> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I?

By this logic nobody should play Gran Turismo because a Superman game exists.

> You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse?

By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you don't need a car to surf the web and you can't test the car by visiting the website.

The web is pretty analogous to the metaverse and the most plausible path to an actual metaverse may be an evolution of the web browser. It's the only platform with a sandbox strong enough to run completely untrusted code on your local device with no centralized gatekeeper manually enforcing rules, which I think is a hard requirement for a real metaverse. Any metaverse contender that doesn't start with that is doomed to eventual irrelevance.

But I don't think, as the author of the article seems to, that today's web is already the metaverse and nothing will change. What really drives platform change is input methods. The iPhone was a new platform because it used capacitive touch instead of mouse and keyboard, and the web evolved with it. The metaverse will be a new platform because it will use still different input methods (yet to be determined, probably not the VR controllers we use today) and the web will have to change again, perhaps more radically this time.

I'd say a sizable majority play Gran Turismo because it's a fun test of skill -- learning the controls of an intricate machine, the layout of the game's tracks, and achieving some form of mastery over it. And I'm also sure some people play it for the fantasy of doing car racing in a safe environment, which is a very dangerous, expensive, and inaccessible sport for a lot of people.

So, perhaps I misread Tim Sweeney's point of view, but it seems like it starts and ends with "put cool car in metaverse, drive it down Main St., everyone stops and stares, like that one scene from Snow Crash. Or Ready Player One."

If it's more specific than that, "put cool car in video game, in metaverse" product placement, well we already have that today. Mercedes Benz already did a whole Mario Kart thing [0], and countless other racing games like the Forza series have sponsorships from real car companies. So that's not really anything novel for the metaverse, it's just the same product placement marketing strategy that's already existed. Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years.

> By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you can't test the car by visiting the website.

Pretty much all of these websites have a call-to-action for "Schedule a test drive at your local dealership". Hell, I remember an entire campaign from a major car corporation that was to the tune of "anybody can watch a TV commercial, but driving it is believing"

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/29/5760538/drive-a-mercedes-...

I thought modeless was wrong and that you weren't discounting the experience of driving, but rather the experience of driving a mediocre car. However, with your followup comment, it seems you're discounting the experience of driving.

Suffice it to say that plenty of people genuinely love driving, both in video games and in the real world.

Flying won't make driving obsolete any more than mountain biking has made hiking and trail running obsolete in places that are accessible to mountain bikes.

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.

And there’s the newest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. People really love the vr mode and the videos I’ve seen (I’ve never played it) already look pretty darn realistic and engaging.

Sure, but still it's a niche product. It's not like they're going to sell the next XBox by getting Microsoft Flight Simulator as a platform exclusive.

This is not to cast any aspersions on the game - popularity is not everything - but things like MFS are perfect examples that even the best simulators are just niche products, not the future of the web.

And people who own it say "yeah, it looks amazing! But it is the same fucking thing it was 20 years ago. But it looks amazing now."

Is that a criticism, or a reflection of the fact that 20 years ago it was already pretty much perfect except for graphics limitations of the tech of the time? (Genuine question as someone who tried it as a kid 20 years ago but doesn't remember much about it.)

It's a reflection that 20 years ago the simulation was truly only limited by the graphics and interface hardware.

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 unnecessary, see Rocket League.

> 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.

Same with manual transmissions. But watching my gf obsess over yeast cultures, I would say same about baking bread. Some people love a challenge; other people don't get it.

Manual transmission is not a challenge. It quickly blurs into muscle memory and you don’t really notice it.

Can second it, its properly effortless and becomes second nature. Gives much more control over the engine.

That being said, switched my old BMW 3 series (E46) with manual to newer 5 series with automatic steptronic transmission, and especially for longer drives, the cognitive and 'manual' load is measurably less. But you don't realize it until you migrate.

It moves to almost boring territory, luckily I am not a type of person who tends to fall asleep behind the wheel (unlike my wife).

It becomes second nature, but most people find it a bit of a challenge to learn - obviously not a particularly huge or impossible one considering how common it is for people to get the hang of it in tens of hours, but still a challenge compared to just learning to drive in an automatic.

>Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years.

I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game.

The reason that giving you the real experience of being in a specific car is bullshit for marketing purposes is that you can see hardly anyone markets cars based on what it will actually be like to use them and of course because except for a few outliers using any specific car is the same as using pretty much every other car built in a similar time frame.

on edit: meaning every other car serving the same market segment of course.

I guess my main question here is: why will it be so close to the real experience?

Why wouldn't everyone make it the most engaging virtual car driving experience they can find, what incentive is there to make it "real" in this useful way?

I mean, I get that it's necessary for this to happen for the whole pitch to make sense, but it's just nonsense. Why these weird religious beliefs about 3D stuff, including product placement, which seem to magically behave differently than the 2D versions we've been living with for decades now.

I am just incredibly confused by this. Is it like NFTs where we aren't supposed to believe the cover story and the wink-wink acknowledgement of the grift is a in-joke/cultural thing?

> I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible...

The experience of driving a real car is heavily influenced by the real world. Take those little flap things cars sometimes have to shield your eyes from the sun - the metaverse will first have to simulate an annoyance (possibly with harmful eye-melting ultraviolet light?) then let you mitigate it with the flap. It isn't obvious why people will want that or pay money for it. If they don't simulate glare, then what is the flap for?

Cars aren't independent of reality, they exist as well designed tools that allow us to do and experience things that we otherwise couldn't. When that gets translated to some sort of virtual space all the design decisions start to fall apart. The only thing that really carries over is to get the branding in front of a person to make them think of the name - which rather undermines the original "isn't going to run ads" thesis.

If it's either a selling point of the car enough that the manufacturer wants to demonstrate it accurately, or if it's something enough people care about and want to see which car suits them better, then a third party could create a simulation tool that let's you quickly go through dozens of different sun positions, weather conditions etc. and see how your personalised body shape will be positioned in each car including being able to adjust the virtual seat position, sun flaps, etc. to compare how you'll be affected by light in a different range of cars... it could be a useful feature? Hell, maybe it even extends to being able to choose the perfect custom flap size and positioning, to either get it added into a new car sale, or ordered as an after-market minor swap to improve your driving experience.

