What exactly is the Metaverse?

I've seen this word over and over, from Unity Blog, to Hideo Kojima's Twitter, and many other places.
They all seem to be talking about different thing, Googling it gave me a lot of different definition of what Metaverse is.

I have a hard time understanding what exactly it is.

Is it something Facebook will be releasing?
Is it Mixed Reality environment?
Is it a shared VR space?
Is it a shared digital space?
Is it a new industry?
Is it an environment to use your NFTs?

Why is it every time someone used the word, it seems to have a completely different meaning?

 

A load of hot air.

Or, everyone late to the punch to be the next VR chat.

 

lol
A poor way to do things in sickness-inducing VR with retro graphics!
+ AR, blockchain.

 

Personally I understand it as a more immersive internet. One that's more based on 3D and VR and AR than simple screens. Plus you'll more likely use a consistent identity/account instead of 150 different ones due to every website having their own registration.
That's what "meta" refers to: The surrounding of the actual content. The content of the internet will stay the same: entertainment, communication and shopping etc.
The way you experience those is different. From this follows that it's pretty much all of your points. NFTs too but those are just an equivalent to showing wealth. Some people will care about that aspect. A majority will not or find individual forms of wealth like before.

Still as long as not even FB has presented a proper framework etc. obviously everybody has their own actual interpretation. And FB will have to be really good at showing the advantages so 3rd party companies jump into the dependency on them. Ideally something non-centrallized would be established but that feels less likely unfortunately because if 50 open source standards appear, none will establish itself.

 

A buzzword.

 

A "3D internet", whatever that means.

Everyone is spending VC/cryptobro money on the metaverse but nobody is actually building "the metaverse". They sell Ready Player One's Oasis but deliver mediocre VRChat/Second Life/Habbo Hotel clones (if they deliver at all).

Basically, every "shared online space with avatars and user-generated content" is being labeled metaverse now, even if today's offerings are no different than those from 15 years ago.

 

because it sorta does, and always did, even before a company decided to appropriate it as a product name.

its origins are in science fiction, where a specific writer coined it for what was basically the same thing as other, earlier science fiction writers had called 'cyberspace'

'cyberspace', as you may be aware, every time someone uses the word, it seems to have a completely different meaning....

generally, both originally referred to a virtual-reality type shared-world (often as a UI for the entirety of internet functionality) with varying degrees of immersion and haptic feedback (up to and including IRL death) not necessarily achievable with existing technology.

nowadays both seem to refer to either 'anything internet' or 'we're doing Second Life again'

 

The meta verse will not be created by the likes of Gates, Zuckerberg and clownage. They have no vision or creative integrity and quite apparently do not understand the sovereign human individual.. They have lousy hiring practices. They put the former data scientist at Uber in charge of hiring Unity techs for the FacePlant MetaVerse project. He didn't have clue one what to look for. They bugged me for weeks to interview. My resume states i am hardcore into the tech artist side and many very advanced Unity projects under my belt.. So I interview out of curiosity and this data scientist clown gives me a test to traverse directories from a bash command-line. This is precisely why they will produce crap. They have no idea of the domain they want to play in. They are glorified bean counters and their code monkey lackeys. The killer metaverse app will come from smaller and more obscure studios that do not have a corporate cubicle borg drone mindset. It will not be a bells and whistles VR chat. It certainly won't involve loft apartments by the sea with one potted palm plant, square architecture and the ability to make an island resembling poor programmers art by pointing a finger. Whoopedy fricking doo!

 

Open a new Unity scene add a character controller, camera and a floor, hit play your in a Metaverse you just made.

It's just a 3D interactive scene.

 

There's no doubt that Metaverse is an overused buzzword at the moment and means different things to different people.

But I think a key ingredient is a multi-user shared experience. It's definitely not just a 3D scene on someone's computer in the same way you wouldn't describe a MMORPG as just a 3D interactive scene, because the multi-user aspect of it is so fundamental to understanding what it is and how it is structured.

 

Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Metaverse is...

 

The metaverse is a buzzword to try and sell people on the idea of digital goods with artificial scarcity applied to them.

 

//opinion
It is a marketing hoax/buzzword at this moment.

Metaverse is something akin to cyberspace that facebook is currently supposedly trying to build.

That's in theory.

IN reality they'll end up with a VRChat knockoff and slap "metaverse" label on it.

Some people try to profit from the buzzword by selling "property" there, for example. It is similar to dot com bubble.

