I feel compelled to say that your second sentence is probably the funniest thing I've ever read on HN. It resonates very strongly with my belief that VR/Metaverse will continue to under deliver. What people want is an escape from reality. "Just like" Ready Player One or anything from a wide choice of science fiction novels. The problem is that these systems require a fundamental disconnect from reality. Not only do we not have the input technology, the closest thing we have is a monkey playing pong, but the obstruction of physical world signals is basically non-existent. If it were, then we wouldn't have people in chronic pain. Finally, we already know how this experiment ends. This is basically SecondLife 2.0 (ThirdLife?). We'll have 0.1% stay because they invested so much (money, time, identity) into the world that the sunk cost fallacy kicks in.
I still don't understand what's the difference between MMOs and Metaverse. Like it's on mobile? That's all? Peak WoW _was_ a social network something Zuck is dreaming about (and that's while you also have to pay a monthly sub). I've read around and some people say that the difference people can _create content_ in Metaverse but... sandbox MMOs are also a thing for a long time (or just look at Minecraft/Roblox/Fortnite). Or the whole point just to attach your persona to your real name + Meta can monetize everything? But that still just sounds like some F2P korean MMO or a japanese gacha game.
Maybe there is more to that but to me at least 1, the Metaverse sounds more like a "vision" than an actual product (yet VR Chat already exist too if the main selling point is AR/VR) 2, if it's an actual product then it's an MMO reimagined for non-gaming "normal" people
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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]
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.
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.
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.
I don't think this is even broadly true. We just locked everyone in their houses for the pandemic and people hated it. They want to get out and do stuff and see the world. Not sit on a couch with a screen strapped to their face.
Likewise! In fact, it was the first time my disabled spouse was able to get some family to talk to her since now they were in the same situation. It also opened up a bunch of services for disabled people since now everyone needed delivery and not answering the door for packages was no longer weird.
yeah, that's real. I'd lost a lot of connection with friends after my mobility deteriorated, and then suddenly I had a mahjong social club every Thursday with old friends! I didn't feel outcast for being shut-in.
VR Chat is Second Life 2.0. Horizon Worlds is shaping up to be VR Chat 0.8. People Make Games interviewed people in VR Chat [0] and gave great examples of how behind (intentionally in some cases, in terms of not having lower halves of avatars) Horizon Worlds appears to be.
I've used both and Horizon Worlds' lack of development is mind-boggling. It's positioned as the crown jewel of the Metaverse, the core from which Facebook will build the rest of the concept, and yet it's so barebones it's like no one is even working on it.
VRChat has completely user-made avatars. To support this, they have a robust content moderation system with a fair amount of user control, and bounded performance requirements. Horizon has very limited Mii-like avatars, but with even less customization. This means they don't have to moderate avatars or worry about performance, and also crushes the boundless possibilities of self-expression into a sea of identical corporate art style drones.
VRChat also has user-made worlds. So does Horizons. The difference is that Horizons worlds can only be made out of primitives (cube, sphere, triangle, etc.) This makes it easy to enforce performance requirements and also makes the entire metaverse look like a poorly developed PS2 game. It also runs worse than a well-optimized environment mesh, but apparently Facebook doesn't trust their users to figure that out. Second Life actually shipped with this system originally (in 2003) and later abandoned the system because of these and other problems, but learning from the past is apparently not in vogue at Facebook.
VRChat has a fairly granular safety system, with configurable boundaries, default permissions, friend settings, etc. Horizons has a half-hearted attempt at this but leans mostly on the ominous promise that Facebook is recording everything you say and do, and if someone reports you an unreachable Facebook admin will review your past actions for content violations. This works about as well as you'd expect.
These and other problems are, IMO, all bad decisions, but they're also low effort decisions and that I do not understand. I actually like VR and want Facebook to succeed here (hopefully incentivizing competition), and the department formerly known as Oculus is doing a great job with the requisite hardware. So why, why, given that the entire company has been bet on this, is the flagship Metaverse software of the world's largest social media company lagging behind a random startup making their metaverse in Unity with practically no money?
> world's largest social media company lagging behind a random startup
This seems to be a really common recurring theme in the tech industry and particularly the games industry, and I wish I understood why
Just look at Minecraft, Valheim, any of the recent Pokemon games... A single person or a skeleton crew can somehow always seem to outproduce gigantic companies full of engineers and artists on the same level as the ones from the skeleton crew.
I think this is because once you are a running on infinite cash, it becomes a no-brainer to apply what you've already learned to achieve that success. Also, stakeholders will require that. So pull in a bunch of management, MBA-s, designers, analysts, etc. What you end up with is lot of friction and no real innovation.
I imagine they're going with Mii-like avatars because they have business contexts in mind. What they could do instead is to give people at least two avatars for different contexts and then let the tool/environment set which they're using.
e.g., if you're in a business meeting, it automatically runs with your Mii-like avatar, otherwise if you're roaming a desertscape to relax on the couch after dinner, you can be a pink lemur in a cape and cowboy hat. Might as well prep for both contexts now rather than putting off either potential customer.