>I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game.

Why do you think the metaverse will do a better job than the developers at assetto corsa for whom it is their primary mission?

It's all just marketing wank to get advertisers excited to put product placement in facebook's new second life metagame.

yes it's marketing wank, but how is marketing wank made - probably by a bunch of idiots (of which I am sometimes one) - sitting around a table brainstorming what they can do to sell this tech to others. And then someone says an idea and everyone says hey that's great even though it is sort of crap, and that becomes the marketing wank they're releasing.

I don't really care how marketing wank is made especially when its obviously lying marketing wank. Calling it the metaverse doesn't make it any more appealing.

I have two cars - a 1980 Datsun and a Fiat Spider. They're both a "test of skill". There's no reason it wouldn't be massively fun to play with lots of other cars on tracks or in all kinds of conditions in VR. "Fun test of skill" is the whole point. The original, like, Stephenson-ish "metaverse" was somewhere people fought with swords. This was getting directly at the idea that skill and challenge were more valuable than raw code. [edit: "entertainment"]

Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?

You're just describing multiplayer video games. We've already had those for more than 20 years.

Well, yeah. Honestly, a massively multiplayer GTA V or Red Dead 2 would basically be the whole Metaverse concept. The only differences would be: (1) You aren't there to complete missions; there's no storylines and it's totally open-ended. There are no writers, and (2) The spaces and content are created by anyone, not a central company, and (3) You can go from GTA world to Red Dead world to tons of other worlds without changing missions or skins or avatars or whatever; they're part of the same huge space you can traverse without leaving VR. (4) You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities.

So, like, yes Stephenson's metaverse is similar to a lot of video games we have now, but it's critically different because his characters are "heroes" in that universe specifically because they coded their own avatars and their own environments.

Which is another way of saying that it rewards thought, code, and creativity -- exactly the things that video games steal people away from.

We already have games almost entirely like this, and the market is clear: no one plays them, to a good approximation. People play games to compete or cooperate on specific goals. This idea of sandbox multi-player interaction is only a gimmick that's interesting a few weeks tops, then the vast majority leave to play Candy Crush or Fortnite where they have clear goals.

If they want to meet with friends and hang around, real life contact just can't be beat. That's the reason why virtual persistent worlds are ultimately bullshit (as opposed to game worlds where you have an actual game to play, be that chess or matching colored gems or killing other players).

I don't know, that just sounds like pitching a TV show without writers. Even a reality TV show or a cooking show needs writers to keep things entertaining. Otherwise, you sort of just have nothing to look at.

> You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities

I ask again: why can't I code my avatar to be the most OP avatar that ever exists? I will create a weapon that kills people if they look at me. What's the incentive to purchase new things if everyone can just code the most OP version and undercut the person next door? I will have the best cars, the funniest T-shirts, and the strongest potions, and you cannot stop me. Because I write Lua scripts.

There's some element of cooperation that is usually assumed when people talk about the metaverse but I don't see any incentive to maintain it that way. Garry's Mod and Roblox are platforms that do what you're talking about, today. The way they maintain this cooperation is that they prevent users from having strong autonomy in games that others make. In Roblox, your avatar is limited to a few cosmetic choices for customization, and in Garry's Mod, you don't really have any customization at all in most game modes.

Real world is like that, you can “code” manipulate the world. However there is a limit on some extent and in such worlds there will be other limits like a consensual physics rule on servers entry, like “local laws”. Rather than LUA think on declarative contracts that limit your crafting based on agreed parameters.

> The only differences would be: (1) You aren't there to complete missions; there's no storylines and it's totally open-ended. There are no writers, and (2) The spaces and content are created by anyone, not a central company, and (3) You can go from GTA world to Red Dead world to tons of other worlds without changing missions or skins or avatars or whatever; they're part of the same huge space you can traverse without leaving VR. (4) You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities.

So Second Life ...

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Content_Creation

>how would that not be a great way to sell a car?

Because there's no guarantee that the experience is in any way comparable to the actual driving. It's in the manufacturer's interest to do the opposite. If the controls weren't standardized the simulation might have still been useful to learn the controls, but they are.

Besides, when AI cars come along the criterias will change completely. From driving experience to cost and comfort. That could be virtualized... but there wouldn't be much point in it.

Following up on the racing of infinite-speed cars, there was also an emphasis of optimizing your own user interface. That when every car could go at whatever speeds you want, the most important thing is how to interact with the car, and to control it. So it isn't just somebody else's code, but the skill and challenge of making your own code to suit your particular needs in an interface.

The metaverse goes against consumer trends in web browsing. People want to consume their information on the go while doing other things, this is why mobile presently dominates the web.

Who wants to context switch from reality into a virtual world just so they can see what the new Ford pickup looks like? Nobody, thats who.

This whole concept reads to make like a Facebook exec went into a coma just as Second Life was taking off and woke up recently demanding that Facebook cease on what they believe will clearly be the future of online interaction.

I thought of a remark a day or two ago, but I have no idea, other than your remark, whether it applies at all:

"Does Zuck have Second Life second-system syndrome?"

Ofc.

Nobody thinks he's cool in this world, so he'll just spam "new worlds" until somebody thinks he's cool in one of them.

Can you imagine being Zuck? Super rich for basically creating the global gossip exchange and fraud factory, and he knows this, he knows Facebook is a clusterfuck of misinformation chaos. And he probably knows he is surrounded by yes people... I wonder if he knows he is in a nightmare.

I don't think it's a nightmare because he has choice and a fair amount of power. He could quietly retire comfortably if he wanted to, but instead he's making the play to reorient his company around a virtual-reality space. That sounds like a motivated person, versus someone trapped and going through the motions.

