VR - Is a user interface. Metaverse is a network built for that user interface.
Historically, we had screen and keyboard based user interfaces, and with it text based gaming like Zork. Then we had screen and controller based user interfaces, and with it games like Pong. At a certain point we got the screen and mouse user interface, and with it FPS, RTS, like Warcraft and Doom. Touch screens were again a new user interface and with it came games like Fruit Ninja. VR now exists as a user interface (although still needs to be improved) and many people love playing Skyrim with it, or Beat Saber.
All of these were mostly local experiences with different (better?) user interfaces.
Meanwhile, each user interface had its own networks that were built on them. e.g. Email is a "first class network" built on the text based user interface. e.g. WWW is a "first class network" built on the mouse based user interface.
The metaverse isn't a new user interface. The metaverse is a "first class network" built on top of the VR based user interface.
The only thing linking metaverse and VR is basic buzzword bingo, they don’t gain anything from being linked.
I mean, yes I agree. There are some workarounds, i.e. you could jump, in VR it’s very fast to swivel your head, look around the people in front of you or look behind you.
That said, I very much agree, I wouldn’t want to play WOW in VR. The DBM style warning zones on the ground alone would kill the UX. Meanwhile, as a HPally, I played WOW primarily in 2D :)(specifically raid frames). I’m very certain I would continue to play VR WOW in 2D as well. Some sort of console attached to my arm or floating in front of me to 1. See who has my beacon/buffs/debuffs 2. Quickly chose targets to spot heal or cure.
However, I’m very excited to try the second big VR-first MMO (basically the WOW not the EverQuest) built exclusively for VR!!!
Maybe, it’s a lot more skill shots, maybe it’s more aoe heals. I can’t even imagine how spot heals or cures would be targeted. Maybe it would feel like being a QB and Id need to literally throw Madden style spirals to land my spot heals??? THAT COULD BE SICK (although that skill floor/cap might be too high to balance boss fights well).
I’m not smart enough to predict the actual implementation. But I know there is enough money to be made that someones will iteratively make it happen.
Give it a few years and every new VR headset will have facial expression sensors.
I'm sure some clever folks will find a way to build a MMO that works for VR. Maybe characters will have magical x-ray glasses that renders other characters semi-transparent, so they can look through the crowd? Perhaps VR MMO games will be grander in spatial scale with lots of small towns to limit players clumping together city centres. Maybe, trying to find something in a crowded marketplace with lots of distractions, could be a part of the quest?
Second Life is a tiny niche. Connecting Minecraft servers with portals has been possible for ages, and smooth connections seems like it wouldn't be terribly difficult, yet no one uses it because no one wants it.
And despite the huge increases in VR quality that has happened already, none of this has changed.
You suggest it's because the VR isn't good enough yet, but I think the evidence so far suggests VR is not the missing ingredient for people to want to live in a common virtual world.
While I agree with you on this; online dating was seen as something only desperate people would do, until it was for everyone.
I'm sorry, I think if you want to broaden this term like this you're going to have to stipulate some new boundaries. Else, we've got the metaverse: it's just the internet, and metaverse is just the latest in a long line of silly names for it back to the "internet superhighway".
And when Di died or 9/11 happened I had a "shared experience across a networked medium" about them, for concrete examples.
Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember? So I'm not sure where this idea even comes from.
Yes, this is absolutely correct.
A "metaverse" exists in contrast to meatspace. In meatspace I walk down the street, I look through a shop window, I see you browsing inside, I spray some graffiti on the wall, you see the graffiti when you come out of the shop. We have a shared space with the qualities of presence (I passively saw you while you were browsing) and persistence (the graffiti will be there for anyone to see).
In the metaverse, I open some application on a computer, I look at some window or readout, I see that you're online (maybe I just see a light next to a username, or maybe I see your WoW character dancing shirtless outside of Goldshire), I leave something persistent (maybe a comment on a blog post, maybe a spray on the wall in an MMOFPS), which is available for you to see at some point. There are hundreds of metaverses (that's nearly the whole point; a metaverse is a virtual space that isn't bound by the rules and limits of physical space, so why not inhabit a few dozen?) of varying complexity (many websites, IRC, BBSes) and immersiveness (Minecraft, Second Life, PlayStation Home). VR isn't intrinsic to the idea of a metaverse, it's just one potential realization of the idea.
> Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember?
