7 ms·

A Framework for the Metaverse

32 points by conanxin 5y ago

kleiba 5y ago
The Metaverse is a great resource for people who like hearing themselves talk.
bullen 5y ago
To me the metaverse is an open action 3D MMO, that anyone can modify and sell. The problem is the asset licence and that can be temporarily stop-gapped with royalty free assets on a open-source engine. But to really accelerate the movement everyone should use a common network protocol and asset file format. I made an attempt at the protocol: https://github.com/tinspin/fuse https://github.com/tinspin/fuse And I'm working on the file formats: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 The last ingredient is to have an economy and I think all the peices are allready here; we just need to wait for the old "meatspace" economy to collapse first.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Second life solved all those things 15 years ago
  - bullen 5y ago
    Not the action part. Also not at the scale I did. The simplicity my system has means you can host, maintain and develop it with zero turnaround yourself. Finally, Second Life did not make anything open enough legally for the system to grow organically indefinitely. Nobody has yet, partly because the hardware has always improved, which is slowing down now.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      opensimulator is the open source self-hosted server for second life worlds
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
*yawn* Is this guy the new Kurzweil, and "the metaverse" the new singularity?
wrnr 5y ago
I don't know about the metaverse, but I think the most interesting things currently happening in CS are in computer graphics and geometry. I wouldn't know what to do with it but it is (just by itself) more interesting then things happening in blockchain and even AI space.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
  For instance?
  - wrnr 5y ago
    Raph Levien work on General purpose GPU, Steven De Keninck and lots of others on Geometric Algebra, new WebGPU spec finally standardising the mess that is GPU programming, work done with implicit function and SDF from the demo scene, just lots of stuff. Maybe take a look at SigGraph talks and symposium on geometry processing.
    - ozarkerD 5y ago
      Very excited for webgpu
cblconfederate 5y ago
oh boy after VR and AR hype failed now we have to read this BS
- andybak 5y ago
  From my perspective VR is doing very nicely thank you very much. Just because it's not succeeding in the VC-salivating-as-big-as-mobile sense doesn't make it a failure. Are 3D printers a failure? They've also failed to reach the levels that some people claimed they would. I can think of other examples where a tech happily finds it's niche and is quite happy there.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    i agree and i m very happy with the OQ2. however the VC-hype was unwarranted and that s probably a good thing. The "metaverse" has existed in gaming for years and is probably niche, the current hype is also unwarranted
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
How do you talk about the metaverse without crediting Snow Crash? Heresy
thundergolfer 5y ago
I've read Neuromancer, The Diamond Age, and part of Snowcrash, and I'm still very pro-Metaverse as a pie-in-the-sky concept, but this recent VC-hype writing about Metaverses does not grab me at all. If you skip through the series to 'Evolving User + Business Behaviors and the Metaverse' you avoid the hand-waving tech roadmapping and get to how this technology is supposed to change people's lives, and what's described is (mostly) super entertainment-oriented, consumerist, and corporate-crossover-branded to the point of self-parody. At times I get the vibe that VCs are very keen on having "Fornite but you spend $10,000s more on digital clothing, steroids, vehicles, and housing because you no longer care about the physical world. Oh and the sex workers are now digital. Your 'friends' are digital too, and also computer algorithms." No thanks. It approaches something like Infinite Jest's Samizdat videotape. Entertainment perfection so engrossing it may literally kill you (if Facebook hasn't made sure you're hooked up to food, water, and sanitation systems).
- lou1306 5y ago
  > It approaches something like Infinite Jest's Samizdat videotape Small, but crucial difference: the Samizdat did not involve money transactions :)
- potatolicious 5y ago