It's not always so obvious when you are trapped. How can we say he is acting truly freely, versus digging deeper?

Plot twist: Someone talked Zuck into VR as a step in playing some deep power-of-suggestion trick on him, as in the movie Inception.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/

OT: The word you probably wanted was "seize" not "cease" although they do sound similar in many dialects of English.

Thank you for pointing that out :)

The point the OP is making is VR isn’t a domain where you test drive practical family cars. Sure you have racing games but how many people can afford, let alone justify, high ended performance cars for their family? And how many racing games do you see where people are driving boring (relatively speaking) family cars?

The point about VR games are that they’re an unrealistic escape. If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.

I for one am waiting for GT 10: Metaverse. So I can get stuck in virtual traffic, and be late for a virtual meeting.

Holy heck man, that made me LOL hard. That has to be the most self-explanatory comment, period.

>If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.

What? Why?

A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution.

Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (which is actually just your perspective if you prefer beer, the orange-juice-loving person in the group is seeing the whole group drinking orange juice) and discussing the latest celebrity scandal. All of the cosmopolitanism and variety of social media, none of its artficiality and bullshit.

(Off course there is going to be new bullshit in this world, people will go through various hoops to pull idiotic pranks on other people and scammers will have a terrifying field day with the new convincing techniques the new medium will bring, but at this point this is just more or less real life. Real Life In Your Pocket that is. (hopefully eventually, it will have a PC phase first). Who is not excited by that?)

Imagine a professional like an airline pilot or a heart surgeon transmitting a read-only record of a flight or an operation, complete with haptic feedback and a temperature-and-wind reconstruction of the transmission environment. Imagine those records dumped to storage and serving as humanity's Library Of Crafts, a correction to our ancient shortcoming of only being able to capture in symbols what could be said (and with photography and microphones, what could be seen or heard), but not what could be felt or experienced.

Won't this absolutely revolutionise learning and communication? There is a very clear path from here to eventual Greg-Egan-style post-singular communication where you are roaming freely in abstract structures residing everywhere from your head to a server in orbit.

Every thought or system or structure ever dreamt up by the human mind began with a 1:1 snapshot of reality that was then further filtered and compressed (Hume's golden mountain). The ability to arbitrarily construct, store, transmit and reconstruct 1:1 ever-more-convincing sensory representations of the world at will is nothing short of a revolution comparable to the invention of language.

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 putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.

>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 creativity and innovation'

>Why are we all drinking OJ/beer?

Why are we exchanging asynchronous plaintext blocks right now instead of speaking on the phone or sharing 30-seconds videos on tiktok? This is the medium we chose, this is the medium the hypothetical group in my example chose. (from a sea of possibilities that make our communication options right now look like ancient letters)

>Can we taste it?

If the hypothetical social media app we're talking about is any good, it will have the option to sync your avatar to real-life-you on various 'motion paths', so that whenever you move along those motion paths, your avatar move in the same way. One of those 'motion paths' is all the movements your hand make when holding an actual drink, which would translate to your avatar mirroring the movement in the meta verse.

What happens if you release the drink ? you have the option of making the renderer either disappearing it or (for fidelity) putting it in a corresponding location in the dream. What happens if you can't or don't want to drink? you have the option to either make the renderer hallucinate a drink (along with believable drinking animations at believable intervals) or just make you appear in the dream as you are in meat space.

What happens if/when the marriage of neuroscience and computers get fruitful enough that this whole thing is being served directly to your neurons, bypassing the many middle men in your eyes, ears and skin? You can have the additional option of eschewing physical mirroring of the meta verse and just have the gear directly stimulate the feeling of drinking whenever you drink in the metaverse.

>If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers [...] without risking giving up the lie?

Lie? Am I lying to you right now because my username is not the full name registered to my national number in my country's official records ? is the jvm lying to the code running inside of it by presenting virtual method calls as a hardware primitive? This is make-believe, the whole entirety of human civilization is built on it. Even my real name is no more real than the username I chose for this account, except merely by the virtue that more of my existence (more records, more of my opinions, more memories in more heads,...) is attached to it.

You have the option to say you're presenting as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of pretending to present as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of not doing that and saying to your group you're just making the renderer playing tricks on them, and on and on it goes. Whole ecosystems and apps will develop conventions and preferences toward particular options.

>that all understand English and American

This is entirely orthogonal to the technology under discussion, the internet have made millions want to understand English so they can communicate with a greater pool of people, and when cyber communication becomes as deep and convincing as the vision of the metaverse, untold millions more will be motivated to understand popular languages, and will be able to more efficiently than now because language learning (as all learning) will become much more effective and joyful, imagine the high-fidelity virtual/recorded tourism trips available by the petabytes to every person who wants them.

Again, when/If AI or neuro+cyber ever reach the moon they are aiming for, this will integrate nicely with the vision of the meta verse by, respectively, a real-time translation engine running in parallel or direct brain-to-brain telepathy, but even without this the metaverse faces a problem of languages that is no easier and no harder than the internet, which I see it handles perfectly fine.

>(that all understand English and American culture enough for me to gossip about US celebrities apparently?)

I didn't specify English or American exactly, I myself am a Middle Easterner with worse-than-average [knowledge of | interest in] all but the most popular celebrities even in my own country. International or regional celebrities have worldwide following even now and even by purely traditional media, and the internet have made the word 'celebrity' expand in very weird directions.

>Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket

"Electronic computers, why!, I already have pen, paper and my trusty slide rule right here my good sir. I see no purpose those 'electronic brains' of yours can serve"

>It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.

Nobody ever said it would, it's a very specific vision* with a very specific claims : We will construct our own sensory reality. Whatever can be fixed or made (much much) better by constructing and manipulating indistinguishable-from-the-real-thing sensory models of reality, this vision is implicitly claiming it would fix or make it better. This is a gargantuan subset of. humanity's problems. Whatever can't be fixed by this alone, won't, and nobody ever claimed otherwise.

