The problem is that if everyone with "metaverse" hype actually looked at Second Life[0], they'd realize that there's not really much to get hyped over. The final and most important lesson of Second Life was that most people do not want a 3D world chat room.
[0] Or ActiveWorlds, or the metric buttload of VRML chat services before that...
Yep. Some people do, they still have an audience, but it's not the revolution it was supposed to be.
It's also a great example of a hype cycle - it was going to be the future, it was going to be everything, corporates had offices in there, universities had campuses, there were virtual music events and art galleries, there were real-dollar millionaires made from virtual real-estate.
When the hype died down and the smoke cleared, there were still people wanting to use it, but not that many, and not in the way we were all told to expect, and the corporates realised they didn't need a bank branch or an SL office full of virtual meeting rooms in there after all. Neat sandbox with interesting ongoing uses, not the new centre of all our online lives.
I think COVID and GenZ growing up on the internet has changed the equation. Will the metaverse take over the world? Probably not. But now that knowledge work has gone remote, entire countries remain blocked to tourists, and people are coming down with flus they need to isolate for 10 days for, I think having a virtual sandbox to socialize in has more appeal.
I think you missed the actual answer. There is a near future sci-fi book called Rainbows End written by a computer science professor 15 years ago (and that predicted a lot of stuff, like... cryptocurrency) that has an answer for this.
What will be the real "VR metaverse" for most consumers is the one that maps to reality. The AR metaverse. Being able to visit people in real life in real locations, virtually: augmented reality. Where the virtual reality part of that is a small extra side bit for the dedicated people.
I agree with this. I'm just saying in my opinion, with our current tech, VR and the Metaverse isn't something to be ignored. AR can definitely be bigger but it's important to remember that thousands of knowledge workers have begun their career never interacting with another person in a workplace.
While there used to always be soft pressure to structure your life in the real world, with work and school online, folks who otherwise would be pressured to interact offline might now find interaction online to be just as fulfilling. Or at least equally fulfilling for things like work while saving quality, offline time for friends.
But none of that looks like an excuse for VR to exist. That generation of remote first, they would be less interested in an hmd-based simulation of a meeting room, not more interested. They want a good camera, to be a better face on a screen, not better screens on their faces.
Of course and they are doing this, there's huge demand for nicer cameras, ring lights, backlights, etc for upcoming streamers and influencers. But this isn't a zero-sum game. It's not like we have to Zoom every hour of our work lives. Startups like Gather Town are predicated on finding a permanent, but not total, place in the future of remote work. If my company pays for a subscription to Minecraft For Work (TM) so that we can have remote tech talks or remote social events on it, then there's value, even if it's only used a couple hours per week by per team at a large company.
This is the exact same proposition that Second Life had, 15 years ago. Cross-continental teams can 'meet' in a shared virtual space and it'll be just like you're there! And after all the hype ... it just wasn't something that people did.
I know there are headsets now, maybe it will go differently. Maybe not.
But having seen virtual worlds come and go multiple times, I'm going to assume that it's another hype cycle until there's compelling evidence to the contrary.
You might as well not be a person if you live in a virtual world...necessities like money and basic human needs mean people outgrow their fantasy world, and their fantasy games. Moves like this cause fragmentation, such that there is no one virtual world.
As your userbase gradually dwindles to nothing...they grow up and have lives. Or don't, and are usually characterized by low paying jobs, poor health.
Ofc not every low paid worker is there by choice, and some are born disabled, but on average these games are a cause of their plight.
The metaverse doesn't seem quite that bad (Facebook's people seem to have an understanding of the medium they want to operate in), but the basic "we're going to make the user experience worse by replicating the limitations of the real world for the sake of realism" mentality is still there.
I ve been inviting people to try SL (opensimulator, the open source version of SL) and most people actually like 3D worlds. Many people don't even know these things exist because their mainstream experience is mobile games and flat websites. But SL has a terrible user interface and experience and it's so complicated that it alienates those users. Even an advanced user would have a hard time figuring out all those legacy things and concepts, it's the Unix of VR worlds.
