Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The metaverse is bullshit

outline.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 780 posts

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#751

Post by greggh »

vadansky wrote: post #589
greggh wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on your needs, the technology is already there. I already do most of my work in VR with my partner, while he is also in VR from his house about 2 miles away. We need a few desktop screens up for information, a big whiteboard, and the ability to see each others screens. With Immersed and Horizon Workrooms we get all of that already. Before workrooms was really stable we were using Immersed and keeping Mural…

Which Headset? I’d love to do this but most VR owners say the DPI is still not there for small text and it’s too cumbersome to keep wearing for hours.

I use the Quest 2, but there are a lot of important things to note. You have to use the right fonts to get text to be crisp/clear enough. I use the Input font, I've mentioned it a few times here.

The biggest problem with wearing it for hours is comfort. The strap that comes with the Quest 2 is not good enough. You will feel the weight of it on your cheeks the most, it will get sore pretty quickly. You have to upgrade. I use a halo strap from VR Panda, it solves that problem for me.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#752

Post by CRConrad »

slightwinder wrote: post #569
dandotway wrote: post #71

Text is mightier than the Metaverse. Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text. News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors. Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed…

> Text is mightier than the Metaverse. "A Picture says more than a thousand words." > Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. Because text is asynchronous, and persistent. Text is a weak medium, but with specific strengths which can beat others in certain situation if they can played well. > We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text. I guess you haven't discove…

> > Text is mightier than the Metaverse.

> "A Picture says more than a thousand words."

One of those two is bullshit (and always has been)... And it's not the first one.

> > We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.

> I guess you haven't discovered yet youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...

And yet, here you are discussing this -- not on youtube, twitch, instagram, tik tok...

> > Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.

> Which is proof that text is the weaker medium, because text demands the readers to fill the holes, which is for some a beneficial experience.

This was, by my count, the third time in your comment you claimed that "text is the weaker medium" -- each time in response to an example illustrating how text is superior. So basically, your definition of "weaker" is... What the rest of the world would call stronger, right?

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#753

Post by CRConrad »

mc32 wrote: post #683
michaelmrose wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name some works first conceived as books where the movie adaptation was superior? Reading for pleasure requires an individual with a greater degree of imagination and intelligence vs staring at a screen and often takes a much greater time investment and yet often offers a broader set of experiences because one needn't convince someone to invest 100s of millions animating fantastic scenes if one author sitting…

I think we’re talking past each other. I’m saying yes, we hear lots of people say “the book was better” and in most cases that’s true. However, most people will never have read the books movies based on books were based on, so it’s kind of a pointless Pyrrhic argument. That said, many will claim that The Godfather movie was better than the book -I never read the book, so I cannot offer an opinion. But, yes, normally,…

> That said, many will claim that The Godfather movie was better than the book -I never read the book, so I cannot offer an opinion.

I think I tried, lo so many moons ago. And IIRC, I can confirm that yes, The Godfather is one of the few exceptions that proves the rule.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#754

Post by CRConrad »

jen20 wrote: post #626
ARandomerDude wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The library costs you money too, in the form of taxes. At least Netflix only charges its actual users. I'm forced to pay for the two public libraries in my town even though I've never been in them.

The cost of civilization. It appears lost of many.

Fortunately, those whom civilisation just doesn't rub off onto are still farily easy to spot.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#755

Post by CRConrad »

justapassenger wrote: post #444
dandotway wrote: post #71

Text is mightier than the Metaverse. Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting. We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text. News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors. Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed…

And that’s why text based games dominated the world and no one is playing 3D games?

No, lots more people want to drown out their thoughts than think any. What else is new?

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#756

Post by toss1 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #746
toss1 wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Because text is asynchronous, and persistent. Text is a weak medium, but with specific strengths which can beat others in certain situation if they can played well. It is indeed async & persistent, but those are not it's only strengths. Text is ALSO highly searchable, and skim-able. I can search and jump right to the point I want, I can rapidly skim through parts I'm not so interested in and then focus and examine…

Text is far superior to video for conveying (most types of) information. It's not so great for building individual relationships. An ideal VR metaverse would be focused on the latter.