* :When I say 'vision', I mean the actual vision advanced by visionaries like Greg Egan, Gibson, and others in their works, not the garbage copied-and-pasted from the marketing brochures of corporations jumping on the trend, or for that matter those marketing brochures themselves, which are a watered-down inferior version of the visionaries' vision. I'm just as opposed and unbelieving of the promises those companies make as anyone who ever read a headline or two about them, I just still believe in the underlying dreams they are appropriating/butchering.

This reads like some sort of techno-utopian fever dream.

People don't want to be completely disconnected from physical reality. The world you described is vulgar to any real human person, honestly it sounds like a cross between Brave New World and The Matrix.

There would be no authenticity of experience in the world you imagine. It'd be people living out instagram fantasies continuously.

Society would eventually devolve into a decadent, fetalistic world marked by the boredom of playing a video game with god mode on, where humans would no longer be able to deal with hardship or conflict. Bored of travelling to places that don't exist, they'd try desperately to satiate their desire for authentic human interaction by sitting in virtual pubs chatting about the imagined escapades of pretend celebrities.

People construct avatars and profiles about who that want to be in a world they want to be in. Nobody wants a 1:1 with actual reality because we already live in it.

It’s the same reason we watch super hero movies, read comic books and novels. Escapism. If the virtual world is a 1:1 with actual reality then there is literally no reason to enter the virtual world.

And why are text mediums so popular? Because they’re convenient. VR lacks that same convenience.

> 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.

Why limit yourself to the real world though. Having 20 people with anime avatars in a fantasy fantasy world sounds much better.

Your input methods comment is key. Today we can have an almost true to life virtual driving experience with peripherals like direct drive steering wheels, loadcell pedals, shifters and a motorised driving rig. It's an expensive hobby with great innovation. Until the interface problem is fixed for VR then it will be a very subpar experience compared to what's already available.

You can now extrapolate this to almost any interaction in VR; walking, flying, typing or shooting.

Until there's an input method that is able to emulate these experiences effectively, then it is pure science fiction.

VR is great for video games, sure. What if I don't like video games though?

VR is potentially good for some video games, like 3D it's a technology and just because you're using it doesn't mean it's magically making your game better. There's an era of early 3D platformers that were terrible because the people making them don't yet understand how this form works, they're maybe expert 2D platform game designers, but not everything they learned applies cleanly to the new form.

It can take a long time to unlearn things in video games. It took years after video game arcades ceased to be the dominant factor for games to get rid of "Lives" that existed only† to ensure players pump coins into the no-longer relevant coin slot.

I think Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes shows off what VR can do well that you couldn't do otherwise. The isolation between the player defusing the bomb and everybody else is part of the game. The fact that the player defusing can't look at the bomb manual is enforced by them being in a VR environment with no manual.

In too many VR games, the VR is largely an impediment, and the takeaway is "This could be a good game, shame it's VR".

† OK things like Hundred Mario challenge and the modern Endless Super Expert show that you can do other things with this form, but it's pretty arbitrary, there's no way this would exist without the history of video game arcades.

Extremely good points. VR has the potential to revolutionize education, and by extension workplace training. With the addition of AR, that education/training can have a persistent presence on the job.

I wonder when society will realize all this technology has no value without the support of the single most valuable resource on this planet: humans and their educations. The number one asset of any/every company and every nation is their people - yet we treat people as completely disposable. Our civilization is literally insane today, and will remain so until this clear value is recognized.

I do think the potential around VR is greatly oversold however there are still benefits outside of gaming: concerts, remote conferences, having kick ass multi-screen home office for those who don’t have the space for one.

The office example is the real winner for me. But imagine what it would take: a wireless VR headset with massive resolution that still allows me to look at my surroundings so I can drink a coffee or eat my lunch and is comfortable enough to use for several hours with no breaks.

A huge monitor is way cheaper.

That’s why I said “for those who don’t have the space”. You might live in a one bed apartment and not have the room for a dedicated work space so VR might be the alternative in such a situation.

I appreciate this isn’t going to be a super common use case but it’s definitely something that might appeal to some who have well paid jobs in expensive to live locations (like London and SV).

Much as I hate FB, as a piano player I loved their little graphic showing how mixed reality would send the notes down to your hand positions on the piano as an endless Star Wars kind of scroll thing. I would do that just to exercise my mind with some classical or jazz pieces. I can think of a slew of other ways VR is useful. Training doctors for surgery. Training pilots. Mechanical engineering and prototyping. None of that means we should live in VR. Just that it's a powerful tool.

What do you like?

I wonder if this has it backwards.

Cars are a symbol of status and people will want to have that status wherever they are - look at how much people will pay for a skin in Fortnite.

I think it’s more likely car manufacturers (the expensive ones) will only let you drive their car in the metaverse if you buy it for real in the real world.

If this metaverse really does come to pass, it will be just as (if not more) valuable as a place to be than the real world.

I know that sounds mad to most of us, but by the time it happens we’ll all be 10 years older and not the main market for it anymore. Everyone else will have grown up paying for Fortnite skins and NFTs and it will all seem a lot more… normal.

So, BMW amiibos?

Sport team season ticket holders getting exclusive digital jerseys to wear? College students getting a code to unlock digital shirt of their alma mater?

Brand affiliation as an identity marker in a virtual space makes sense.

Yeah, that’s kind what I mean

But in the end it will be whoever’s walled garden the metaverse is planted in that makes the real money. 15% of everything.

That’s why fb want this so bad.

Caveat, I haven't really read up in depth on their renaming to a html tag element. So: I don't know about all of that, but on this topic of virtual cars and such I've got a bit of knowledge.

I've already paid a lot of money for a number of high quality car models I can drive quite accurately on high quality race track scans with lots of other people in iRacing.

These are works of love, and I greatly appreciate that the interest in iRacing has boomed as much as it has since I joined the Papyrus guys' latest offering in 2008.