As for the metaverse, people need to realize that it's not for everyone . Maybe in 10-20 years or so
The entire point of second Life is to have an infitely customizable character with user created clothing, etc. VRChat avatars are fully backed 3D models that require advanced modelling skills even for something as basic as changing the colour of a t-shirt.
Fortnite and Minecraft do have chat features in them, but those are features tacked-on as a last resort. In the case of Minecraft you don't even have voice chat. In the olden days of the Xbox 360's heyday[0], all we had were one-on-one voice channels or in-game chat, the latter of which would be an absolutely toxic nightmare of getting shouted and screamed at.
Furthermore, Fortnite and Minecraft are games whose camera and movement controls are optimized for the specific game mechanics they feature. If you want to create a generic 3D world, then you have to also create a generic set of controls to move and look around that world; and those controls are always going to be awkward and difficult to use.
Maybe you built a regular house, in which case Sims-style point-and-click-to-move and a fixed camera angle would be your best control option. Or maybe you built a racetrack with cars, which means you want WASD-steering with a car-locked third-person camera. Your FPS level wants first-person or over-the-shoulder third-person.
Second Life tried to do all of the above, so they gave you a default behind-the-head camera that vaguely works in open spaces, but you have to use Maya-style camera orbit controls to look at specific things. You can scroll to zoom to first person, but you can't use any of the builder controls in that view because of mouselook. And all of this was complicated enough that Linden Labs felt it was necessary to add "easy" movement and camera controls driven by UI buttons, but not to add click-to-move for third-person mode.
The thing is, when I look back at Second Life I can't really think of a way that it could have been done better. I can think of features that it's missing, but that wouldn't fix the clunkiness of the controls. Anything I could think of to fix camera movement would bias in the direction of a particular 'genre'; and making people switch between "FPS mode", "car mode", and "hanging out mode" would be a total pain.
This isn't even getting into the other problems these projects have, like the fact that 3D worlds are really expensive to build, or that the copyright maximalists will have a field day suing you over all the pirated content that your users will inevitably port in.
They use Fortnite and Minecraft as something to do while they chat in another client, usually Discord. Modern multiplayer games have largely reduced (or eliminated) communication with people you aren't already friends with.
SecondLife, Fortnite, Roblox, etc (even VRC on PC) are what Matthew Ball refers to as "proto-Metaverses" as in 3D experiences locked inside 2D screens. But you can't compare those experiences to what is possible when you can see 3D in 3D either overlayed on top of reality or in a totally animated world space. It's Apples and Oranges -- yes they are both fruit; but you'd be very wrong indeed to think because one is good in a pie the other must be.
Personally, I hadn't thought of it this way (mostly dismissed the idea). I'm sure it's a much different experience and one would have to experience it to properly judge it. I think the difficulty with the other, more generic, platforms was that the question of "what is the point" came up, a lot. And when users got to define "the point", sometimes "the point" was pretty disturbing ... most of the time it was just boring.
My biggest concern is that I've yet to find a VR headset that I can use for more than about ten minutes before feeling nauseated from motion sickness. I'm told this is somewhat/mostly solved and I've used higher end gear but it's been the same result for me every time.
> My biggest concern is that I've yet to find a VR headset that I can use for more than about ten minutes before feeling nauseated from motion sickness.
Sometimes I see these issues being brought but and I always wonder if they are associated with experiencing applications that make your virtual body move artificially without actually moving in real life, instead of staying intact like in Beat Saber or jumping by teleportation like Half Life: Alyx allows?
It seems a popular mistake for VR newcomers is to get in—or be put in—a rollercoaster or drive a car where these kind of problems are very visibile.
[0] Or ActiveWorlds, or the metric buttload of VRML chat services before that...