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.