Heck, soon I'll even be able to connect a real BMW M4 racing wheel to my sim setup, adding more $$$$s yet also more realism to a setup already deep my the investment path; I just don't see the use case for "having cars" in <meta name="rainbowpuke" content="Facebook" /> or whatever if it's only going to be window dressing; I mean, what's the point, unless we enter the fidelity of e.g. iRacing. So I can't see "meta" competing with them at all unless they either buy it (and they wouldn't; it's far too hardcore) or a competitor.

I can see the value of motorsport companies investing in esports, however, as the newest generation of F1 drivers have their roots in that and e.g. karts - which enables a connection to the fanbase hitherto impossible. Would they find value in giving lots of money to MetaFace instead? Time will tell; it'll be interesting to see what eventuates from all of this. First impressions are pretty much Candy Crush in VR - with all the spam you could possibly tolerate, and then some. (No thanks.)

If they're doing that, eventually people will not really bother with the physical car - the prices for the physical car on the used markets would likely plummet (unless ownership is always tied to the metaverse one)

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 and peoples relationship to it: AR and VR are 'wow' experiences that really excite people before they've tried it and for the first few experience, but apart from a small subset of people the excitement and wonder wears off pretty quickly. When selling things, aspirational photos (the product in a desirable setting) is usually more useful to a buyer than seeing it in AR in their current home.

I first used a $50K VR headset 30 years ago in a CS research department (Dire Straits - Money for Nothing video quality graphics) and it was thrilling but obviously didn't catch on because of the cost and lack of technical performance at the time. The technology available still isn't ready - poor battery / CPU performance really kills mobile AR, the low resolution/field of view/lifelike rendering makes VR painful for the average person.

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.)

One way to make money in a metaverse would be to artificially create limitations to what a user can do and then sell them the solutions to those problems. So why not add thirst and hunger meters and then sell food items? Or why not make travel non-instantaneous and then sell faster modes of transit?

This is how heavily-monetized games work today and it's not surprising that some in the industry are salivating at the thought of extending this economic model beyond just entertainment.

If the metaverse is truly a decentralized, collaborative space, how can we add these limitations without others breaking them? If all that's stopping them is code, why wouldn't everyone have all the most powerful items, all the time? If the metaverse ever becomes a reality, I promise I will publish a blog post for people to copy/paste some code to make their own custom overpowered equipment and free food and break the whole economic system.

Hey now, you wouldn't download a car

who would win: company burning $10,000,000,000 trying to create a brand new capitalist techno-utopia, or 1 GitHub repo boi

> If the metaverse is truly a decentralized, collaborative space

We're talking about facebook here. I expect the metaverse to be designed 100% according to the wishes of ad buyers. And Cambridge Analytica.

Right. Just like we're currently living in a world where IBM controls all computers.

We did, up until Microsoft inherited that role, and now share it with the rest of "FAAMG" (no 'N'). You're basically still correct, only ludicrously -- and I suspect intentionally -- outdated on the identity of the puppet-master.

I'll take your underhanded way of trying to ridicule the idea as a tacit admission that you actually agree it's true, but have some undisclosed motive to discredit it. (Own a lot of Facebook shares, or what?)

If I have to pay for food and transportation to go to a metaverse location to pay my taxes I'll go to the good old web site for free and a fraction of the time.

> I'll go to the good old web site for free and a fraction of the time.

if it still exists. Once the metafart comes to be it will naturally compete with the Web of old, so it will probably look for leverage to extinguish that.

If I’m living my life with my head stuffed into a doohicky then why do I need a car at all?

How much extra do I pay to get wired up to feeding and waste tubes for 24/7 access?

I’ve seen the Matrix, so I assume I need a big pod full of pink gloop in my bathroom too?

Roblox will be looked back upon as the MS-DOS of metaverses, yet people go gaga over any vehicle you can make. They (mostly kids) spend an absurd amount of hours just jumping from one place to another to prove they can without falling. They spend real money just to turn their hat a new color. Entire genres of games and activities exist basically to just move around, jump on a few things, see numbers get bigger, and see things change colors.

With all that, I truly think yes... people absolutely will drive a car in VR.

People in tech, especially VCs, have this weird habit of seeing something simple (like music sharing, or Roblox) and instead of taking away the simplest lesson (people like free music, games are fun) they feel compelled to extrapolate some sort of vision of the future from it (people love P2P tech! Roblox isn’t just a bunch of games kids like, it’s a _metaverse_!) It’s certainly a fun job to have, massively overthinking everything all the time, but I’m not sure the results bear out.

The funniest part of this for me was Roblox changing all their mention of games to experiences earlier this year during the start of the Epic-Apple thing.

People already drive cars in VR, in multiplayer with force feedback steering wheels and chair based motion platforms with a fairly decent but not perfect simulation. My main gaming activity right now is flying WW2 aircraft in VR in big multiplayer fights.

This is one of the articles main points this decentralised universe of cool shit you can do already exists. The question is whether interoperability actually brings anything useful.

Not only that, but here you're talking about increasing the cost of advertising exponentially.

The closest thing we have to what's being described here is a video game. 3D game development is one of the most difficult and unforgiving branches of software development.

To achieve what is being talked about here, BMW is going to have to hire a team of 3D artists, animators and programmers to realize this asset. And someone is going to have to make sure this asset performs well, and interacts appropriately with the world, and with all the other assets which have been created by independent and unrelated teams. Part of that is, driving around in this car can't use too much CPU and GPU budget so that it brings the framerate to a halt when it appears on screen with any combination of the infinite number of combinations of things which could exist in this world.

This stuff takes years and is hard to get right for mature AAA studios with decades of experience. The idea that every company with an ad department is going to get into this vastly expensive and unproven business is a dream for facebook but a nightmare for everyone else.

In Second Life, you could create islands with their own rules, for example you could create a car racing game. Then when you enter the game, you can not fly around while you play the game. It really was very interesting, and amazing how many things people created in a very short time span.

