The Metaverse has no clothes

Are they really trying to be the metaverse though, or trying to be their own closed garden with a license to print money?

A proper metaverse would be an open standard. like HTTP and HTML was for the world wide web - where people could author and host their VR spaces independently, with connections between them.

Oops, accidentally posted that in Careers, apparently. Meant to post it in Business.

More hype:

• "The Metaverse ETF will let you invest in stocks that are the internet’s future"
• “‘Walking Dead’ NFTs to Roam the Metaverse”
• "Outlier Ventures Launches Filecoin Base Camp to Accelerate the Next Generation of Startups in the Open Metaverse"
• “NFT Oasis Raises $4.4 Million in Financing and Opens a Bridge to the Metaverse Enabling Creators to Reach the Masses Using Virtual Reality”
• “CryptoKickers Is Bringing NFT Sneakers to the Hypebeasts of the Metaverse”

These are all in the last 2 days. All in mainstream media.

WTF? I thought the NFT thing had crashed already.

I feel some kind of laundry business going on…

And now, Zuckerberg wants to try to do a Metaverse. Again. After Facebook Spaces and Facebook Horizons.

What he seems to have in mind this time is something involving AR goggles. Imagine everyone logged into Facebook all the time.

Nagle said:
What he seems to have in mind this time is something involving AR goggles. Imagine everyone logged into Facebook all the time.

Too late. AR maybe is hip some time, but fb is old boys club already now.
Some other dude will put virtual ads on everything.

New article on GamesIndustry.biz today: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-08-20-what-is-the-metaverse-and-why-is-it-worth-so-much-money​

“So far, there seems to be a lack of consensus on what the metaverse could actually be, but investors seem to agree there's big money in it.” Right.

There's a huge disconnect between what people are talking about and what's actually running. Facebook makes a lot of metaverse noise, but what they're shipping is another meeting-room program. (With really good spatial audio. Audio seems to be the big product differentiator for meeting systems.) Robox makes a lot of noise, but what they really have is a nice mini-game platform for kids. Epic makes a lot of noise, but what they really have is a very popular battle royale game with some social add-ons. The systems that are trying for full-on Ready Player One remain kind of niche - Dual Universe, VRChat, Second Life, Improbable. Whether they're stuck in that niche due to technical limits or fun limits is a good question.

There's also the AR line of development, Google Glass → Pokemon Go → Hyperreality → some kind of always-on Facebook/Google Goggles. The AR people want to compete with cell phones, and have to get the hardware size, weight, power consumption, and cost down. They also have to figure out how the user controls the thing. And how many ads they will tolerate.

That's sort of where we are right now.

Nagle said:
That's sort of where we are right now.

And where do we want to go? And why?

Thanks to the linked article i know now what ‘Metaverse’ means. It's pretty much what i had expected.
Ofc. i've thought about this idea too, like most of us, probably since our childhood.
It's the promise of a virtual computer world to our liking, later mixed with the other ideas of making money when growing up.
Personally i name it ‘The final game’. It's final, because people can make their own content inside / for the game, so no more need for other games.
If we ever get this, there is an obvious winner, explaining why people invest.

But that's surely not what we want. Risk of not being the one and only winner is too high :D And it's monopoly, etc.
So the other option would be some open standard. Like html for reality simulation. With competing but compatible implementations.
How much better is that? Probably the standard is not what everyone wants, and it will evolve slowly, but never be right.

I don't know. Is it an opportunity for good things? Like uniting the world? Tearing down cultural walls? Better than the internet can do?
Or is it more a treat than a dream, about being sheep in a cloud. Living a life of wasting time, confused from ads and echo chambers.

I mean, in some games i often feel like having to work. Collect 10 magic flowers to proceed. Mixing reality and games may follow this practice to someones profit.
I can only imagine a meaningful metaverse if it rises from the people, some kind of cool underground maybe.
But whenever some rich guys put the word in their mouth, i prepare to run, not to plug in.

A good metaverse is a clan for a certain online game. Meetups and fun playing together.

That is if you like the clan you're in.

The Metaverse has no clothes

oO

I thought the topic is news about alien monsters without clothes
are coming through the faraway metaverse black holes into this
universe to this planet. Scary. :P

Hi! Metaverse builder here! (In my career I've helped build There.com, OLIVE, IMVU, and Roblox.) I no longer work directly in this business, so I've managed to get some distance on that particular phenomena, which I believed strongly enough in to spend 20 years of my life on.

Will someone uproot their real life to live virtually, wearing a Scuba mask for work 8 hours a day, drink virtual coffee, and send the kids to virtual Video Game High School using a virtual jetpack?

No.

Well, at least not until we get “cable in the brain, we might as well be living in the matrix” level interface technology.

Virtual worlds are great to fill in spaces missing in the real world. Some people have fewer real-life friends who are like them, locally. They can find friends online! And in 3D, it's more immediate! This is great! Some people are a boy / girl / dragon on the inside but a cat / octopus / businessman on the outside. In various societies (even in “western” countries,) those people can't be who they really feel like, in the real world. But online, they can! This is great! Some people need to communicate with high bandwidth, in a space that allows one to easily illustrate / re-configure geometry for concept communication. A good enough metaverse could fill this space better than Zoom, assuming everyone who needed it was on board. This would be swell!

But, I can take a zoom call while I'm driving. I can drop off the kids while on the way to the grocery store. My desk and keyboard don't lock up the sweat into my face. The precision of a 2D CAD application is much more applicable to mechanical design work than a laggy, imprecise, jittery handheld 6DOF controller.

The metaverse will fill some niches where it hasn't managed to go yet. Some of those niches are pretty big (Play! Entertainment! Mass market interactive education experiences!) Some of those are small (Planning a movie shoot or special forces operations mission.) But they wont' take over the real world, they will, at best, augment it and accelerate it.

Now, regarding “crypto” worlds: All the NFT / decentralized nonsense, just like some centralized virtual real estate things before it (like Project Entropia?) seems to me to be a perfect cover for real-world transactions. If I'm going to pay you for a kilo of coke, will you send me a receipt so I can show where the money went? No, you will send me a totally unique obviously very valuable NFT, virtual land package, or share in a decentralized business on the block chain. See, totally legit! Future-looking investment! No money laundering happening here, no sir-ee!

(And I say this as a crypto HODL-er since 2012, so it's not like I'm against the general idea of cryptographically assured minimum-cost-of-fungibility as a transactional primitive!)