Stephenson depicted his metaverse as a virtual space for the sake of the reader's imagination, so that they could envision something real and familiar instead of just a bunch of people clacking away on keyboards. The "virtual street" metaphor used in Snow Crash was always just a convenient literary device, and not at all the point of the metaverse, which to reiterate is the idea of a virtual shared universe in which to exist that is unbound from the restrictions of the physical universe.
Its been around for longer than Second Life in pancake kvm forms but the latest iteration is based on Immersion or Embodied experience facilitated by the new hardware price/performance advances.
VR hardware is just about over the chasm and proper wide fov AR is on the horizon although semi AR/MR is possible today (e.g. Pokemon Go as a shared overlay of digital world space on to a shared real world space).
The Immersive Embodied Metaverse is available over the internet using open W3C WebXR standards today and this will get better as the space and infrastructure matures.
Virtual shopping malls where you would "walk" around by clicking around websites.
It’s clear from Facebook’s presentations for instance that they consider text messaging via WhatsApp to class as part of the metaverse.
It’s not anything new, but I think the metaverse strategy is basically Facebook saying “we want to own all communications, and push the boundaries of what owning communications even means”. That’s my take anyway, but I have found most people are focused on the VR aspect and have missed the more scary all-encompassing and broader definition.
So think that every user is an inhabitant, a citizen, a potential buyer in the virtual and the real world, but also a potential business owner in the virtual world. Business owners will be tax payers that must pay fees to operate on this city-state that will have internal laws that except for few cases (at most) will not be subject to government laws and constitutional protection, and if you are difficult or problematic the authority will be able to expatriate you without prior notice, regardless of time or money invested in the platform. Maybe, at most, they could offer arbitration with a company that knows that if they don't favor Meta the contract will not be renewed. So yeah. It is a good idea, if they can pull it.
There was a two dimensional interface called Flatland that worked like a CLI. Hiro used it to manipulate the virus without viewing it.
A lot of home office workers never learned to touch type. How the heck are they supposed to do office work if they can't see their fingers on the keyboard? Voice recognition is no solution, it still sucks for text entry and is completely useless for anything like slide presentations or spreadsheets.
There is legitimate potential for workers doing 3D stuff like CAD, architecture, and data visualization but that's a tiny niche of the workforce.
Also most CAD users would probably not want cludgy UI like VR has today, they want keyboard and mouse too.
I suggest looking at the demo/videos of Horizon Workspace (by meta). It works really well, although the resolution is too low for me tooday.
Then there is this guy that was on HN recently:
I have seen a video, IIRC it was from SimulaVR, in which the user had a virtual window which showed a camera view facing the real-world keyboard. So this is easy to solve: these people who need to see their fingers on the keyboard (and probably everyone else when doing a real-world action like getting a cup with a drink) would open a window with an external camera view.
I’ve switched out my keycaps for blanks recently to try to force myself to get better at working in VR but I’m still struggling a bit with all the symbols.
To clarify, when I say "tracking", I don't mean just being able to use your keyboard in VR. I mean being able to actually see your keyboard in VR, along with being able to see keycaps on the virtual representation of your keyboard.
0. https://uploadvr.com/immersed-real-keyboard-support/
1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/typing-in-vr-how-to-connect...
Good typing skills are a super-power in today's world.
These days in Teams it will tell you when someone's typing. It amazes me how long people need to type just to get a simple point across.
eg. maybe your vr home has digital art, but that art can also exist and be viewed in other mediums. Or you can all sit at home and watch VRTV with friends, but one friend just watches on their phone on the bus.
Or a virtaul office desk, that can have coworkers visiting. The office server can be hosted on your corp servers (or, the social networking, maybe you self host your personal office), but when you leave to go virtually home, you're now in your home, hosted by fb nee meta.
It does not matter because for the public and the media Zuckerberg is redefining the meaning of the word right in front of our eyes. Give it a few years and everybody will believe VR is an inherent feature of metaverse. Just like those of us who had been using the word "crypto" to mean "cryptography" for decades were trying to explain in vain what the word originally mean - but it made no sense as the new meaning was already popularized.
People are already dismissing this "metaverse" furor as just more VR hype with a stupider name and the company "Meta" is risking killing the entire term "metaverse" and any usefulness it might have had altogether.
