertainment, but for “serious” use, work/business and multiple hours per day — no thanks.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#154

Post by Animats »

dale_glass wrote: post #88
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…

High Fidelity isn't loading pre-baked levels. At least the original High Fidelity isn't, the new one is still a 2D Zoom of sorts as far as I know. I'm part of the organization that picked up the old High Fidelity codebase.

Oh, good. High Fidelity was promising. Is that going anywhere?

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#155

Post by laratied »

therealbilly wrote: post #149

I have no doubt the metaverse will be the future. Obviously it's hard for people to imagine the possibilities. It's also hard to explain it to people who lack imagination. I think it opens up amazing new horizons for humans to be a part of. From work to recreation. One example, you are working, writing code. You have virtual monitors hanging in front of you. No need to have a physical monitor with limited real estate…

As if a huge part of the experience of a beach in Bali is not feeling the sand between your toes, the temperature of the water on your skin, the smell of the ocean, the ambient air temperature, the feeling of a change in your weight when you dive underwater, not being able to breath underwater, being cooler when you get out of the water than when you enter, all the local people your interacted with to get to the beach.

Maybe it is you who lacks imagination because pretending reality is just what you can see and hear while wearing a mask is utter bullshit.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#156

Post by irq-1 »

chimprich wrote: post #66
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…

With respect to the metaverse being boring... I agree. Most VR experiences are lacking. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation (in my opinion only: I know how bearish HN is on anything VR). There aren't enough users to get enough investment in creating experiences, and not enough experiences to really get the users... There's the odd exception, like Alyx, but creating a whole metaverse is a much bigger challeng…

I once saw an Nvidia project where AI created 'medieval' buildings, but I can't find the link. I did find these:

https://developer.nvidia.com/omniverse/simready-assets

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/omniverse

*edit: Rapidly Generate 3D Assets for Virtual Worlds with Generative AI https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/rapidly-generate-3d-assets...

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#157

Post by JohnFen »

wnscooke wrote: post #117
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…

“Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games.” Strange that this line has been misunderstood when ppl write that (of all thing) email has done fine in community building without looking great. I think it’s the perspective - metaverses expect us to be _inside_ looking around, not looking at it from the outside. Who hasn’t thought, while playing an AAA title game, “aw man, this would look so coo…

> Who hasn’t thought, while playing an AAA title game, “aw man, this would look so cool if I was IN THE GAME!”

I haven't, because every great game I've ever played has made me feel like I was in the game. Even games with primitive graphics or text-based games. The actual VR games I've played don't achieve that.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#158

Post by two_handfuls »

devnullbrain wrote: post #44
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…

>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…

> including one who's blind in one eye.

Interestingly, even people who are blind in one eye can enjoy VR, including the perception of depth.

Binocular vision is only one of the ways we get 3D cues, and not even the main one. The main cue is motion parallax: how things move when we move our head (or body). This one still works even with a single eye.

I have read reports of people with one functioning eye enjoying VR. Just as in real life their eyes do not give a 3D image. Just as in real life, their brain can still infer 3D just fine.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#159

Post by mrguyorama »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #106
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 certainly don't disagree with your NFT rant :-) but do disagree with the characterization of the nominal "metaverse." Back in the late 90's early noughts it Dave Rosenthal did a research paper on what it would take to create a "stadium" with 50,000 people in it where a sporting event was held. And create the "environment" that one gets when you are actually at such a stadium. One of the challenges is that physics d…

All this misses the most important point; Nobody will pay $500 for a standalone high quality VR headset to experience a shitty VR "Stadium" ticket that should cost $30 if you go to a real damn stadium.

Nobody fantasizes about living a virtual life that emulates real life. They want to live a fantasy life. Plenty of people managed that with just mid 2000s era WoW. Metaverse has nothing to offer

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#160

Post by mrguyorama »

rippercushions wrote: post #130
himinlomax wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Only a very small part of game or world immersion is technical though. The best VR setup in the world won't help you if the game is terrible.
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