> [2] https://youtu.be/Uf_9J_EdzZw

That video is kind of amazing. It's all people of color, until one white guy shows up and immediately gets blocked.

Also, all their safety team can do is make a recording and submit a report for further review? That seems stupid and pointless.

- the lady in blue, she looks like a white person after having sun in the beach

- the guy with purple tshirt, he looks readhead, so white

- the guy with white hat and black hoodie looks south American

- the guy with glasses and red jacket, looks black

- the ladies with white tshirt, look white

- the lady with glasses and brown tshirt, looks white

- the guy with grey hat and orange hoodie looks white

We are talking about cartoons, so we're really talking about symbols and coding. You're taking too much of a leap by inferring that much about the underlying concept from the use of symbols. You might have a point, but you need different support.

What? I better tell some friends they aren't European.

Second Life, which has been at this a while, has a reasonably workable solution - a rather strong notion of individual property rights. By default, anyone can enter anyone else's property. The property owner can change that. They can block everybody from entering. They can block individuals. They can eject people already there. They can set time limits. They can create groups and only allow members of that group in. They can charge to get in. They can delegate those powers to a program of their own. All those options are in use.

So, for most land in Second Life, Linden Lab doesn't have to get involved. Linden Lab itself owns land, but it's mostly roads, water, and open space. Almost all the places where people congregate are privately owned. Club owners routinely eject people, and are not required to justify their decisions to anyone. There are more complaints about "I was ejected from ..." than "I was harassed at ..." To which the Linden Lab stock answer is "we don't get involved in resident to resident disputes".

There's still some trouble at Linden Lab's own "safe hubs", which are probably the worst places in Second Life. Linden Lab does not police those much. So they're jerk magnets. This is mostly a problem for new users who haven't figured out not to hang out there much.

There's a paid "governance" team, of about six people. They do sometimes ban people for griefing. Most of what they do is deal with real estate complaints - "There's a 60 meter tall rotating, floating, glowing FOR RENT sign at REGION/X/Y/Z, which violates ad policy", or "There's a big tree at REGION/X/Y/Z which goes over the edge of private property onto a public road and has a solid branch too low for trucks." (You can usually build stuff only on your own property, but it can stick out over the edge. The owner of the parcel encroached upon can remove the object if they want, but that's not automatic, because a bit of encroachment makes the shared landscaping look better. It really works like real life as much as possible.) Governance has public meetings, and it's like going to your local board of zoning appeals.

This rather low-key approach works well in practice, and it doesn't require an army of "moderators".

I mention all this because almost nobody making "metaverse" noises seems to get this. Of course, Decentraland has only 200-300 concurrent users, so they don't have the scale to get these scaling problems. The worlds that are divided into little disconnected rooms don't have neighbor problems. Roblox has a huge moderator staff, but their target demographic is aged around 13. If you can't solve this problem, your biggest labor cost is your paid goon squad.

> I can go to any time--in the past. I don't want to go to the future and find out what happens to white people because we're gonna pay hard for this shit, you got to know that. We're not going to just fall from number one to two. They're gonna hold us down and fuck us in the ass forever. And we totally deserve it. But for now, wheeeeeeee!

Source: https://genius.com/Louis-ck-on-being-white-annotated

Not my cup of tea, but let's be real: there are a finite number of things people do when invited back to hotel rooms. The idea that this is shocking or even surprising behavior is fairly divorced from reality.

In 2017, we had only had mainstream non-beta VR headset hardware in the marketplace since 2016 (original consumer Rift, HTC Vive), lets not forget the 20 years of PDA hardware/software attempts we lived through before the mainstream smartphone designs we all use appeared in 2007. I expect a very similar arc will be followed for VR/AR, especially as the interaction model is so different from screen based.

I'm happy to see some development out "in the open", and wouldn't be so quick to criticize small project flops; VR/AR needs to begin somewhere. Zuck isn't trying to pretend VR/AR is ready for primetime either yet, he's made it clear he wants to be in a very strong position when/if the market does heavily move to VR/AR hardware, which he obviously believes strongly it will over time.

Not really. I tried Jaron Lainer's original VR rig back in the 1980s. The Autodesk system from the 1980s. The W Industries system ... the HTC Vibe. The Microsoft HoloLens. There's been progress, but usability really hasn't improved all that much.

You can shoot at people. That works fine. You can sort of use swords. Everything else, not so much. That's why Beat Saber is still the most successful VR game.

Some Autodesk people once thought that VR would make it easier to use CAD, because selection in 3D with a mouse is such a pain. Didn't work out, and 3D selection with a mouse got much better.

If anybody gets this right, it might be NVidia Omniverse. That's an attempt to do for 3D what shared text editors do for text documents.

I want 3D emacs.

[0] https://gource.io/

If someone gets the right metaphor going there, I think it could work great, but the naive solution of 1:N direct scaling the position of your hand to a co-ordinate in space isn't it. I imagine it'll be something like direct correlation to get 'in the neighbourhood' and then an easy modal toggle to a 'precision' mode, where you move something in small increments along just 1 or 2 dimensions, using a comfortable binary gesture.

Or maybe AI will get really good at guessing what alignment the user wants.

Right. The Autodesk people figured that out by 1990. It's like trying to draw while wearing mittens. And they had fingered gloves as input devices. During the 1990s, there were many attempts at tactile interfaces. None of them ever caught on. My favorite was the levitated metal ball. It rested over a shallow bowl, and offered all 6 degrees of freedom, plus it could resist your movement and push back.

VR is good for looking at 3D models, but not for working on them.

Facebook is smart to be in there doing experiments and failing though. That's table stakes for having a shot at winning the competition.

This is the biggest mistake a lot of VR developers made and are still making. People want to look cool in VR. They don't want to look like flying blobs (unless that's their actual chosen aesthetic). This affects their platform and purchase choices to a degree that many don't seem to fully comprehend.

I don't know why the no legs thing seems so incredibly frightening to me. It's like a really bad "uncanny valley" feeling - everyone walking around, chatting normally, but seeming to not realize they've all been sawed in half.

Their world building tools are kind of interesting, and surely were difficult to implement, but lack any real purpose or traction.

All in all, I'm surprised more by how basic and bad Horizon is than I am by how good it is. Its been in development for a long time, and by now, I expected a lot more.

Try vrland.io instead, it's a web-based social 3D/VR platform that runs everywhere with a browser which includes WebXR.

Link: https://vrland.io/lobby

A trillion dollar company with the temerity to endure will eventually succeed.

Link to the platform: https://vrland.io/lobby

Link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/cNfG834

Love the blunt and honest feedback. The platform comes alive in VR btw, but understand if you don’t have a headset. You can start building using the editor tool and share your room with others to view it in a social manner.

If there’s any features you’d think would make this more like a proper metaverse, please let me know.

I think interoperability is what would really make a metaverse experience, so I'm pretty doubtful any single company could do it, even with Facebook's resources. I think the web itself is the closest thing to a metaverse we have, but it's still far away in terms of actual experience. I think that it's become universal because of the interoperability and common standards that mean it doesn't matter what software or hardware is used to create, interact with, or consume content, so it's a level playing field without one organisation controlling it, and so people are free to go nuts making stuff, without threat of losing it or losing access.

I get that it's not for everyone, but sign me up.

We need to fix our current internet before allowing it to permeate our lives any deeper.

Adblockers may not work so well in the future, when everything's a binary blob of Web Assembly.

But, really, the problem is the vulture capitalists who can't conceive of building anything, only exploiting everything.

https://vrland.io/lobby

(1) https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs