As far as I can tell from the material Meta has released, they have an incredibly ambitious vision for the metaverse. Essentially, I believe they want to create glasses that you wear, that allow you to see other people in your space, wherever they are. So you could have a conversation with three friends in your living room, as if they were there, while they could be on different continents, making physical location irrelevant.

Now, I am not sure if they will get there, but they are investing heavily in the tech required (AR screen tech, SLAM, 3d body reconstruction etc), and even partial success could be enormous. Having spent a lot of time in VRChat, seeing people and interacting with them up close has something very powerful, even if if is just the beginning of the technology. I am very excited to see where it goes in any case.

One thing I don't get is why there is a such high regard of visual input. I mean, we can speak to our friends since the telephone age, and we can see them on screen too since maybe the 90s. Is there a huge demand to actually see them IN THE SAME ROOM?

I really don't think so. But maybe future generations have different ideas. I think VR can make a lot of difference in training (e.g. medical training) but it's not consumer stuff.

A lot of people find asynchronous and text-based communication to be unpleasant. This maybe isn’t the most common sentiment on a tech news discussion forum, but probably describes much of the population. I think the internet’s potential to help people socialize is really hobbled by the text form factor of social media, chat, and discussion forums. Video and voice calls are richer, but they aren’t good a good way to meet people.

I’ve found that VRChat makes for a more pleasant, natural, deeper experience than phone calls or video chat. For me, it really replicates the experience of hanging out with people in real life.

Part of it is that it has the thing where you stand next to the people you are talking to and you can move around and talk to someone else when the conversation ebbs and flows. You can go to smaller spaces where you know everyone, or bigger places with friends of friends.

This mitigates the problem with video or phone calls where you have to sort of mutually agree with the other party that you want to talk and when you are done talking. Instead, you can more naturally flow between different conversations. You can go to a crowd and meet new people, you can go on adventure with your close friend, or go hang out at your regular haunt.

There are a lot of problems with the service, though. One of the big ones is that the onboarding experience is shitty for new players. If you don’t already have friends who play, you’ll just end up with 14 year olds screaming obscenities at you in a public world.

Personally I find video (Facetime/Duo/etc) to be more immersive than audio-only when talking with someone. If there's a similar leap in perceived connection with some AR/VR gear then I'm all for it.

Video chats with more than 3 people start to suffer from an inability to have multiple conversations at the same time. Physical distance of a couple feet and visual queues like the direction of a speakers face allow that in 3d space. Maybe someone can overcome this in 2d? I haven't seen it yet.

I was on a casual call with ~10 people recently and the way only one person could speak at a time was so unfortunate. Really killed the experience compared to chatting in person.

Check out kumospace. Start up with a really fun, functional solution to this problem. Maybe just a novelty generally but for a remote happy hour it was a game changer.

gather.town is a pretty great forum for this

Maybe it is a cultural thing.

Zoom mediates almost all meetings at my company. We went full-remote in 2020, and are now heavily international.

Screen sharing is heavily used, but nobody uses cameras except for presentations.

Even aside from our work norms, I have a strong preference for voice-only realtime comms. Video just doesn't add value to me.

I don't know! I do know that I vastly prefer meeting people in person, compared to talking on the phone, and I think it is the same for a lot of people. I prefer it so much that I occasionally spend hundreds of dollars on airplane tickets to travel to see friends and family and attend meetings in person.

There is clearly something different in in-person interactions that makes me do this, and if Meta or someone else can replicate part of that experience I believe that could be very valuable. Think even of the environmental implications - so much energy is spend moving people around, imagine if AR platforms could reduce the number of trips by even a small percentage!

Isn't this the same argument as 'we have telephones. Why do we ever need to see the people on screens, isn't voice enough?'

Feeling truly present with someone isn't possible in 2d

> Feeling truly present with someone isn't possible in 2d

Or in VR for that matter...

Lots of communication was more effective with voice calls than video calls.

Seeing people in the same room with a pair of glasses is the same vision for the metaverse that has existed for decades, there is nothing new or original about that part of Meta's vision.

The best choice they made was to sell a balanced Oculus (high-res and decent battery with low-power compute) as a loss leader rather than continue down the tethered high-powered Rift path.

AR screens, SLAM, 3d reconstruction has well over a dozen well-funded companies gunning for the same result. Several companies are going to lose hard, similar to Magic Leap's recapitalization.

So FaceTime?

They aren't in the same room, just same screen, but I'm not sure that really has value for me anyway?

Pretty much.

On that note, I wonder if a pair of wide angle cameras could be used to create a reasonably convincing three-dimensional live stream via FaceTime. With VR glasses, participants in the call would be able to see each others surroundings in 3D space.