 

Whole thing is an attempt to justify Oculus' purchase.

 

Think the step from VRchat to metaverse can happen if large external companies and services are involved.
What I'm looking for in particular would be 3D shopping experiences. Showcase clothes and other goods as if you were in a shoppingcenter - just more comfortable.
Pair this with attractive conditions to streamers and other content creators (especially making use of VR on their side even if viewers might use a screen) plus lots of advertisement so the place is populated (so the 3rd party companies & creators make profit) and you might have something quite interesting at hand.

That's at least what I am expecting.

Edit: Interestingly enough, with my idea it's rather Amazon (owner of Twitch) than FB which has the best prequisites to launch a successful Metaverse.

 

In that case Second Life already was the metaverse. And its current replacement is Minecraft VR.

 

No it's not. It's needlessly complicated compared to just using a standard list. They've tried this loads of times since even the dot com boom and it's failed every time because it sucks to use. It's cumbersome and slow. People aren't shopping online for some kind of "experience." They're shopping online because it offers a greater convenience than doing it in person.

 

Walmart's version of the Metaverse?

 

Yeah, making ordering groceries online almost as inconvenient as going to the the actual store is going to be such a revolution.

 

"IF".

To become a thing, metaverse has to be decentralized. As long as it is within facebook's walled garden, it is no more than a VRChat knockoff.

It is second life all over again, and not a proper cyberspace.

Have you ever tried to make a 3d car configurator? This whole thing is a royal pain in the butt, because either you're breaching manufacturer's patent by reconstructing their car without permission, or they're disclosing their secrets providing 3d models of their cars people are going to rip. Something simple like a dishwasher where you can poke every button and look inside of it is alrady a small project.

Making a 3d shop requires significant effort, because you'd need to photogrammetry every single thing in it, which requires manpower and computing power to do. Then you end up with a truckload of data you'd need to stream into a mobile processor. It is FAR easier to make a telepresence drone instead, but then it is no longer going to be metaverse.

This is my opinion only, but it feels like we're missing some key technology to make something like this happen.

 

I've seen that video before. It cemented clearly in my mind just how tedious this whole virtual store thing would be. Also, load-times in real life would probably be longer.

 

This is kinda really bad.

They're falling into a trap of replicating real-life experience instead of making things more convenient, and the only thing they came up with were scrolling shelves in/out of existence. Why must there be a shelf? Why must there be a cart? Why must the user waste their time picking things physically?

They're thinking backwards. If that's how "industry" envisions cyberspace, the metaverse is dead on arrival.

At least that's how I see it.

 

Right, and who in the world would want to do that after Amazon has already proven you can rake-in 6 million a day without any of that fal-de-ral.

 

...

Thinking about that wallmart video made me realize, that something like shopping for groceries does not benefit from VR in any way.

I mean. The point of VR is to see and interact with things you cannot access. With groceries you do not really need any of that, because you already know what you want.

I shop exclusively with home delivery, and a smartphone app gets the job done. I pull up the APP, look up things I want, add them to cart and they arrive a short time later. Realistically speaking I need price, need a single photo to see if that's the thing I had in mind, and that's it. In some cases I'd need nutritional data and manufacturer. Personally going to the store would allow me to check expiration dates or pick bigger or fresher vegetables, but that requires presence, and cannot be done virtually. So in this scenario I'd need a telepresence drone and not VR.

For the store, maintaining product list on the app does not significantly increase workload, because they already have to maintain databases and have photos of their products in the database already. So upgrading to support an app is not a whole lot of work.

Now, there's a separate category of products where you need to check how this thing work, how it looks and so on. The problem here is that normally in this case you also need to check how it FEELs, and VR does not transfer touch.
This happens when you shop for toys, for tools, for furniture, appliances and so on. You need to walk around it, look at it, look into it, poke it, and so on. Is this table sturdy? Does this toy car look durable? Does this teddy bear have sufficient fluffiness? Does it smell bad? What's inside in this toolbox? Does this table match my height? Does this chair feel comfortable? Does this computer keyboard feel right?

Normally, in this scenario you'd resort to watching youtube unboxing videos if you cannot check the product in person. Or you buy them blind, meaning it looks right on photo, you order it and cross your fingers that's the thing you wanted.

So, what happens in t his scenario when it comes to VR? The VR lets you estimate SIZE of the thing. You cannot touch/feel it. You cannot get a good impression of material either, because it has been simplified for the limitations of hardware. In this scenario, again you'd need a telepresence and not VR, or you'd need VR180/360 video and not cyberspace. Or it could be light fields.

For example, in my experience a VR180 video shot of a car - I mean, walk around it, look under the hood, sit in it and drive - it will give you a pretty solid impression of what the real thing would be. And that can be shot with a VR camera instead of trying to replicate this thing in reality.

So, the longer you think about it, the more it appears that "metaverse" and facebook nonsensical ads of it have extremely limited practical application. Some things outright do not benefit from it, and in many other cases rather than trying to reconstruct things in virtual space it is far cheaper to just film them.

 

Also, thinking about it a bit more, we might end up with a "shopping telepresence robot" similar to Boston Dynamic's Petman(advanced) or FPV drone (simpler)

 

Isn't it just a rebranding of William Gibsons Cyberspace

Interesting article on wikipedia on the history of the Cyberspace concept - Cyberspace - Wikipedia

 

I don't get it. Why do we need 3d internet? 3d applications on the internet for sure but I feel this will end up just like Microsoft's "Information Highway" back in 95.

 

We had 3d internet. It failed. It also had applications a lot similar to the ones proposed now. Visiting stores, or museums. Mostly some brands attempted to use it to promote themselves (same as now basically).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

 

In a world with massively rising inequality a 'Free' 3D Meta verse will allow the have nots to experience the lives of the have lots.

Or to paraphrase Palmer Lucky not everyone can have a real Ferrari but everyone can have a virtual one.

 

Internet in text and image format is very useful. Well optimized internet search is useful. The 3D stuff, seems to me like a lot of people try very hard for it to be revolutionary but fail because the applications are visually impressive but ultimately useless. It's probably not going to change anyone's abilities to get some work task done for an example. There are some interesting things being done in AR but nothing super revolutionary for what I've seen.

 

The games industry is based on people playing in cyberspace. Meta is just rebranding cyberspace and lowering the bars to entry. Look at what Facebook did for blogging and personal web pages, now imagine what it could do for personal and corporate cyberspace.

And games on Facebook were one of the big draws in the early years (Zynga) and they will be in Meta/Cyberspace.

 

Yeah, we've already covered that. Yesterday.

 

We're talking in cyberspace right now and the bar is pretty low already. Requiring VR goggles and other peripherals is not lowering the barrier to entry, it's the opposite of that.

Facebook is dying in the west, hence the rebrand and poor attempts at trying to lock people in another walled garden that'll give them even more personal data to exploit for profit. Metaverse is supposed to be all-encompassing, so it has to be decentralised. I highly doubt that's what Zuck is doing.

And Meta won't get enough pull from other big corps to join their metaverse. Why would they contribute to Meta's wealth generating scheme when they can have their own? Also, judging by reactions online so far, Zucks' value proposition didn't land. Newer generations already don't see him as a visionary and consider him an out of touch lizardman/robot. This ship is sinking even if slowly.

 

Remember the movie "Ready Player One"?
It's supposed to be that. And built on blockchain tech. And with loads of virtual items to charge microtransactions for, of course.

If the concept of "Ready Player One" sounds familiar to you, it should, because it's already been done a bunch of times before with platforms like Second Life, VR Chat, PlayStation Home, and heck, maybe even World of Warcraft counts.

"But this time it's different, because it uses the blockchain!"

 

Not quite.

It was done a bunch of times before by novels like Neuromancer and other cyberpunk dystopias, which specifically presented making these things a core part of the day to day experience of people as a bad thing. Not because of the existence of social spaces online, but because they were there to reinforce structures that consumed peoples day to day lives. The things you listed are, by and large, simply social spaces.

 

We don't have anything like cyberpspace right now. Because cyberspace requires a universal platform/protocol and tools that operate in there.

In VR chat you cannot build a room from within VRChat. You have to use flatscreen software.

The only piece of software that tapped the potential was Anyland.

 

In VR you are basically a point of consciousness. Hands, feet, touch do not exist and can only very clunkily be simulated. Command and control should be voice activated and gaze focused. You should be seated to avoid tiktok videos of stumbling thru the flatscreen TV and knocking grandmas ashes off the mantle with VR goggles on.

 

I have a (at least) several hundred hours in VR, and I arrived at a very different conclusion.