You might not know this, but Second Life was not, uh, a wide success. And Second Life is the one we remember from that era. There are dozens of these metaverse things from the mid-90s through the 2000s, none of which achieved the notoriety anywhere near Second Life. Off the top of my head:

Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Lively (2008), PlayStation Home (2008)

It was such a tired cliché by then that even Homestarrunner was making fun of it in 2007 [0].

Go look back at some of the early VRML hype from the mid 90s, it's like watching history replay itself. Most of it is before the era of the Wayback Machine, but there's a few good articles out there still [1] [2]. I can't even find any news writeups of SGI WebSpace, just screenshots, despite it being the VRML plugin for Netscape back then.

[0] https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147 [1] https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html [2] https://community-place.neocities.org/

Geocities and Xoom were all the metaverse we needed back in our day.

You know what? the internet was better when it topped out at 56k for mortals.

Amen to GeoCities. They had a concept of addresses within neighborhoods. My friends and I all made our own pages, experimenting with web tech.

And remember webrings and Internet Link Exchange?

I'd also say that MySpace and Tumblr carried that vision forward.

It's ironic that Facebook won, with its bland conformity, and now they think they're going to bring us the metaverse.

SL was great and a lot of fun. It just had a rather clunky user interface, and probably other issues (nobody said it was easy). Nevertheless there was an explosion of creativity for a while.

Nowadays Minecraft and Roblox seem to fill similar niches.

That many attempts failed doesn't mean all attempts will fail. You may not know this, but there were other social networks before Facebook. There was Orkut and MySpace, for example, both disappeared. Yet Facebook now is a billion dollar company.

VRML appeared at a time when people were still using dial-up modems. Things change - eventually technology may be good enough for people to adopt VR on a larger scale.

> Yet Facebook now is a billion dollar company.

Yet the social network as a concept that moved from one monopoly to another is a fad that is dieing. It certainly seems likely companies that have gotten their start from VR will succeed in collecting a lot of money and possibly diversifying successfully, but will VR end up being more useful than a FB style social site?

The basic problem with VR for me is that second life showed some potential that isn't going to happen because it is socially positive and a lot of negatives that make me want to kill VR as a medium before I have to deal with FB owning real estate in it.

FB has basically created the bifurcation that will limit the future of all new mediums. Half your friends will never use anything they participate in making the concept of social X a disaster for any X.

I'm not rooting for Facebook, I just take issue with the takes of people claiming the concept of metaversum is bullshit, many of whom have clearly never even played any of the modern games like Fortnite or Roblox, or tried a Quest.

Nobody would be happier than me if a decentralized alternative to social networks like Facebook could be established.

I am not really seeing it as a given, though - the big companies usually offer more convenience and the masses fall for it. And for content creators it makes more sense to go to where the masses are. I have looked into the Fediverse but it seems there is hardly anything there.

I don't know if VR will replace classic web sites like Facebook. An issue in SL, for me at least, was that it was too difficult to create a good looking avatar. In Facebook you don't have to bother with web design. Not sure how to translate that to VR - everybody having a standard living hexagon for representation probably won't work.

When Facebook went public, everyone thought it was doomed, because they made no money. It took the addition of the personalized newsfeed, aka the part of Facebook that is the least social, for it to become a billionaire firm. Nobody posts on my wall anymore.

But now there is Roblox, isn't it kind of a metaverse too? And it's a huge success.

how come nobody is mentioning the inevitable cancer that kills every metaverse given enough time: griefers.

Yet social media has enabled, and arguably thrived on, griefing and trolling at an industrial scale.

What's worrying is...what if FB manages to create a metaverse that thrives on the same toxicity that FB itself does. And through the Oculus makes the tech cheap and portable enough to get a critical mass of people involved in it.

While I’m not seeing much around this topic in this particular forum, it is being discussed in many places.

The general consensus seems to be (and at this point I wholeheartedly agree) FB attempting to build a meta world is hysterical considering their seeming complete inability (with some unwillingness sprinkled in) to address trolls/astroturfing /misinformation on their flagship site was a significant driver of many people ceasing to use the site.

If they screw up something like a vanilla social network, they have no shot at running an entire second life derivative. At least one where anyone other than NFT sneakerhead type marketing victims will willingly spend their valuable free time.

That’s not my concern. My main issue is that it would be pretty much impossible to recreate the dynamics of driving a car the way dedicated video game car simulators do. Who will write the code? The car manufacturer, or the platform? All you’ll end up with will be a precise 3-D model of the car and a generic driving “experience”. When you play Grand Turismo every car behaves differently because the creators took the time to customize each car. I don’t see how would this apply to a platform because the backend to support all this would probably not be there.

If it works a bit like Second Life, the creator of a thing (like a car) can define the behavior of the car. So people wanting to put their car into the metaverse presumably could expend as much effort on it as they want.

I mean now if they simulate a car for Grand Turismo, they also use some kind of API (Unity Engine, OpenGL, whatever) to encode the behavior. Likewise a metaverse will have some API which you can use to encode behavior.

It remains to be seen what options it provides. In SL I think you wouldn't have been able to create a very good car simulator because the engine was too limited. But the situation might be improved for newer metaverse attempts.

I think most people in this thread are missing the point. It is not that people could only experience VR without the metaverse. People can still surf the internet, yet most people chose to spend their time on Facebook, because it is more convenient and makes some things easier. To the point that some non-Facebook internet sites make you sign in with your Facebook account.

If everybody is on meta, it makes no sense for Mercedes to create an independent VR experience to advertise their cars. It makes more sense to do it in meta, where Facebook can direct users to the Mercedes VR world.

Facebook's apis have a reputation for being garbage with poor documentation and frequent functionality issues.

That's a different argument then claiming a metaversum can not work out of principle.

People have managed to create good apps for the Oculus Quest, too.

If if the buyer can afford the car they can just to go a dealership and test drive one, and get a 1:1 experience. This is about advertising and trying to sell advertising as experience rather than advertising. What else would you imagine facebook's virtual space to be?

Like an enhanced version of Second Life. If you don't offer some kind of immersive experience then no one will bother participating. Advertising as experience is exactly what I'm describing by having a car that behaves like the real one. Otherwise it's a dumb model with no difference from any other car/ad there.