This sounds more immersive, and less goofy than the metaverse. It also seems like a feature that Apple could reasonably deliver with their rumoured glasses.

Waiting for the Meta "power glove" too.

What, wrong decade?

For those of you who missed the 80s and the movie The Wizard (1989) which immortalized the Nintendo Power Glove: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AacoxHFYvZw

Colour me highly sceptical. Can they ever solve for latency? Playing a video game with rollback code is one thing. Trying to give me the nuance of a conversation with the latency of our global network is a fool's errand.

This all sounds great... If it worked. VR has been around since the 90s with impressive demos which fail to captivate audiences for one reason or another.

In terms of tangible results, Meta may as well have pivoted to autonomous vehicles. The only way this pivot makes sense would be if they had actually delivered a headset people wanted.

One great aspect of that vide: What event is reasonably full, but has people respecting a human-sized empty space next to you so your hologram friend can have a place to exist?

This is my response every time someone mentions metaverse as a new idea. Metaverses are awesome. I play one every time I play a video game, especially WoW back in the day. I don’t need some crap strapped to my face. A tv or monitor and the human sensory system works just fine. When I played Elden Ring recently for 300+ hours I was in that world, just as deeply as someone with annoying crap strapped to their head.

It’s just easier to get gullible investors to invest in your metaverse VR idea due to Gartner hype cycle rules, which are currently at Peak of Inflated Expectations.

> “the metaverse” can include virtual reality—characterized by persistent virtual worlds that continue to exist even when you're not playing—as well as augmented reality that combines aspects of the digital and physical worlds.

> Minecraft/Roblox/Fortnite

These MMO's are the real absolute ceiling of whatever Meta is trying to do, but that's insufficiently gigantic to justify a pivot of Meta.

So they are pitching it as something that will extend past niche audiences (in absolute numbers they are huge but niche in terms of FB scale).

The incoherency of why non-gamers would be interested in this is revealed in their advertising. For example, a fitness buff talking about how swinging around a foam stick with a headset strapped to her face is the best workout of her life.

> I still don't understand what's the difference between MMOs and Metaverse.

I think it's ads.

You made me snort beer out of my nose.

This is how I've felt since the beginning. Especially lately with all of this NFT -> "virtual land" selling in some cases for millions of dollars. Like... What? Why wouldn't you play a game where virtual land is, get this, free, and provides the exact same value.

From what I can tell, metaverse is just an attempt to make MMOs for "normal" people. So instead of a few million people spending 6+ hours per day in your "game", you have a few billion people spending 6+ hours per day in your "game".

So, Second Life?

but for normal people

If by "normal" you mean corporate chatbots everywhere.

WoW but more boring and with more microtransactions.

Second Life but with hardware requirements with less general-purpose utility.

AOL but with avatar solicitors coming to your virtual door to try and interest you in "security deals from Ali Express".

Final Fantasy XIV is at least fun

Imagine the mandatory MSQ in the Metaverse

Cut substantially all of the Seventh Astral Era line and maybe we can talk.

If you're not aware, they did this in one of the final Shadowbringers patches. Most of the fluff that used to be part of the MSQ is now moved to optional sidequests.

They only cut 20% the 2.x MSQ. Significant, but not "most"

Maybe if it had auto-path

> I still don't understand what's the difference between MMOs and Metaverse

Metaverse demos have felt super underwhelming compared to e.g. playing Grand Theft Auto 5 for a few hours

Silicon Valley is great at rebranding things that already exist. Everyone talking a big game about the metaverse never played an MMO.

Exactly this. I read a great quote from Gabe Newell talking to PC Gamer[1]:

"Most of the people who are talking about metaverse have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. And they've apparently never played an MMO. They're like, 'Oh, you'll have this customizable avatar.' And it's like, well... go into La Noscea in Final Fantasy 14 and tell me that this isn't a solved problem from a decade ago, not some fabulous thing that you're, you know, inventing."

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-metaverse/

nobody knows because it's not a real thing. It's one of those "there's something there and we need to be a part of it when it gets big" kind of things.

I don't believe that VR will ever become mainstream btw, but AR has huge applicability starting from business but also for people involved in all kinds of sports, especially anything to do with bikes / skis / motorcycles etc...

I strongly suspect Facebook will not be the winner of either use case.

Apple / Disney are much better positioned to capture the "virtual amusement park / mall" space than Meta.

Google / Microsoft are better positioned for the work / leisure time use case.

Conclusion: Meta is screwed.