Ironically, by owning Facebook "Meta" should be in one of the best positions to build/sell a 2D "metaverse plane" as well as just about anyone else possibly could. Tear down some of the garden walls, allow a bit more of the old MySpace and Blog anarchy of clashing styles and user control, be a better web citizen. They aren't likely to do that because they are using "metaverse" as attempt to make more Oculus money and risking the Facebook lock in and walled garden for a vision with actual guts and takes risks doesn't seem to be in their interest.
[1] https://www.highfidelity.com/backlog/requiem-for-the-hmd
Have you seen the leaked Quest Pro design[1]? It's already close to being ski goggle size, and it's only a couple of generations away from something the size of sunglasses.
Displays are getting cheaper, better and higher resolution. UX is being improved, passthrough cameras already exist.
My estimate is that towards the end of this decade we'll see unprecedented adoption of VR/AR outside of the few niche use cases we see today.
Meta is jumping on the bandwagon early, making their brand synonymous with VR, and betting big that this will change how everyone uses computers today, and that it will be the tech to replace smartphones.
As much as I dislike that such a user hostile company is trying to popularize the metaverse/VR, I'm sure they did their research and are confident this will eventually sell like crazy. I think they're right.
Whether or not they did their research, whether or not we are just a few iterative improvements away from mass adoption, there's still just too much feeling of "same hype cycle, different day" from the average consumer (which is the point of that article, and my implication that VR is dead right now but it was Facebook's lucky albatross so they're tying it around their necks in the hopes it is still lucky while dead [1]).
[1] Spoiler alert for a classic poem used as a metaphor here: in the poem things do not go well from here. I am pessimistic about this marketing play for "Meta".
They used to be open. Cambridge Analytica came along and congress made them decide open was a liability. Sure they were starting to close down before congress, but now they're sure as hell not opening up.
I don't care if the data is locked down or not, the social graph isn't the interesting part of a "metaverse" and in some ways it is probably better locked up and that can remain Facebook's lock in to keep them interested in the project. The kind of garden walls I was talking about are more federative: bringing external content in, but in ways that are true to the outside content; not just confined to Facebook looks and styles and components, not confined to a bare amount of customization of boring card styles, not embedded in a "Facebook way" but in a "web way" (whatever that means, and it doesn't really feel like it means much at all after the imagination and wilds of the 1990s).
I referenced the anarchy and chaos of blogs and MySpace, specifically: it's about user control to "do ugly things", to escape the gray walls and graffiti "their spaces". If Facebook is a "space" today, it's a building full of cubicles all alike. Sure, you can hang photos in the cubicles and they've got colorful stock ones, but your still constrained to just those cubicle walls and they mandate a lot about the allowed size and frame styles. That's almost directly the antithesis of a user owned "metaverse" whether 2D or 3D.
When smartphones were launched there was a simple description - "oh cool, it's a traditional phone but it has a computer running inside of it? makes sense"
It took a decade from the first smartphones until iPhone/Android like devices with a mostly uniform appearance and UI had decisively won, though. There was a lot of rapid exploration of design space first.
As for VR/metaverse, there's been constant exploration of this space for decades. The VR boom in the 90s was killed by cost and primitive hardware, but we still have surviving persistent 3d worlds that came out of that wave.
We've also seen a lot of non-VR exploration. Aside from Minecraft, we have Roblox, which while a lot more limited in some ways is also a lot more meta: you have an identity that persists across worlds, with a social layer across that. Minecraft looks to be slowly moving in that direction.
We'll see people exploring a lot of other variants, and most will fail. But in the process we'll start to learn what will work.
I doubt Facebook, or Minecraft/Microsoft, or Apple, or Google will turn out to be the winner though.
Maybe they'll manage to buy the winner.
To quote (some) of Larry Ellisons famous statements about it:
"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. … The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion."
"Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
The point of "the cloud" was the concept of users not needing to think where their device is communicating. The device might as well be talking to "the cloud" in the sky.
The point of "the cloud" was the occlusion to the end user.
I don't see much value in the phrase as it doesn't help me know what is going on in any way.
So all the interesting parts of the metaverse going forward are all the VR aspects which is why the discussions are focused on that.
Watching TV or playing a game in an immersive, distraction-free VR environment sounds great, and will happen, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.
Working in a virtual home office has the potential to be extremely productive, ergonomic, and space-saving, and it's not the metaverse, it's just VR.
A metaverse involves some kind of shared space and shared experience across a networked medium. Not only is it more than just doing things in VR, a metaverse doesn't even require VR.