You can't have a car that behaves like the real one in vr...especially not in oculus quest like set ups. Its just bullshit for advertisers.

> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I?

Flying? I hope I can teleport as easily as I can jump to a web page by clicking a bookmark or typing its URL.

Second Life had teleport. I walked, drove a car, went flying only for the fun of it or for very short distance movements.

Any game that implements a form of fast travel finds 95% or players use it all the time or most of the time. Sure you could run to Stormwind - but even the tram was completely dead one griffon flight points were usable.

Weird example. That Gryphon ride is slower than taking the tram, or at least it used to be. The advantage of the Gryphon ride is that it was automatic.

I remember those arguments and races - and it all fell aside when people just hearthstones you Dalaran which was faster than both.

Don't forget Shattrath. The OG portal-hub town, though the run from Inn to Portal room was pretty bad until you could fly.

Forget about what other people who have nothing in common with you do.

Its a trap to focus on it. Many have resources, energy and no sense, taste or imagination. You cant blame them. Its like complaining to a cactus for not producing strawberries. Or yelling at swampland for not turning fertile.

What you can do is shift focus, and focus on what you and people like you are working on, and keep the focus there no matter what.

>You can tell this absolutely makes no sense, because if we're in the metaverse, why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Or if I can't, I'm going to open up a shop next door that sells metaverse helicopter rides. If I make a vehicle in the metaverse, I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around.

The corporate metaverse will be advertiser driven. You won't be able to put rocket launchers on a car except in specific zones where violence is allowed. You'll have to pay the metaverse operator to get your helicopter approved, and they'll want 30% of anything you make from helicopter rides.

All of this is an advertiser friendly second life with no reason to participate. I've had plenty of fun in VR but I want nothing to do with advertiser driven VR, and a metaverse even less.

Just what we need: an escape from this world into one where corporations literally control the rules of reality.

I think we need to rename the Metaverse into the Zuckerverse so that its more honest. In the zuckerberg you can take an ad from one game to another, a microtransaction from one game to another, and advertisers can send you ads right to your credit card!

incredible work zuck.

Very true. Also if I choose to drive a car in metaverse it would be either a Lamborghini Aventador or a clown car propelled by bubbles. The kind of sensible cars I would consider in real life would be way too boring in an environment where anything can happen :p

Back in the early 90s (late 80s?) Ford published a lame video game promoting (I think) the Mustang. It had a minimal feature walkthrough (now featuring 6 speakers!), terrible graphics, and a very limited driving simulator that was about as exciting as watching paint dry. The Metaverse version would no doubt look a lot better, but it'd be no more real than Ford's early attempt. Maybe as adware it'd be functional at selling some units, but only with people who were already invested enough in Ford to be able to engage with their ad.

I'm also reminded of the US military's funding of FPS games like America's Army (and at least involvement in Call of Duty) as recruiting tools.

People are willing to pay thousands of dollars on setups precisely to simulate driving a car in VR. It's not totally implausible that if the VR technology gets convincing enough it could help move some cars too.

Very few people are willing to spend it - that's coming from someone who has spent some money on getting a VR racing setup. Many people who have tried it think its fun but then ask me how much it was and say 'well I'm glad you enjoy it'.

Driving a real car down a windy road is 1000x better than the best Vr setup.

Yeah but I'm not going to push my real car anything like I would a video game car because I do not wish to damage it or injure myself.

I have literally hundreds of hours in VR racing and driving down a winding highway at 100km/h is still more fun. They sound the same on paper but they don't feel the same. Maybe if I had a full simulator that could replicate the feeling of acceleration but I don't - and nobody on metaverse on their $200 VR headsets will either.

I dunno man, if Ferrari drops their car into the game then that’s going to be more awesome then I can ever model on my own.

Even if I can drive a square block by designating it a car, it’s not really a car I want to drive in.

That's a bit harsh on the Nissan Cube!

So is the metaverse AR adverts? Makes sense I guess. "Please go into an AR world, then our advertisers will be able to 'physically' interact with you."

Advertisers will no longer just manipulate what we read or see but now what we interact with. Makes me yearn for the ceefax thing on the frontpage.

Had the same sentiment when watching MZ presentation. Why on earth would my avatar be standing like regular people in the crowd in a concert? I want to be in the scene with hot shot musician, not in the tribune.

Instead of watching a professional driver smoothly going around a switchback, you sit in first person POV in a car that feels, handles, and accelerates better and faster than the real thing. It even cheats to make you feel like you're a better driver—that the car makes you a better driver. You probably won't buy it on the spot, but you could; the car as an impulse buy right at the peak of your high. Even if you don't, now when you see that car on the road, you associate those good memories with the car. Maybe you even go in for a test drive of the real thing.

Why would anyone want to do that rather than fly? Why would I rather play Gran Turismo when I can be Iron Man in LEGO Marvel Superheroes?

If everybody is making cars that handle much better than they do in the real world, wouldn't this result in an arms race of upping the "cheese" of the mechanics to heighten the intensity? And this only works until people recognize the grift -- once they know the actual car experience and the demo experience aren't related, suddenly it won't be a useful ad anymore.

That's not a likely scenario. They aren't trying to create a Camry that handles like a Porsche. They're trying to sell Camrys. The effects will be subtle and plausible. To the extent that it's discovered, there will be excuses. And even after it's discovered, it will continue, just like everyone today knows TV car ads aren't real, but they're still effective, because they tap into the right parts of our brains.

I hate to tell you this, but in most driving games, the center of gravity is so low that it's below the ground. That keeps you from rolling the simulated car.

If it was below the ground, the car would roll in the other direction.

Gravity acts downwards so having a low center of gravity resists rolling forces. This works in reality as well with vehicles with a high center of gravity being at increased risk of rolling over those with a low center. Games often take this a step further as physics engines let you manually specify where the center of gravity is so you can make it artificially low compared with the actual mass distribution.