> I still don't understand what's the difference between MMOs and Metaverse.

You actually have to try VR to better understand. Google Cardboard doesn’t count

Rec Room and VR chat are good places to start

Rec Room and VRChat are like earlier social MMOs, but with the inherent appeal leaving them attractive enough to cut out the pretense of gameplay (e.g. OSRS, MUDs, were not that dissimilar in being mostly about chatting with a distraction present)

It also raises the question of what Facebook's metaverse could do that VRChat and Rec Room haven't. VRChat is the more successful of the two and has achieved the level of success of "video game more popular than you might realise", which for the small dev team is enough for a profitable business.

How do you make it profitable at meta scale? NFTs, loot boxes and cosmetic microtransactions seem to be the prospects raised by people promoting such ideas. But then how is VRChat + microtransactions - your local modder's blatant copyright infringement more appealing than VRChat?

Facebook’s metaverse is just marketing. It’s akin to AOL commercials implying that AOL is the whole internet. What meta is providing is a gateway to the metaverse and maybe a portion of it called Horizon. The metaverse is built on the internet. No single entity can own or control all of it despite what any marketing implies. (Ready Player One is fantasy masquerading as sci-fi imo)

The difference is that you play with your whole body, not just your fingers. You can duck for cover, or run, or kick and punch someone, or construct an item with your hands. It’s immersive and it could take gaming to a whole other level.

This is what AR and games are all about. Not necessarily what Meta wants to build.

I've never been convinced that physical immersion will ever be as compelling to the human brain as mental immersion through good story-telling. Having my real-life body and physical attributes thrust directly into a story/game just seems like the most non-immersive thing possible to me unless the game is entirely designed around moving the body, like DDR or Beat Saber or whatever.

This is what the makers of text adventures said about graphic adventures, just in a different dimensional context. And we all know how that turned out... :-/

True, although I still feel more immersed in a good text adventure than some of the best AAA games out there. I played 'Lost Pig' [1] about a year ago and the 'visuals' are still fresh in my mind.

https://pr-if.org/play/lostpig/

I don’t understand this comment. Isn’t having your real life body put into the story/game like a textbook definition of being more immersive than just engaging with sight and sound?

"The last rays of sunlight disappear leaving a cold darkness in the Uncanny Valley before you."

How's that going to work in my living room where there's an ottoman, a coffee table, the dog's running around, etc. Or do I need to build a new room just for AR/VR stuff? I mean, yeah you can do some interesting stuff like having virtual Jenga on your coffee table, or whatever, but thinking in terms of HalfLife 4, or even sitting around chatting with 3 other friends who are in different locations, it sounds like it would start to become impossible just because of the space I'd be in. (Or expensive if I have to have a new space that I keep clear all the time.)

The level of magical thinking and SV delusion around the practical downsides of this reminds me of what Steve Jobs apparently said about the Segway "If enough people see the machine you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it. It'll just happen."[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010617162321/http://www.inside...

> Or do I need to build a new room just for AR/VR stuff?

Probably, at least until we perfect the matrix or 360 degree treadmill tech.

Insurance companies will love the metaverse :)

You get a kind of treadmill which is stationary and you move inside it. Come on guys, stuff like that have been described in sf literature decades ago. It's not like we run out of ideas. We already have kinetic games for more than a decade now.

As for your friends, they can sit wherever the fuck they please. They're holograms, or on a more crude version just simulations from an AR/VR set.

The Nintendo Wii was briefly quite popular because it had a crude version of this, and the Switch improved on it a bit.

Even using your fingers, going from keyboard and mouse (on desktop) to touch (on mobile) was a major change.

It's unclear to me that you need realistic 3D imagery versus new kinds of input devices. Maybe smart knobs will become popular?

So basically like "Ready Player One" where you need a full motion capture suit, 2-D treadmill, and handheld controls. There's probably a niche market of hardcore gamers like the people who build full cockpits for flight simulators. But this complicated stuff is never going to penetrate the mainstream mass market.

Maybe a giant inflatable ball in your backyard pool that you climb in.

I mean, cool. If you're already an athletic freak who can do this for a couple of hours at a time with a massive room with no furniture in.

You're basically describing Wii Sports, which was a great novelty at the time. For maybe a year or so.

> I still don't understand what's the difference between MMOs and Metaverse

Lack of mundane grinding for exp, rep and mats?

>Lack of mundane grinding

Auto/afk [anything] is a staple in lot of mobile MMOs. Like auto-battle, auto-questing etc. Yeah I don't know why would you even "play" at that point but then again those games are insanely popular. Kinda like "gamifying a game" if that make sense.