It never died, because it already existed for fucking years: Active Worlds from 1995 is where I started, Second Life later, now the dominant “metaverse” is VR Chat.
The corporate simpletons just never did their homework to see what the market is like for this.
Even further back there was Lucasfilm’s Habitat all the way back in 1986. It’s kind of shocking how little the idea of the “Metaverse” has evolved since back then. It’s still just some virtual space with avatars, different hats and chatting.
Wow how fascinating! Thanks for sharing that video.
The word is meaningless, nothing like the metaverse as described in snowcrash ever existed. If you’re talking about a multiplayer game that tries to mimic the real word then you’re right. But that’s not what the metaverse actually is…or what the word stood for, before being ripped to shreds as a buzzword.
Yeah they (Facebook) chose the word as a form of marketing to rebrand something that already existed. It’s similar to how we went from “machine learning” to “AI”.
That’s the thing I hate: the word AI is being misused. It’s not a buzzword, at least it wasn’t supposed to be. It’s artifical intelligence, not in the sense of having a brain but in the sense of being an intelligent algorithm solving an issue. The path finder algorithm A* (A Star) is in this group. Machine learning is a sub category of AI, nothing less.
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Is SL still around? I left my partially nude Darth Vader wearing a banana thong in someone’s art gallery and haven’t been back
Exactly, they should have included fursonas IMMEDIATELY if they wanted it to work.
Even basic market research should have told them this.
I remember Blaxxun’s Colony City i think even earlier than that. VRML is the future of the past!
Oh my god I remember this too. It looks like there’s a revival project. https://www.cybertownrevival.com/
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Isn’t fun just defined as “a period of user base growth followed by extracting every last dollar possible in an exponential growth pattern forever and ever because that’s totally possible mhm it totally is!” to them?
Indeed. “Funnel. Us. Notoriety.”
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 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.
This is the wildest take I’ve heard. People don’t trust meta because it’s Facebook, because it’s Zuckerberg. We’ve all seen what they do with companies they acquire (I used to be an Oculus rift owner).We’ve all seen how poorly they handle data, seems like there is a data breach every year.
Hell, when I was an Oculus rift owner I worked inside of Virtual Desktop some days. I’d argue that Meta killed my desire to work in VR.
I think the article is accurate, and they make a good argument for the fact that Silicon Valley is anti-fun. Even without all the data tracking they still think people want to make money playing games, which is ridiculously out of touch
They also seem to think that continually spending money to do mundane things in a virtual world is not a problem for regular people who actually have to watch their spending.
In general, it’s a tiny nerdy minority that doesn’t trust meta or even cares at all about internet privacy. Unfortunately that’s the only tiny minority who could have any interest in the meta verse.
And those are the same people who are running dev-ops, infrastructure management, and acting as CTOs of companies. If you rely on enthusiasts, you don’t wanna piss off the enthusiast community.
It had nothing to do with trust or concern over privacy, that is still a vastly minority opinion otherwise these services would die overnight. Metaverse failed because it never even was a thing or a concrete idea that could be explained.
Yeah, I agree, I want to get into VR eventually but I refuse to use any Oculus/ Facebook product, when the next valve headset comes out though I’m all over it
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.
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.
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.
i would add cost as a barrier to entry. as cheap as the hardware it, it needed a more heavily subsidized distribution.
apple only exists because they practically gave away equipment en masse to school districts as the market became flooded with ‘ibm compatibles’
they built an entire generation of apple-loving folks by dumping huge amounts of money/resources into those programs.They almost died after that. Jobs putting colored plastic on the outside of Macs saved them.
Well, and them replacing the rotting husk of MacOS 9 with a bastardized version of NeXTSTEP. That kinda helped, too.
Quest2 is $300. That is a pretty reasonably entry price for a Metaverse. Problem there was more that Meta never actually implemented a Metaverse. Putting that thing on your head doesn’t launch you into the Metaverse, but just into the home screen where you select apps to launch from a 2D menu. Their whole software stack does a terrible job of making use of the fact that you have a 3D display on your head. They didn’t even have basic things like VR180-3D trailers for their games. There were no virtual shops to buy stuff. No cinemas to watch stuff. Just apps you can launch. Horizon World, which was supposed to be their Metaverse, was still just another app to launch and not meaningfully integrated with anything else. PlaystationHome was more of a Metaverse than anything Meta ever build, though even that fell rather short.
The Metaverse died because everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg isn’t trustworthy and really had no plan.
If there was any potential in a “metaverse”, it would be picked up by people who know how to make something fun. In Silicon Valley or somewhere else.
That’s not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.
If computer interaction benefited from being more ‘like reality’, then Microsoft Bob or any of the countless other attempts to create a reality- and/or 3D-based computer interface, would have caught on long ago.
The thing is, computer interaction can benefit quite a bit from a 3D space. I really liked what Microsoft did with WMR Portal and how it let you organize your apps simply by placing them in a 3D space, meaning you could have a cinema space with all your video related apps, a stack with games that you were playing, a stack with games you finished, etc. You could have frequently used webpages pasted to the walls. You could just grab the things, resize them and put them somewhere else. It was far more intuitive than any 2D interface I ever used and extremely customizable to your needs.
The problem was that it was also incomplete and unfinished in a lot of other ways and Microsoft just gave up on it. Outside of WMR Portal there has been surprisingly little effort into building good VR user interfaces and even less when comes to actively taking advantage of the 3D space (e.g. plenty apps still use drop shadows to simulate 3D instead of making the buttons actually 3D).
Will be interesting to see how well VisionPro does in this space. They seem to be a lot better with the basic UI elements than everybody else (e.g. dynamically lighting them to fit the AR environment and using real 3D), but at the same time, their focus on a static sitting experience without locomotion drastically limits how much advantage you can take from the 3D. Their main menu so far looks more like a table-UI stuck to your face than an 3D UI.
This describes what I want - being able to have relatively blank walls/spaces that light up and fill up with content when you’re wearing the headset.
This has been tried and tried again, and it never catches on. Computer interfaces that are completely detached from physical 3D space are just much more flexible and easy to use.
That’s not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.
Realistically, the only thing you’d actually want to do in the Metaverse is something you can’t do in real life, utilising the features of a virtual reality computer generated environment to do things that are physically impossible. If only there was some way you could use a computer, with or without a VR headset, to fly a spaceship, use magic, and explore beautiful environments. There could even be these computer generated characters that could give you ideas about things you could do and places you could go, by giving you a reason to go there and do those things, and all of this could tie into a narrative element that turns it into a kind of interactive story, so you’ve got a reason to keep engaging with the computer-generated environment and characters. And maybe you’d get some of that cool computer-generated swag while you’re there, which you could dress your avatar in…
Hmmm… there could be money in that idea. Someone should try making something like that.
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.
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.
I think this article makes reasonable sense. Also that quote from Spez is so disheartening. Glad I’m not on reddit anymore
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.
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.
Was the metaverse ever alive? All I ever saw were posts about what the metaverse could be, but I never even knew it was an actual thing that existed.
Meta’s very own Horizon Worlds still hasn’t even launched globally, it is still restricted to a small handful of countries. On top of that it isn’t even a Metaverse in any meaningful sense, it’s just yet another VR chat application.
What separates a “real” Metaverse from a normal chat app is that it connects all the other applications into one unified virtual space, but Horizon Worlds ain’t doing that and nobody else is either.
Sony’s Playstation Home back from the PS3 days or Second Life are still closer to a Metaverse than any of the modern attempts.
I’d argue that the MiiVerse for the Wii U was up there too.
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.
