Re:The metaverse is already here – it's Minecraft
by vidarh on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @02:40AM
(#29091697)
Not a problem. An opportunity.
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.
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.