  Agreed, a lot of is strikes me as a very recent hype-cycle that seems to have materialized out of thin air. Which to be clear is not to say that the concept of the metaverse is somehow recent - it's exactly as old as it's made out to be, but the obsession - particularly from SV elites/VCs - seems to have manifested very recently. One thing that also rubs me the wrong way is that it's nearly always accompanied with cryptocurrency boosterism - even though I see absolutely no reason why NFTs or Bitcoin or Ether or Tether would be a critical part of the metaverse at all. At worst it seems like a transparent attempt to shoehorn something that has proven to have few applications outside of raw speculation, into a concept that might actually be interesting. The total failure to also acknowledge that depictions of the metaverse are overwhelmingly dystopian is also alarming. I have some willingness to believe that a virtual universe could be a benefit to people - but "let's recreate Snow Crash!" is... not that.
furi 5y ago
I'd welcome anyone trying to explain this idea to me along a number of axises, because I really do not get it. 1. What does 3D space add? If I want to shop for some item it's more convenient for me to look at a list with pictures and text than to wander through a 3D store. It's also more efficient for the vendor to provide the list than pay people to model the interior of their 3D store, scan all their products in, etc. The Internet won through being more convenient, I don't see how this isn't a step backwards. 2. What are we going to do about UGC kitsch? Second Life and more recently VRChat and NeosVR have provided demonstrations of what a metaverse combining content from thousands of creators of mixed skill levels is like. While I can appreciate it on some level, the fact is it's hideous. Are the operators of metaverse-Amazon really going to let their in-store aesthetics be ruined by a low-poly neon-purple wolf wandering through it while I'm trying to browse? If they are, why? If they aren't, how is this an interconnected metaverse? 3. Why is anyone going to respect the interconnectedness of the metaverse? Websites successfully resisted the Semantic Web. Businesses don't want to point the way to their competitors. Games want to constrain what the player character can be to fit a specific power level, tone or art style. Fortnite, for all of its metaverse cred, does not allow players to upload their own avatars and has never (to my knowledge) added a portal which when entered closes Fortnite and opens another game.
- linkdd 5y ago
  It's a hype-filled word. The metaverse is not interesting especially if it's operated by FAANG companies. Virtual Reality is a Sci-Fi thing. I'd rather have Augmented Reality so I can have reviews on products while I browse a real/physical store without taking out my smartphone (which is getting slower and slower as time pass by). IMHO, VR will never be a thing, not with the current technology at least. I don't want to live in a world were the idea of sitting at home to live in a virtual world instead of going out is considered "progress".
  - andybak 5y ago
    > I don't want to live in a world were the idea of sitting at home to live in a virtual world instead of going out is considered "progress". It's not either/or. I enjoy VR experiences. I enjoy sunshine, fresh air and travel. For me VR is just an obvious upgrade to a flat screen for viewing spatial content and environments. I don't always need it but the fact that I can grab a headset from the shelf and view something properly rather than peering at it through a small rectangle seems to me to be a good thing.
kgarten 5y ago
The lead image is from Teamlab https://www.teamlab.art/ https://www.teamlab.art/ no ar glasses, no 3D. simple projection mapping, the beauty of math and immersive illusions.
motohagiography 5y ago
Notable that the people I've read talking about this so far (top down, influential people) talk about what is essentially an architecture based approach and not a product based one. Anything that succeeds is going to be the expression of desire, and anything that is not the expression of desire is necessarily imposed on people and requires an increasing proportion of its resources to sustain it against the people it is imposed on. This is why I think architecture and other artifacts of technocratic thinking are interesting, but diseconomic and dumb. Nobody will invent a metaverse where they do not rule or control it, just like nobody believes anything political that doesn't justify their own sense of protagonism. When someone says, "let's build a metaverse!" I am glad that they are distracted by own hubris, which costs them some months or years against leveraging their resources and conceits into doing any more