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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

#161

Post by WorldMaker »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #16

I think some sort of "metaverse" outside of Meta Horizon Worlds could have been real, but I don't think anyone would have taken it seriously because it would have just ended up another Second Life, Garry's Mod, or VRChat. That just doesn't sound like the next trillion dollar idea. It's barely a repeatable million dollar idea. Is there a possibility for some sort of new protocol and client software where people naviga…

> I think some sort of "metaverse" outside of Meta Horizon Worlds could have been real, but I don't think anyone would have taken it seriously because it would have just ended up another Second Life, Garry's Mod, or VRChat.

A lot of Meta's Horizon Worlds efforts wind up reading like "those who forget the past [Second Life] wind up repeating it (poorly)".

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#162

Post by jfengel »

josephg wrote: post #86
geek_at wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a common thing in "disruptive technology". The companies see it like "OMG we build this amazing environment, we can't wait for you to use it" but company policies see little to no value in actually adopting it themselves. Sometimes this works if some niche will adopt it and let the system grow with them but it's very rare

Yeah. There’s a story I heard from the launch of Zelda: Breath of the wild (the last one). After what I assume was a flurry of work and crazy deadlines, they sent everyone on the development team home for 2 weeks to rest, and maybe just enjoy playing the game they had made with their family before it launched. After coming back in to the office, needless to say everyone had little things they personally wanted to tid…

The answer to your question, I'm afraid, is "time". Zelda was heavily pre-ordered, and they had a deadline to hit.

The fact that they could take two weeks off and still hit the window is a testament to their good planning. (And the fact that they had already announced a delay a year earlier.) But software is notoriously hard to plan, and a lot of things could easily have turned that two week time off into two weeks of 100-hour crunch time.

It sounds as if they planned a generous schedule, which is another great thing. Triple-A game studios are notorious for doing the Silicon Valley thing: make optimistic announcements and insist that everybody work unpaid overtime to make it happen. Artists, QA, and other "little people" often take the brunt of the hit there, and sure don't get rich off of it.

Taking the time to develop a product well, without killing your team, seems anathema to a lot of CEOs.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#163

Post by ahzhou »

nstart wrote: post #69

One thing I can never get over is the fact that despite all their claims of going all in, Meta never seemed to actually be invested in the Metaverse themselves. If they really believed in it, the first priority of the company would have been to make it so that every non hardware unit of their physical offices was shut down and people were told to go work from the metaverse within the spaces of their homes, beach hous…

It’s incredibly hard (read: impossible) to make top-down dogfood pushes across a massive company like Meta. You have three options:

1) Create an team to internally sell it

2) Make it an ultimatum, and fire people if they don’t agree

3) Hope your marketing is good enough that you get grassroots adoption

Option 1 is a waste of money - your best sales folks should be making money, not doing internal processes. Option 2 is terrible for moral and retention. Option 3 is ineffective. I’m sure Zuck would have loved to have the whole company on the metaverse if he could.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#164

Post by [deleted] »

ahzhou wrote: post #163
nstart wrote: post #69

One thing I can never get over is the fact that despite all their claims of going all in, Meta never seemed to actually be invested in the Metaverse themselves. If they really believed in it, the first priority of the company would have been to make it so that every non hardware unit of their physical offices was shut down and people were told to go work from the metaverse within the spaces of their homes, beach hous…

It’s incredibly hard (read: impossible) to make top-down dogfood pushes across a massive company like Meta. You have three options: 1) Create an team to internally sell it 2) Make it an ultimatum, and fire people if they don’t agree 3) Hope your marketing is good enough that you get grassroots adoption Option 1 is a waste of money - your best sales folks should be making money, not doing internal processes. Option 2…

[deleted]

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#165

Post by pmontra »

wkat4242 wrote: post #128
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…

I need glasses too read my screen which is at a arm length from my face, about 70 cm. Myopia is also a thing and if it starts it starts much earlier than presbyopia.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#166

Post by JohnFen »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #99
nstart wrote: post #69

One thing I can never get over is the fact that despite all their claims of going all in, Meta never seemed to actually be invested in the Metaverse themselves. If they really believed in it, the first priority of the company would have been to make it so that every non hardware unit of their physical offices was shut down and people were told to go work from the metaverse within the spaces of their homes, beach hous…

I agree with this at least for the Reality Labs group it would have been a way to eat your own cooking. Like normal remote work, a lot depends on roles and the ratio of sync to async in your schedule. Much can be done async within a time window if you build suitable workflows. Spending the hour or two insync time as an Avatar in a 360 6DOF 3D meeting room floating out at sea with your team would have its advantages o…

> Spending the hour or two insync time as an Avatar in a 360 6DOF 3D meeting room floating out at sea with your team would have its advantages over zoom squares.

What are the advantages that would have?

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#167

Post by JohnFen »

totetsu wrote: post #127
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?

"The Metaverse" is a marketing term looking for something cool to be attached to.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#168

Post by JohnFen »

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.

Just a general note: this isn't always the pattern the magic of capitalism gives us. There are as many examples of the reverse of that as supporting it.

As a quick example: toasters. The magic of capitalism has made sure that actually good toasters no longer exist in the consumer market.

> Once there are incentive structures in place, advertising will find a way to slide in.

Which, in the end, is what will keep me out.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#169

Post by JohnFen »

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.

> VR headsets are the least bad option we have.

True, but they're still a bad option.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#170

Post by ChuckMcM »

mrguyorama wrote: post #159
ChuckMcM wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Nobody" is carrying a lot of weight there :-). Do you have any reasoning here for your point of view? (not criticizing it, just wondering how you got there given what we know.)

For example, a ticket for the 49ers on the 50 yard line is ~ $1200 - $1500 depending on how important it is as a game. Also, existing renderers for sports figures are quite good given the market for video games featuring them, so it isn't clear that the visual quality would not be "just as good." Finally, the ability to do SLAM for stadium events is so good they can paint graphics on a moving player in real time as it happens.

So this is how my reasoning about it goes; Let's say it costs you $1000 for super hi-def VR goggles.[1] And the NFL decides to charge you $200 to sit on the 50 yard line "virtually" [2]. Your initial investment is $1200 ($200 less than the actual seat). Presumably you and your buddies would be allowed to be "next to each other." So there you sit, as a group, in great seats watching the game how you want to watch it, and all your friends are chatting with you. Every time you do this you save another $1200 off the cost of doing it "for reals."

But how can we even know that something like this would even be fun? The answer lays in the enjoyability of watching a movie "together" in VR. I think this is something of a sleeper as it isn't "a thing" in many people's mind yet, but it is definitely better than "simulwatching" while you have discord running. I suspect "twitch watching parties" would also have a similar vibe.

Other than the sex in Second Life, just hanging out is a very popular reason for participating in a MMO type universe. Having your "idealized" avatar with your face morphed on to it with all of its expressions retained intact and I think that would be pretty powerful.

So that is why I think it could be a thing, but I'm interested in your take on it as well.

[1] https://store.bigscreenvr.com/products/bigscreen-beyond

[2] https://theathletic.com/4522408/2023/05/16/nfl-average-ticke...

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