The question implies that it was alive at some point. Was it though? All I know about Metaverse is that a lot of “tech” journalists were writing about it, but I don’t know anyone who used it. And I owned a Meta Quest 2 for 6 months.
There is no metaverse. There’s VR games and multiplayer games, and metaverse became a word for anything that remotely touched any of these or that’s even remotely vaguely related. 3D assets → metaverse. Online game → metaverse. Video call → metaverse.
If you’re talking about Horizon Worlds, that’s a multiplayer game/social experience. Nothing about this is a “metaverse” as it is described in the book where that word came from.
There’s no use case for the metaverse that gives it any more value than a video conference. But I can set up a video conference for free, while the metaverse is set up to constantly extract money from the user. On top of that, the barrier to entry is too high in both cost and practicality. I can buy a high quality webcam for a fraction of the price of a VR headset, and I don’t have to strap it to my face just to have a meeting.
In order to justify the cost of being in the metaverse, there has to be a value return that makes it worthwhile - something that can’t be replicated with other simpler and cheaper options. Right now, the metaverse is a platform run by grifters ripping off other wannabe grifters and the gullible.
There doesn’t need to be a value return - if it’s fun. Unfortunately, it seems designed specifically to be brand safe for future advertising instead of appealing to real people.
There doesn’t need to be a value return - if it’s fun.
This is fine, for a video game. But the metaverse isn’t being marketed as a video game, it’s being marketed as a social and utility platform.
Also if it is just a video game then there’s nothing more compelling about it than any other video game… and also it’s a crappy video game built around microtransactions. It’s not fun, it’s a dead mall.
It never even existed and was this ambiguous buzzword that got way too much traction.
This is the only true answer here.
Even Meta themselves said they want to “build the metaverse”, at that point the word still had a somewhat clear definition. It then became a bullshit buzzword and lost all meaning. Now even Meta is using the word as a synonym for “VR” or “Multiplayer”, which has nothing to do with the snow crash definition of the word.
There’s way, way too many buzzword chasers out there. How hard can it possibly be to assess something by it’s own merits instead of looking for keywords that other Successful Cool Guys™ are promoting? Instead, we get people copying each other’s hype to the point they build entire markets in intrinsically worthless things on occasion.
Don’t dismiss an entire group on the actions of a single person.
Engineers make Star Trek tech because people want to live in Star Trek. No one (besides Zuck) wants to live in Ready Player One.
Fortnite shows that there are people interested in living in a game enviroment where they are surrounded by recognizable brands. But Meta’s infomercial vibe with bland, low budget, dead-eyed characters, which are so sanitized they didn’t even have lower bodies, is not anything close to anything that anyone wants.
The weird thing is they actually do have the tech for photorealistic avatars. But they didn’t implement because if they did then inevitably people would use it for “virtual encounters” which Facebook don’t want to deal with understandably. But at the same time if that’s what people want to do with it and you’re not letting them that’s a problem.
This tech won’t work if it’s run by one boring ass company.
Purity is the enemy of innovation, got it.
Almost across the board, new technology is used to spread two things: religious dogma and porn.
And the farmer’s almanac, but mostly the Bible and porn.
Well this sounds funny, but really? I think our newest tech is applied in… Research, manufacturing, weaponry, speed/efficiency/throughput.
On the consumer side of things, we have new technology applied in TVs, movie theatres, and video games. Depending on how “new” is new to you. NGL porn does get a lot of love from tech, though. Not only video resolution, 3D video, and VR… But teledildonics, fancy new backend (ha!) Systems for all of this streaming and payment.
What do you think?
new technology is used to spread two things:
religious dogmawar and porn.Religion might be a distant third.
Photo realistic avatars aren’t possible today. Even if they have the technology for it to work in normal conditions and it wasn’t faked like the leg tracking, it’s going to take more than a smartphone to render, and the majority of people don’t have a computer more powerful than a smartphone, even if they do own a VR headset. The sad reality for PC VR is that most PC users don’t have VR and probably most VR users don’t have a gaming PC.
- dense housing
- VRchat is mainstream
I think this article makes reasonable sense. Also that quote from Spez is so disheartening. Glad I’m not on reddit anymore
Small correction - Steve Huffman is u/spez, he’s the current CEO. Alexis Ohanian was one of the co-founders and was on the board of directors for a while but I don’t think he’s involved with Reddit any more except probably as an investor.
God, they even want to make leisure time into a side hustle. Is it so much to ask that they let me not think about my participation in capital for like, two hours?
I’ve just invented a pillow that bombards your dreams with ads.
For the user it is free, and it is literally the most comfortable pillow you will ever lay your head on
It has a White noise generator, and a built-in fan so that it’s constantly the cool side of the pillow. It is exceedingly soft and yet surprisingly supportive but you will see ads every single moment of REM sleep for the rest of your life and once you’ve gotten used to using it if you stop using it you will never be able to fall asleep again.
Currently Microsoft meta Amazon and Netflix are all in a bidding war to purchase this technology from me.
VR Chat is still here and doing well. Its good for niche stuff. When the tech is ready maybe it can reach the mass, but the current tech is not ready yet.
VrChat
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It died for the exact same reason every single aspect of life is getting shittier and shittier. Shareholders. When a company is publicly traded, it has NO CHOICE but to get worse and worse and worse, because shareholders will accept NOTHING beyond continuous growth. If you lose value in the market, they will run for the hills, if you plateau they will run, if you suddenly start making even slightly smaller gains, they will run. They are the sole reason for every decision, and because of that, every single decision will be a detriment to both employees and consumers. Underneath all the bullshit, this is why everything will go to shit eventually unless it is both privately held and by people with good intentions, which is rare to find tied together.