Echoing your thoughts, I used a friends Oculus and it was really awesome and inspiring and had echoes of that tech I fantasize from science fiction novels. But after five minutes it was really like, I can't wait for version 17 of this thing, because it's so close and yet so far.
> It resonates very strongly with my belief that VR/Metaverse will continue to under deliver.
Just offer VR porn applications, and a lot of people will urge to get a VR headset and a decent computer to support it. For a lot of kinds of media, porn was the killer application.
I want VR to be a thing. I want Ready Player One. I want the Star Trek Holodeck.
But I also want a time machine. And honestly, that seems almost as likely as the metaverse ever being a "thing". The technology simply doesn't exist and we are so far off that pivoting to it now seems...either wildly optimistic or HBO Silicon Valley level out of touch.
VR only underdelivers when compared to full emergence. You don't need a television when you have a VR headset. I think that Meta's headsets will be the the consoles for the next generation because TV sets are not a given anymore. So a console becomes more expensive because you have to also buy a television.
I have to say, that based on my family and friends who I occasionally watch TV shows and movies with, I'm the only person who is able to focus on the TV screen without my phone in sight. Everyone else I know is constantly half-listening, half-watching, while simultaneously browsing IG, Zillow, YT, TikTok, etc. I think our very real phone addictions are going to play an adverse role in VR adoption until the VR app space fully replaces everything in the mobile app space (plus the time it will take for people to break their phone habits and replace them with VR habits)... seems like a uphill slog for Meta.
> I'm the only person who is able to focus on the TV screen
I don't know why you'd want to do so for most TV. I like to idly code at 1/4 speed during average shows. Like if the cousins want to watch Moana for the 34th time, I'm not gonna dedicate my full attention the whole time, but I do want to hang out with everyone else in the family.
On the other hand, I've never wanted to pick up a phone while my VR headset is on my head. It's engrossing! But the downside of VR is that it's so isolating. There's no way for me to be half in a head-mounted display. No one can casually look over my shoulder, nor can I causally peek up from my screen when someone says something interesting.
I used to do that a lot, and I finally realized that I actually didn't care about what was on the TV and just started leaving it off. Either a show is worth actually watching or it isn't IMO.
I guess it's a little bit of a different story if it's just the centerpiece of family time, though..
The first killer accessory in the metaverse will be some kind of pass-through phone gateway or phone proxy that people can use as a substitute for their physical phone, to satiate their compulsive need to (ABC) Always Be Checking it. I don't see people accepting strapping on a headset that blocks access to their primary addiction.
I don't think it'll be particularly hard to mirror your phone screen into your virtual space. Closely similar things are already done in a bunch of apps.
The mental image of a bunch of virtual avatars sitting at a table on the moon all silently staring at their virtual phones and scrolling through reddit seems so hilariously stupid that it just might happen.
Every time I put on a VR helmet, I flash back to being a teenage boy and cringe while I wait for one of my “friends” to punch me in the crotch. I can’t really see VR taking off for most people because middle school bullying aside, it’s very claustrophobia inducing to be unable to see your surroundings.
Vision and sound covered too, though vision can get better with more res and variable focus. Sound can get better with 3d scanning for custom HRTF's matched to the user's ear shape and body (sound reflecting off shoulders etc.).
Proprioception cannot be fooled. No matter what you do to your vestibular system it's not going to realistically feel like you're in a fighter jet or a race car. It can't even make walking on an omnidirectional treadmill feel like real walking. Galvanic vestibular stimulation is not really a good idea, independent of the fact that it literally sends high voltage electricity through your skull.
Walking on a VR treadmill is actually the opposite example of what you are claiming I believe. It exercises your proprioception without giving you the right vestibular response (except on huge military 12x12ft treadmills and stuff that can accommodate decent amounts of real acceleration from locomotion, I'm assuming you mean consumer "slipmill" type setups where you fully run in place).
Not really. Your proprioception is accurately sensing the same as your vestibular system, which is that you are moving your limbs but you don't have forward momentum because you're not moving. Which is totally fine and indistinguishable from normal in the steady state of walking in one direction at a constant speed as on a regular treadmill, but the illusion falls apart the second you try to turn or change speed, as you'll want to do on a VR treadmill. And it doesn't matter how big the treadmill is, the problem will occur whenever the treadmill changes direction or speed.
If you apply galvanic vestibular stimulation to try to "correct" at least the vestibular sense, you will lose your balance and fall over, because you can't fool physics. Even if you're prevented from falling by a harness it won't feel right. The disagreement between your vestibular and proprioception senses will be uncomfortable.
I mean, yea, earplugs and a blindfold work too, but how do I feel like I'm walking through a pasture with wet dirt between my toes if you cannot simulate the sensory system? That's what people imagine. A home-bound person wants to feel what it is like to skydive, not watch a POV video.