harm. The way to see the future is not to invent it, but to listen to what people want, choose the ones you want to help, and help them to prevail. It's so much easier to invent internally consistent frameworks, models, and architectures than it is to make even the simplest useful tool. Want a metaverse? Write me a program that provides me security, and I'm not the dumb one for leaving that meaning unspecified, you're the dumb one for not being able to figure it out. The genius of the other metaverse (social media) is that it is a set of programs for providing another basic human desire: approval. If someone said, "write me a program that gives me personal validation and approval," almost nobody would invent facebook, but a few did, and the winner took all. Another basic need, sex, is also mostly integrated, I don't know what new form of transaction that is going to change that as much as online dating, porn, and the ongoing normalizaiton of sex work just did, as any change there seems marginal in comparison. Going up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, from physiological to self-actualization, we've got products that provide access to most of them, where Twitter is working on "esteem," where everyone imagines themselves as a kind of political micro-warlord with their followers. These weren't the artifacts of frameworks, they are responses to desire. Personally, I think the bargain of a metaverse is you can have simulated everything, so long as you give up self actualization and dignity. We will accumulate comforting symbols to distract and obscure the nagging shame of it, and to forget if only briefly that we forfeited our agency to a system controlled by others, and with it, any connection to something universal or divine. We'll even moralize it, saying there was never anything there but superstition, the self justifying fairy tales that people with less approval and stuff tell themselves, or perhaps artifacts of illigitimacy based on an injustice that is finally righted now that we are all subjects of the same system, with the only rules being the ones that sustain and preserve its order. In this sense, everything about the metaverse idea is a way for its inventors to break from being subject to the real, and reign over what appears to be a kind of hell for everyone else.
gfodor 5y ago
If you're not talking about 'responsiveness' and 'web' when talking about the metaverse, you're missing big pieces. The metaverse is going to be built on top of the web, and will be responsive not just in terms of device support but also projectionality. But most won't notice right away since it will be a poor way to make money. Just like the big service providers missed the web.
gnramires 5y ago
It looks like the author needs to play a (hardcore-ish) MMORPG. It's hard to compare the immersion to other types of games. The interesting thing about metaverse-type propositions is of course the insertion of not just play, but also development, education and work that's a part of our lives as well. MMORPGs are incredible in terms of providing a virtual life but don't enable our development as individuals and society beyond a certain point.
_greim_ 5y ago
There's been a big focus on video in developing VR, and it's definitely gotten better, but I think audio is too often overlooked. It's a potentially even harder problem than video. Audio has fallen victim to voice-specific compression and noise-gating in almost every talk-over-the-internet app. Music performances don't translate, for example. Audio nuance doesn't translate. But there's a further problem: how to you put everyone into the same acoustic space? Currently, all participants come from disjoint acoustic spaces. One person is in a large room with wood floors, another in a small, carpeted room. How do you strip out the sound of those rooms, and add artificial ambience as if everyone were gathered in the same room, or no room at all (outside)? People may not think of these things, but they profoundly affect our sense of "being there" in subconscious ways. I think we're still pretty impressed that we can send video and audio over the internet. We need to get over that, and realize we still have a long way to go.
flohofwoe 5y ago
Ugh, another pointless hype cycle where everybody reshapes their pet ideas to fit the new narrative. I could say "the metaverse already exists for half a century, we just called it 'internet'" and would be just as right. Also what's with Silicon Valley recycling old scifi novels, are they finally running out of ideas?
RalfWausE 5y ago
Somehow this reminds me of the 'Gopher VR' project...