I would argue Zuckerburg had a lot of control over this project, lost a lot of money, and shareholders, due to the structure of Meta as a company, could do fuck all about it.
… But in almost literally every other company on earth, yea this is the case. And meta made these decisions in a world defined by the relationship you just described.
The metaverse was stillborn.
It was the hype for like 4 weeks and was dead before it even existed
It’s crazy how Zuckerberg hyped it up to the extreme, even renamed his company for it and than never actually build anything remotely worth of that name. What is going on in Horizon Worlds still looks less interesting than what they demoed with Facebook Social all the way back in 2016 on Oculus Rift.
Just give me a virtual space where I can watch movies, play games and go shopping with friends. It shouldn’t be that hard to build something that at least feels a bit deeper than just yet another chat app. Or take the silly stuff CodeMiko is doing, that is what I expect to be happening in the Metaverse, yet it happens in 2D on Twitch. Even Meta’s own conferences are still real world events with video screens, not events in the Metaverse.
I don’t mind the idea of the Metaverse, but the implementation is lightyears behind of where it should be.
I feel like part of the impetus for the name change, and perhaps the extreme hype to some extent, came from trying to distance themselves from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
I’m pretty sure it is hard
Other businesses got hyped and signed up in droves, but they forgot they need a user base.
The crazy part is that it is not even clear what they signed up for. Everybody started talking “Metaverse” as if it was an actual thing. But it never was. There never was an app, a standard or much of anything.
Second Life ain’t exactly perfect either, but at least that’s an actual thing that exists and in which you can open up your virtual advertisement booth.
The metaverse could be successful but it needs to be a protocol not a proprietary product by one company, least of all Facebook.
Right now anyone can make a website if they know how to program one. It can be hosted on any number of services or you can host it yourself if you have the hardware. Your website can look like anything, have any functionality you want, be as complex as you want, be as large as you want. You can use website builders or you can go entirely custom. There is a huge range of options.
What now needs to happen is that same thing for the metaverse. It needs to be a standard programming language or set of programming languages that people can learn, that will enable them to build experiences. Those experiences should be hostable on any old server and a routeing protocol needs to be developed so that people can access them without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Second Life does a very good job of modifying the web URL concept to work for virtual worlds, just copy that. There also needs to be a standardised API for returning feedback responses and querying available interfaces (vibration motors, speakers, lights, force resistance motors etc) that all headsets and interaction devices use.
Perhaps some kind of federation service that enables different servers to interact with each other for transferring items from one environment to another and making sure that they make sense in all environments.
Another underlying aspect is the dimensionality:
- Paper is 2D
- IRL items are 3D
- webpages are… you’d be tempted to say “2D”, but look at the links, in how many directions one can move across webpages… they’re n-D!
Going from nD to 3D, is a step back, and even when people don’t realize it consciously, they’ll keep falling back to the superior webpage solution.
Until someone puts the nD mobility into 3D worlds, there is no chance for them to take over.
Like VRML from the 90s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML?wprov=sfla1
Third Room by matrix.org does all of this.
The main problem is that they only focused on how much money they could make, and forgot to make it somewhere people actually wanted to be. Basically the developer equivalent of “here’s the deal, you do something for me-” then they never finish the sentence.
Exactly this. When you read about the metaverse in something like Snow Crash, it’s a place built by enthusiasts, very cheap to use, and people have the choice of DIY, or paying someone to do things for them.
In the facebook’s version, everything but connecting costs money, and it’s all done by facebook.
I can’t ever forget the first trailer where they pulled street art out of a street into virtual space, and then they had to tip so it wouldn’t disappear. It was insanely transparent how any attempt at imaginative play was superficial, that the creators were completely out of touch with what people wanted, and squeezing money out of people was the ultimate goal.
They did the reverse enshitification, do it shit first and then… wait what then?
That said…it is VR although is getting bigger still plenty of people without headsets or people with issues with them.
That said…it is VR although is getting bigger still plenty of people without headsets or people with issues with them.
That was one problem yes. There isn’t really any need for the metaverse to VR only, at least not initially. Even Facebook actually came up with a sort of workaround for this problem where you could use your phone and navigate an avatar around with on-screen controls. It would have probably worked better on a desktop computer which is something they never bothered to implement but it wouldn’t be that hard to make.
If it was actually fun and useful and people used it on a regular basis other people would be incentivised to go out and spend big bucks on a VR headset. Trying to get people to buy the VR headset first was never going to work, only enthusiasts were going to get one that way around, and they weren’t actually interested in metaverse all that much, they were going after traditional gaming experiences, watching 3D movies, and porn obviously.
They needed VR to convince people that this one fad of virtual real estate and tradeable virtual items totally wasn’t exactly like Second Life.
Well that was always my problem with Facebook’s implementation as well. If I’m paying money for virtual real estate I’d rather just pay money for the server and then control it myself. It never made sense to me to let one company host the code, because there’s literally no benefit to me for them doing that. Usually the benefit of letting a company host the code is that it costs less money, but if I’m going to be paying virtual rent every month anyway I’d rather just have server access.
It’s gonna come back in some shape. Imagine being able to make users live inside your little world, and you can manipulate their emotions and track them around the clock. Wet dream.
Facebook and Google are doing this already but at least without the virtual world graphics.
The Metaverse died because they tried to monetize it before it’s even a thing. Buy a virtual plot of land? With crypto and NFTs? Hell no!
VR Chat exists and it, and it’s free.
It died because meta (which everyone still sees as facebook) is a toxic brand, even to the average consumer now.
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Really, no. That’s not it at all.
It’s because it’s been almost exclusively pushed by hucksters. Just like blockchain, whose driving inspiration in the marketplace has been crypto and NFTs.