I have seen young people dismiss studies that say that being out in the forest will be beneficial for mental health by saying that for them it's the opposite. Forests gives them high anxiety and being in urban areas will calm them. This included parks.
Fair points though I suggest technology is farther along than monkey playing pong. Consider Neuralink for one. I read the book metaman back in the late 90s and even then they had very simple brain to chip interfaces.
I actually think we had those escapes since I-don't-know-when. People don't need to actually see virtual reality to escape from reality. Actually a good book does a good job too.
In the 90s, the internet was very much being used. It was so exciting that my friends and I sat waiting for 20-30 seconds to see content. We exchanged messages, played each other on Comamand and Conquer, looked at edgy content on forums.
Now, my Oculus headset sits gathering dust in a cupboard. Nobody I know wants it because it's so boring using it for more than half an hour.
I agree with you, but my 9 year old uses our Oculus more than her tablet. She plays games with her friends from school mostly, but also watches movies on Netflix, etc.
Just because your lived experience is that "VR sucks" doesn't mean it's like that for everyone.
As a total counter example, I'm in my 30s, live with my girlfriend (in her 30s) and we play with our Valve Index together several times per week. We also have friends over for house parties where we play VR together (as well as Nintendo Switch.)
Now, imagine this is still "v0" of VR, that I am playing it on a weekly basis etc with my non-gamer girlfriend, I can easily imagine this being massive in 10 years.
sure but the ground has shifted dramatically, in large part due to Meta because of standalone devices. You can't overlook that and pretend the tech is still 90's era.
I remember walking into a computer shop in the late 90's and saying I wanted to install Wifi in my house. They looked at me like I was an alien. One of them literally said "Why would you want that?"
It was probably less than 5 years before Wifi was ubiquitous.
The most disruptive thing about gmail was that it was obscenely expansive webmail space compared to your typical webmail provider. But webmail was already pretty damn common when gmail came out, and email had been the killer app of the internet for a decade already.
Facebook Mobile is... I'd have to think hard about what it actually is, so I'm not sure that qualifies as disruptive.
Now the iPhone was disruptive. But although you'd fairly classify Apple today as an "established mega-corporation", it's a lot harder to do so when the iPhone came out. To the extent that Apple can use its market share to wield a powerful bludgeon against those who dare cross it--which is what I associate the phrase with--that market share doesn't exist until the phenomenal success of the iPhone. It certainly couldn't do that on the basis of its OS or computers (indeed, you can argue that it still can't do that today). The iPod, or more accurately iTunes, may have given it that power against the music industry, but that's the closest to any sort of tyrannical power it might have held at the time.
The most disruptive thing about Gmail had @&$@ all to do with user features. It just needed to be "good enough".
The key feature of Gmail was scale, which allowed it to offer much better spam detection, which allowed it to capture more market share, etc.
Facebook mobile is the idea that you have something (Facebook) that was popular somewhere (PCs), that for strategic reasons (TAM / global penetration, location-targeted advertising) pivoted to a completely different medium, and invested non-trivial company resources in making that happen.
The iPod/iTunes were pretty damn big. And specifically, big in demographics that were ideal iPhone customers. Apple in 2007 was very different than Apple in 1997.
Gmail was an already popular concept whose differentiator was a company was willing to set money on fire to have two or three orders of magnitude more storage than their competitor. AFAIK, that's been their only differentiator - free storage space.
iPhone was a breakout product from a decidedly no-longer mega corp who practically died in the 1990s. I guess they had already made a resurgence with the iPod, but I think iPod leading to iPhone is similar enough that it's the same jump.
A mobile app from a company is a breakthrough product in your eyes?
There was a time when Facebook existed primarily on the PC web. Everyone thought Zuckerberg was dumb for pivoting substantial company resources into mobile (initially HTML5, then pivot to native app).
Sorry, don't buy into this. The main difference to me is "the people" in the 90s were nerds. Now in the best business scenario for facebook its the opposite: the more nerdiness, the worse business outcome. They have to cater for folks looking for anything but.
> The field is in its "90's internet phase" right now. The tech is still immature, but is rapidly growing in capability and ambition.
This has been said to be the case (though for the first several waves with a different analogy, for obvious reasons) for every wave of the VR hype cycle since at least the mid-80s.
But it keeps not sticking, and I don't see any convincing reason to believe that the people pushing, or buying into, the hype understand why it keeps not sticking, much less have done anything in the most recent wave to overcome those problems.
The fact that "Metaverse Twitter" is a thing, implying that even the people most religiously devoted to the metaverse are still using Twitter rather than a 3D metaverse space tells me all I need to know. It smacks of the old skeumorphism craze: why bother "migrating" to a virtual rendition of an obsolete part of meatspace when you could just use the novel solution for interaction that already works great in meatspace, and would be unchanged in the metaverse?
I had thought that "Meta" was supposed to be a cool-sounding conceptual name, but it seems that folks are taking it literally to mean a very specific reference to a "metaverse" in an actual 3D virtual reality environment.
