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?
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.
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.
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.