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Does anyone remember Metaplace,[1] circa 2009? It was an isometric 2.5D-ish "virtual world" that, if it shipped today, would probably be pitched as a sort of Ro

Does anyone remember Metaplace,[1] circa 2009? It was an isometric 2.5D-ish "virtual world" that, if it shipped today, would probably be pitched as a sort of Roblox competitor for building games and interactive installations within a virtual space. (At the time it compared itself to Second Life, which either baffled people who didn't know what it was or turned off people who did.) I used it briefly in 2009 and one of the things we tried to do with it was exactly this — spatial voicechat in a virtual environment with contrived "physical" modeling of spaces to adjust how sound travels. (This also reminds me of TeamSpeak's spatial integrations from around the same era.) I know it's the pandemic that's inspired a ton of these projects, but they've been around in some form since live voice-over-IP came about and haven't really taken off in non-game applications. What keeps blocking them from mainstreaming? I suspect maybe it's adding contrived physical interactions to the already high relative overhead of meeting virtually, but I'm not sure if that's just a problem for me. I could see myself enjoying something like this but not many others on my team seeing enough value to take the efficiency hit of having either zero or multiple open voice channels that do away with the abstraction. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-22-massively-interviews-raph-koster-on-the-state-of-metaplace.html https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-22-massively-interviews-rap...

vyrotek 6y ago
I never tried Metaplace but it reminded me of The Palace which I did spent many hours of my youth on. It would be interesting to see if these 2d chats have work-place benefits over the current Slack/IRC experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)
- Fnoord 6y ago
  Yeah, I remember that one as well. Real fun. Its also why I never bothered with Second Life ("been there, done that"). I just checked and saw someone even made a Linux client for The Palace. Neat!
stevenicr 6y ago
IT had not rung a bell until I clicked your link and as soon as I saw the picture I remembered immediately - thanks for the reminisce. I was thinking that the old 2d / move around 3-d kind of space chat from waaay back - worldsChat - you had an avatar and moved around a space station chatting.. I always wondered what held that back from being more popular / more used by more people.. Which brings me to the time of having all sorts of friends and family pinging on yahoo messenger for a while - then that was killed off. Perhaps if worldsChat had this spatial talking kind of option it would of gotten more traction. I'm sure moderating and other factors also apply.
WorldMaker 6y ago
Notable game designer Raph Koster was involved in Metaplace and his blog included a lot of making of/behind the scenes articles and discussions from around that time, including some post-mortem thoughts. > What keeps blocking them from mainstreaming? Most likely it is business model. Getting the spatial model correct is a lot of work, and making it generic enough to be reusable is even harder. (Both Second Life and Metaplace flirted with idea of being platforms that other services could build on.) It's easier to get some financing for it as a "game" (it's also useful to note a bunch of Metaplace ideas came out of experiments in failed MMO Star Wars Galaxy), but it's harder to sell it as a general chat application (much less platform) or especially as an "Enterprise tool" if it looks too much like a toy or a game. On the flipside it's harder to build it as an Enterprise tool first, because the impulse to keep things sparse/spartan/"profesional" also leaves a air of "lifelessness" with not enough things to do outside of/between meetings/during downtime inside of meetings, not enough of a feeling that it is a space to "inhabit" rather than visit briefly because a meeting required it. These business model bootstrap hurdles are a criticism I often bring to a lot of the conversations about why the Cyberpunk "ideal" of a single shared VR space (including the one most recently popularized by Ready Player One) seems so extremely unlikely in the real world. (Aside: Ready Player One especially suffers from a lot of basic game economy mistakes and likely shouldn't have survived very long in its world for very long, much less have taken over nearly everything including education and enterprise so much as it did. My reading of the book was that the game economy directly caused a lot of the collapse and dystopian economy outside of the game, which made the book better than the author seemed to have intended as further reading and other evidence suggests the author was not aware of how terrible the economics of the game were, they were just fun ideas thrown out for verisimilitude.)

vyrotek 6y ago

I never tried Metaplace but it reminded me of The Palace which I did spent many hours of my youth on. It would be interesting to see if these 2d chats have work-place benefits over the current Slack/IRC experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)

Fnoord 6y ago
Yeah, I remember that one as well. Real fun. Its also why I never bothered with Second Life ("been there, done that"). I just checked and saw someone even made a Linux client for The Palace. Neat!

stevenicr 6y ago

IT had not rung a bell until I clicked your link and as soon as I saw the picture I remembered immediately - thanks for the reminisce. I was thinking that the old 2d / move around 3-d kind of space chat from waaay back - worldsChat - you had an avatar and moved around a space station chatting.. I always wondered what held that back from being more popular / more used by more people.. Which brings me to the time of having all sorts of friends and family pinging on yahoo messenger for a while - then that was killed off. Perhaps if worldsChat had this spatial talking kind of option it would of gotten more traction. I'm sure moderating and other factors also apply.

WorldMaker 6y ago

Notable game designer Raph Koster was involved in Metaplace and his blog included a lot of making of/behind the scenes articles and discussions from around that time, including some post-mortem thoughts. > What keeps blocking them from mainstreaming? Most likely it is business model. Getting the spatial model correct is a lot of work, and making it generic enough to be reusable is even harder. (Both Second Life and Metaplace flirted with idea of being platforms that other services could build on.) It's easier to get some financing for it as a "game" (it's also useful to note a bunch of Metaplace ideas came out of experiments in failed MMO Star Wars Galaxy), but it's harder to sell it as a general chat application (much less platform) or especially as an "Enterprise tool" if it looks too much like a toy or a game. On the flipside it's harder to build it as an Enterprise tool first, because the impulse to keep things sparse/spartan/"profesional" also leaves a air of "lifelessness" with not enough things to do outside of/between meetings/during downtime inside of meetings, not enough of a feeling that it is a space to "inhabit" rather than visit briefly because a meeting required it. These business model bootstrap hurdles are a criticism I often bring to a lot of the conversations about why the Cyberpunk "ideal" of a single shared VR space (including the one most recently popularized by Ready Player One) seems so extremely unlikely in the real world. (Aside: Ready Player One especially suffers from a lot of basic game economy mistakes and likely shouldn't have survived very long in its world for very long, much less have taken over nearly everything including education and enterprise so much as it did. My reading of the book was that the game economy directly caused a lot of the collapse and dystopian economy outside of the game, which made the book better than the author seemed to have intended as further reading and other evidence suggests the author was not aware of how terrible the economics of the game were, they were just fun ideas thrown out for verisimilitude.)