What is trying to be communicated here is psychographic content will be delivered via standard device substrates existing in well aligned usage patterns that will no doubt delight the end-user with value. Metaverse here simply means they will deliver an experience that is parallel to user expectation yet orthogonal to the digital representation of the physical model of the prevailing social zeitgeist.
Or maybe someone just read Ready Player One recently, and is just thinking: We're going to build the Oasis but nobody could possibility understand what that is, I'll have to break it down into easy-to-misunderstand corpobabble.
The Black Sun was there first.
Can i interest you in a loose collection of extremely janky perl scripts? The bar’s owner hates it but, who cares? If he kicks us out we can just race bikes for a while until the fuss blows over.
On a more serious note, I think these are different metaverses. Ours is pretty much locked in VR as far as I can tell, and Apple is building an overlay on zeroth-order reality, aka AR. Arguably harder and more powerful if done properly. Which I'm sure it won't be.
:P
My response is kind of stuck between "that's overly cynical, isn't it" and "statistically speaking, that's pretty likely".
(I was actually working at an early AR project at Nokia a bit over a decade ago, at the time called Point & Find, later called CityLens. It gave me a feeling that good AR may be one of those things that remains "just a couple years away" for decades.)
I don't know what the "killer app" for AR is really going to be. CityLens and comparable apps like Yelp Monocle on smartphones clearly haven't cut it. (Show of hands: how many people remembered Yelp had an augmented reality mode? I don't think it's there anymore.) I think the big challenge now is thinking of applications that aren't games where using goggles/glasses give you more than incremental improvements over putting the UI on your wrist or in your ear(s).
I wonder if it really is a navigation HUD. For example, i’d love this, with some auditory interface, for things like cycling and motorcycling and also probably normal driving too. Safely presenting salient information in the same depth of focus as the road, and giving me tools to interact with it with voice, would be good AR in those situations, and i’m in them pretty frequently.
Is that a big enough market? Will it inevitably descend into the inverse of They Live?
we’ve given the hardware a shot at least a few times now and wearable glasses tech has not yet been useful. But i can’t think of anything else.
- Low latency, ideally imperceptibly low
- "Delta-zero", meaning the overlaid virtual reality should never drift from reality itself. This is probably theoretically impossible, so let's just be imperceptible here too.
This should boil down to a completely continuous interface over the sensory domains of all humans (other animals?)
For now I assume we are only talking about the visual and audio senses.
All eyes and ears.
> Of course, I think I can help. (…)[jibberish]
Lol, well done!
If you can't explain what you mean in simple, easy to understand language, and you're not talking about quantum physics, you're just bullshitting. Should be required reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
But it’s also not totally unfair. I think much of the metaverse & AR ecosystem doesn’t have great terminology.
I mean ‘slap some goggles on and touch floaty doo-hickeys that you see but they aren’t really there’ doesn’t quite have the same curb appeal…
If we’re pursuing a Metaverse, VR Chat is closer to a Metaverse than Apple.
Also, Apple will try to make useful things appear in your VR goggles - like showing you how to get home on a map, when in fact you're planning to go out for a drink, or go grocery shopping, or anything but.
This is a terrible article, but the idea is - if not sound, at least potentially interesting.
It's basically enhanced location-aware cognition, taking input from everything around you - sound, video, tactile input, GPS location, event history, AI-enhanced memory - and combining it in real time to produce (checks notes...) "a new class of life-enhancing interactions."
The problem? It needs a lot of moving parts working together seamlessly with better-than-human performance and reliability.
Otherwise it will be a kludgy distracting nightmare of failed meta-everything - like the most annoying and useless intern anyone has ever had, only everywhere.
Clippy?
/s (I hope)
Personally, I dislike the term and I believe that it causes people to lose credibility when they use it. However, I can define it to some extent.
Consider the term 'universe' in the context of 'a particular sphere of activity, interest, or experience'. For example, the 'Harry Potter universe'.
The 'metaverse' is simply such a 'universe' that you can't really opt out of, because it's a layer on top of, rather than distinct from, the regular old world. This is why AR is often considered to be such an intrinsic aspect of it.
Now, you might say that 'the internet' is just such a metaverse, but it isn't because it doesn't benefit the people who peddle the buzzword.
Metaphysics = the physics of physics
Metascience = studying science itself with science
Metaphilosophy = Philosophy about philosophy itself
Metadata = data describing data
Gaming 'meta' = the game of how to best play the game
'Meta' is one of those ultra-abstract terms that obfuscates the meaning of whatever word it is attached to unless the listener gives or has given the word a fair amount of thought. Ah, then maybe that is why it is being used here.
Metaphysics isn't really the "physics of physics" though. It is part of philosophy, not physics. It isn't even the "philosophy of physics", since that names a branch of philosophy distinct from metaphysics (albeit they do have some points of overlap.) This is an example of where the meaning of a term is different from the sum of its parts.
The philosophical implications of quantum theory (and its interpretations) is one part of the philosophy of physics, but the study of those implications go beyond just metaphysics proper and also extends to other areas of philosophy such as the philosophy of mind, epistemology, the philosophy of logic, etc. Conversely, there are some debates in metaphysics with which contemporary philosophy of physics doesn't concern itself with much, such as the relationship between existence and essence, or the problem of universals.
A "metaverse" is a "universe" in the sense that it's a shared 4D spacetime that you can explore (using some technology to give you a window into it). It's "meta" because it's layered on top of our "base universe": It's there to describe and augment the physical universe we exist in.
For example: If, in your vision (via glasses, or a HUD, or a pane of glass or a brain implant), there's a big 3D arrow hovering above a road then the arrow exists in the "metaverse" and the road exists in the physical universe that the metaverse is describing.
I thought metaverse just meant Second Life 2.0.
Some examples: Roblox, Facebook Horizon, VRChat, NEOS
"I’ve been less sure they understood the full scope needed to build a compelling AR ecosystem – a metaverse."
Ok, so a metaverse is somehow the realization of the "full scope" needed for a compelling AR ecosystem? And what exactly does that mean, and how does that define this particular usage of the (heavily overloaded) term 'metaverse'?
Meta meaning 'about', so a universe about a universe?
edit/ugh: googling the term says 'a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.'
Like wtf does that have to do with the meta root word here?
There is far too much abstraction in this vocabulary defining a thing that is very real.
Another use of the term (not here) would be a way to jump between VR systems, but they never generalized well enough to make that a significant thing. Right now Steam would count
Imagine a city park where a handful of people have glasses with cameras on them that are continuously sending a geo-located feed of the images to a map server which processes it into a 3D reconstruction. You could watch in real time as the city park is reconstructed and updated in real time 3D, add in virtual content, make content "layers" for different digital assets, track interactions etc...
It's a globally crowdsourced, consistently updated real time digital twin of the world.
> I’ve been less sure they understood the full scope needed to build a compelling AR ecosystem – a metaverse.
Seems this is about augmented reality being integrated into the regular experience of a significant population.
I think it's what Apple's calling their new Augmented Reality platform...I think...or what the author is calling what could be Apple's potential AR platform...maybe?
Like jfc people, 'End users will experience the metaverse through the default device delivered experience.' sounds like the most doublespeakiest doublespeak ever to have been written.
I love tech and this lofty shit makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Speak plainly and simply, folks.