In my experience:

1. It is incredibly important to have a body and a way to witness it (mirror). The body ideally should be a full body and not just floating head and wrists.
2. When human-to-human interaction is involved you'd want full body tracking and ideally gaze/blink tracker. Those features have tremendous impact. When they are not present, something like automatic blinking can lead to miscommunication.
3. The most important instrument and input method is your hands. Positional and wrist movement. Natural reaction/control in VR is to touch, press, point. Ironically "throw" is the interaction you'd want to avoid. Ideally you'd need to be able to track all fingers.
4. Voice is incredibly awkward and unintuitive to use, unless you're talking to people.

Basically, you're not really a point of consciousness and normally need a body to inhabit or something that hints at being a body. The natural reaction is to touch everything and not speak, and it is a good idea when your controller mimics hands. Ideally you'd want all fingers, but we're not there yet, so currently only pirate mode is available ('hook hands'). Voice is awkward to use, and can be annoying to people outside of VR that are near you.

 

While true in games..it is not true in the realm I am currently in. This involves total novice at times donning a set of VR goggles. To expect them to use novel hand controllers will have folks walking away from the kiosks or sites.This does not work for command and control of industrial systems..i.e monitoring valves and circuits and using VR for walk thrus of to be built plants...and as you stated before..shopping online. For vehicle repair tuts and similar hands on training...yeah..but essentially the point of consciousness with a gaze direction is all you are without some fancy intervention.

 

And everything you do, everything you say, everyone you interact with with be tracked, and that data sold, because this is Facebook where you aren't the customer, you are the product.

 

There are two controllers that can be intuitively understood. The first one is a stick. Because poking things with a stick is intuitive. If the user can hold a wand, they can use a stick. Understanding buttons is not necessary.

The second intuitive controller is a hand. Again, as soon as the user can see their hand, they'll start trying to poke things with fingers.

Quest had a nice experimental game called Elixir which utilizes hand tracking, and it is done exceptionally well meaning that a person who will struggle with touch controllers, buttons and have hard time with computers in general can easily use this control scheme in half a minute. I've seen this happen in practice. They see their hands, they try to touch things with them. Even if there's no tacticle feedback, the interaction itself is natural.

I'll be looking into buying an alternative to quest later this year, because the downsides of facebook walled garden became incredibly obvious. Currently eyeing pico neo, which seems to be a quest clone (no walled garden, but also no hand-tracking and no touch controllers). At the moment I'm of opinion that their Metaverse is not "the future", but just another marketing spiel instead.
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The whole point of "Metaverse" is, once again, to lock people into technology of a specific vendor. "We have this cool thing, and only we. You've registered? Now you can't leave".

The logical idea would be development of open standards instead, where every vendor can make their cyberspace shards and those can talk to each other. But this is not something that a company like Facebook would do.

 

Wikipedia says so, so it must be true:

Yeah, that's actually what I came in here to say. We had VRML, and we had (have?) Second Life, and there's an abundance of shared virtual worlds for various different purposes, and so on and so forth.

My guess is that the Facebook/Meta thing is a branding grab, in the hopes that it does gain traction in the coming years and thus "metaverse" becomes synonymous with whatever Zuckerberg and co is doing, just as "PC" effectively became a synonym for "Windows machine" in the mid 90s, despite them definitely not being equivalent terms leading up to that.

There are "meta" branded devices and a thing called the "metaverse", so all of the non-geeks out there are going to assume that you need the one to go with the other, and every competitor is at a disadvantage before the concept even takes off. Assuming it does take off, and really... who knows?

 

You'd be surprised how active Second Life is. Only two years ago before I started using Unity I spent some time making and selling a few things on it. If I didn't have bigger aspirations, I could be making a decent dollar selling certain virtual paraphernalia on Second Life.

 

Yeah. I had time when I was playing it nearly 10 years ago. I did some assets, back in the days. Surprisingly these are sold frequently even these days.

If I have invested more time into assets back then, I could easily make small passive income. Probably I have accumulated couple hundreds of dollars over course years.

I just keep account active.

 

Answer: Runescape

 

Eggsellent eggsplanation, sir!

 

Facebook is not well placed to be a runner up to metaverse corp paradise:
- ROBLOX
- Fortnite
- Minecraft
- VR chat

Also the fantasy is that people will be on te metaverse like they do in real life, the reality they will be talking to a mirror for hours and not have face to face interaction, the mirror is everything, you can tell someone know VR if he mention the "mirror".

I'll be low tech high life though

 

Sounds like you need to go back and upload some more.

 

Perhaps.
That makes me thinking, maybe indeed it is still worth to invest a bit more time into it.