I'm not so sure about that.

Often, people's considered thoughts will give a better connection than their offhand comments. Many a great romance or friendship has grown and been preserved by handwritten letters sent via the post.

In thinking about my last comment, what I'd really want in a metaverse is the ability for the participants' thoughts to be scanned, textualized, and edited via thought transfer, then displayed above/beside them, so we can both read and speak about things in real-time, at the speed of thought/reading, instead of speech. It could get really interesting...

It is sooo common to feel that we can't communicate nearly as fast as we think, even when the lot of us are very fast talkers...

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#757

Post by CRConrad »

watercooler_guy wrote: post #72
zemo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure he says that but what they’re doing is the opposite. They’re not releasing standards, they’re not making the equivalent of a cgi-bin server that lets me run my own simulation that someone can transit to from someone else’s simulation, they’re not releasing a high quality client that can target simulations owned by other companies, etc. They say people can make spaces but it’s very Geocities. Sure, people can mak…

but isn't it good that the standards aren't coming from Facebook, but rather will have to come from a more neutral source? I also wouldn't expect a big corp to be the one to create open standards for the rest of the community. The way I see it, Facebook kicking off the push towards a metaverse is kind of like Bell Labs creating Unix. Sure it took a big corp with a lot of money, but that gives the rest of the communit…

> but isn't it good that the standards aren't coming from Facebook, but rather will have to come from a more neutral source?

What's to say that's how it's going to go here?

> I also wouldn't expect a big corp to be the one to create open standards for the rest of the community.

Exactly. So root for a W3C metaverse, not Facebook's walled garden.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#758

Post by CRConrad »

benatkin wrote: post #630
tsimionescu wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are discounting that there would be anything new at all in a "Metaverse" offering driving compared to what exists today in gaming. Of course you can have fun with virtual driving, there already exists a plethora of ways, from realistic-ish high speed racing in Gran Turismo to wacky racing in Mario Kart to realistic-ish long-form driving in Truck Simulator.

How about new places to drive? Virtual reality can have all sorts of landscapes, and moving along a surface, whether it be hilly or flat like Tron, will be popular. Driving is one way to move along a surface, but there's also running, swimming, base jumping, skiing, snowboarding, skating, and others. I'm sure all will be common in the metaverse. For an example of something where driving is exciting and totally unnece…

> How about new places to drive?

Yeah, that's just "the layout of the game's tracks" from the G^~5P, only now in more detail.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#759

Post by CRConrad »

Banana699 wrote: post #613
Jasper_ wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds incoherent. Why are we all drinking OJ/beer? Can we taste it? If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers (that all understand English and American culture enough for me to gossip about US celebrities apparently?) without risking giving up the lie? Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket, too. It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why…

>That sounds incoherent. Why so? the first 3 paragraphs are 2 examples of why a 1:1 reconstruction of our world on demand can be an amazing thing, the remaining is the statment 'All creation or innovation that the human brain does, or is ever capable off, is simply mixing and remixing its readings of the outside world. So mutable and cheap on-demand reconstructions of the outside world will be an immense boost to cre…

> the first 3 paragraphs are 2 examples of why a 1:1 reconstruction of our world on demand can be an amazing thing

But they obviously weren't "a 1:1 reconstruction of our world": You can't all simultaneously be drinking beer and be drinking OJ in the real world, so all the scenarios were false.

Re: The metaverse is bullshit

#760

Post by CRConrad »

lowdose wrote: post #369
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people would tell you that the car showroom experience is one of the enjoyable parts of buying a car - the new car smells and discovering the knobs and features, and how comfy the lumbar support is in the shiny new models - VR doesn't come close. I was CTO in an Augmented Reality company that did a lot of user testing (using AR to showcase products) so have atleast a rudimentary understanding of the technology a…

We just don’t have the compute to render a full universe experience in God mode.

Obviously only God has.

(Well, he would if he existed.)

Post reply on HN