You haven't addressed the point. Rolling moment is proportional to the distance of the center of gravity from the ground, in either direction. If the center of gravity is exactly at ground level, the car cannot be rolled. Moving it lower, into the ground, increases the rolling tendency again - in the "wrong" direction.

This is not correct because gravity only acts downwards. This means a lower center of gravity will always be more stabilizing for a vehicle the right way up. As the car rolls the center of gravity is pushed outward. When it’s too high it quickly passes over the pivot point of the wheels and the car will roll as gravity is applying additional moment about the wheel. When it’s lower than the pivot point which is not usually physically possible it’s always resisting the roll until the vehicle is basically nearly upside down.

Draw it on a piece of paper if you need to convince yourself. This is an incredibly common trick to stabilise rigidbody physics simulated vehicles in games.

Edit: I took some time to setup OBS on my non-work machine and make a little video explaining what's going on (apologies for kids in the background and that for some reason my voice only comes out of the left channel): https://youtu.be/qvMbdzbaAMQ

In your video you show the force in red being applied somewhere up top. What is this force? What applies it?

Your force sideways is actually from the ground, on the tyres. This acts on the CoG (or better to call it Center of Mass), so if this CoM is above the tyres you get a torque, because the mass doesn't instantly accelerate, but resists the force. This torque then needs to be countered by having more force on the tires on one side than on the other, which when you take into account things like suspension, causes body roll, or in the extreme case the car lifting wheels on one side completely off the ground.

If you put the center of mass below the car then think what happens not during turning, but during braking. The center of mass will swing forward underneath like a pendulum (think of what happens to something hanging from the rearview mirror during braking) and if you took it really far down you could even get the car to do a wheelie while braking, which is of course ridiculous.

If you want the car to be completely flat during turns, acceleration and braking then you need to put the center of mass at the ground level. This way when you turn and the ground puts a horizontal force on the car at the contact points with the road (ie. the tyres), it goes through the center of mass and there is no torque generated. No torque = no body roll.

The torque to roll the car in my example is provided by an external force, the dark brown/red arrow being applied to the top right of the 'car'. This is why the car would still roll even if you had the CoM at the ground level. I'm simplifying the true situation (suspension, roll due to the forces involved in turning and so on) to isolate just the impact of CoM position on body roll. So you need a force to induce roll otherwise the car would just sit still.

If you don't believe me you can download Unity, UE, Godot or the rigidbody simulator of your choice and just setup the experiment. Of the engines mentioned UE is perhaps the easiest to set this up with a straightforward car example.

Well sure, if an external object hits your car above the CoM then it will roll. I suspect we're talking past each other, I was referring to the handling characteristics, not the response to an impact.

I think you misunderstand. My demonstration uses an external force for simplicity. To illustrate the stabilizing effects of moving the CoM up and down. The results are the same for other sources of body roll as well.

We're very much not talking past one another. I recommend just doing the experiment to convince yourself because as I and Animats note this is a very common thing to do in games. As I said in my last reply just grab a game engine (they're all free to download) and test it yourself!

Driving in a curve (make it infinite if you will: a circular track) your tyres will try to hold you glued to the road, and the centrifugal force ("doesn't actually exist", yadda yadda -- but it works for the purposes of this discussion) will try to push you outwards.

The tyres exert their force at road level, the centrifugal force at the height of the CoM. The CoM usually being above road level, the centrifugal force will tend to tilt the car outwards.

Lower the CoM to exactly road level and there is zero tilting moment; your car might slide outwards if it loses grip, but it will remain upright with no tilt, because the centrifugal force has no vertical leverage relative to the opposing gripping-force of the tyres -- they're opposing each other in the same horizontal plane.

Lower the CoM below the road (magically travelling through the soil without interacting with it), and there is again leverage, only this time with the centrifugal force pushing outwards below where the car is trying to stay attached to your desired trajectory and thus tilting the top of the car inwards, towards the inside of the curve or the center of the track.

:: Moving the CoM down has a stabilizing effect down to road level, but if you go lower than that it starts destabilizing again, only applying its rolling force in the opposite direction.

I'm sure we all agree that a lower CG is always more "stabilizing" in the sense of righting a car that is not already flat on the ground. But that's not what snovv_crash and I were talking about - we were talking about plausible handling characteristics. A CG below the ground will produce vehicle rolling motions opposite to real life. The outer wheels will lift in a tight turn, and the car will rear up when braking instead of pitching down.

There are only two forces involved - inertial forces which act on the CG, and friction forces which act at ground level. Swap the order, and you swap the direction of the torque.

> I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around.

You'd be surprised how popular truck and flight simulators are.

bruce willis surrogates anyone? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263

Exactly what I had in mind. Underrated movie. Maybe metaverse will end up somewhere between the currently envisioned one and like the surrogates physically existing and people at their homes interacting with the world via them, where tech companies even give the main unit for free but sell unlockable content for their surrogates.

farmville comes to mind. oh what fun times we live in

I'm patiently waiting for the desktop metaphor to die. I'm a very happy user of i3 (tiling) window manager and it's beautiful how efficiently it uses space. Meanwhile in the "desktop metaphor" world, interface designers have settled on fullscreen applications (skype, even music players) and tabs. Because no one wants to bother moving application windows around with mouse.

i3 is explicitly for power users, but someone will eventually take the idea of tiling window managers and make something with a low learning curve. And that will be the end of desktop icons and movable windows.

So if I just use every window in maximized mode, what's the big advantage of i3?

fancyzones is a free windows powertoy already. Everyone who thinks they need one can have one.

The metaverse (not Facebook's/Meta's version) can be whatever you want it to be. That's the point.

You could sign into different worlds, or turn different layers of reality on/off.

Perhaps you choose to use a reality where the rules are more akin to the real world, and so the best way to get around is a car... a car that looks and behaves like a car.

And then 15 minutes later you get bored and jump into a world where you can have rocket boots instead.

There will be markets for all different types of realities.