32 points by conanxin 5y ago

The Metaverse is a great resource for people who like hearing themselves talk.

To me the metaverse is an open action 3D MMO, that anyone can modify and sell. The problem is the asset licence and that can be temporarily stop-gapped with royalty free assets on a open-source engine. But to really accelerate the movement everyone should use a common network protocol and asset file format. I made an attempt at the protocol: https://github.com/tinspin/fuse https://github.com/tinspin/fuse And I'm working on the file formats: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 The last ingredient is to have an economy and I think all the peices are allready here; we just need to wait for the old "meatspace" economy to collapse first.

cblconfederate 5y ago
Second life solved all those things 15 years ago
- bullen 5y ago
  Not the action part. Also not at the scale I did. The simplicity my system has means you can host, maintain and develop it with zero turnaround yourself. Finally, Second Life did not make anything open enough legally for the system to grow organically indefinitely. Nobody has yet, partly because the hardware has always improved, which is slowing down now.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    opensimulator is the open source self-hosted server for second life worlds

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

*yawn* Is this guy the new Kurzweil, and "the metaverse" the new singularity?

wrnr 5y ago

I don't know about the metaverse, but I think the most interesting things currently happening in CS are in computer graphics and geometry. I wouldn't know what to do with it but it is (just by itself) more interesting then things happening in blockchain and even AI space.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
For instance?
- wrnr 5y ago
  Raph Levien work on General purpose GPU, Steven De Keninck and lots of others on Geometric Algebra, new WebGPU spec finally standardising the mess that is GPU programming, work done with implicit function and SDF from the demo scene, just lots of stuff. Maybe take a look at SigGraph talks and symposium on geometry processing.
  - ozarkerD 5y ago
    Very excited for webgpu

cblconfederate 5y ago

oh boy after VR and AR hype failed now we have to read this BS

andybak 5y ago
From my perspective VR is doing very nicely thank you very much. Just because it's not succeeding in the VC-salivating-as-big-as-mobile sense doesn't make it a failure. Are 3D printers a failure? They've also failed to reach the levels that some people claimed they would. I can think of other examples where a tech happily finds it's niche and is quite happy there.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  i agree and i m very happy with the OQ2. however the VC-hype was unwarranted and that s probably a good thing. The "metaverse" has existed in gaming for years and is probably niche, the current hype is also unwarranted

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

How do you talk about the metaverse without crediting Snow Crash? Heresy

thundergolfer 5y ago

I've read Neuromancer, The Diamond Age, and part of Snowcrash, and I'm still very pro-Metaverse as a pie-in-the-sky concept, but this recent VC-hype writing about Metaverses does not grab me at all. If you skip through the series to 'Evolving User + Business Behaviors and the Metaverse' you avoid the hand-waving tech roadmapping and get to how this technology is supposed to change people's lives, and what's described is (mostly) super entertainment-oriented, consumerist, and corporate-crossover-branded to the point of self-parody. At times I get the vibe that VCs are very keen on having "Fornite but you spend $10,000s more on digital clothing, steroids, vehicles, and housing because you no longer care about the physical world. Oh and the sex workers are now digital. Your 'friends' are digital too, and also computer algorithms." No thanks. It approaches something like Infinite Jest's Samizdat videotape. Entertainment perfection so engrossing it may literally kill you (if Facebook hasn't made sure you're hooked up to food, water, and sanitation systems).

lou1306 5y ago
> It approaches something like Infinite Jest's Samizdat videotape Small, but crucial difference: the Samizdat did not involve money transactions :)
potatolicious 5y ago
Agreed, a lot of is strikes me as a very recent hype-cycle that seems to have materialized out of thin air. Which to be clear is not to say that the concept of the metaverse is somehow recent - it's exactly as old as it's made out to be, but the obsession - particularly from SV elites/VCs - seems to have manifested very recently. One thing that also rubs me the wrong way is that it's nearly always accompanied with cryptocurrency boosterism - even though I see absolutely no reason why NFTs or Bitcoin or Ether or Tether would be a critical part of the metaverse at all. At worst it seems like a transparent attempt to shoehorn something that has proven to have few applications outside of raw speculation, into a concept that might actually be interesting. The total failure to also acknowledge that depictions of the metaverse are overwhelmingly dystopian is also alarming. I have some willingness to believe that a virtual universe could be a benefit to people - but "let's recreate Snow Crash!" is... not that.

furi 5y ago

I'd welcome anyone trying to explain this idea to me along a number of axises, because I really do not get it. 1. What does 3D space add? If I want to shop for some item it's more convenient for me to look at a list with pictures and text than to wander through a 3D store. It's also more efficient for the vendor to provide the list than pay people to model the interior of their 3D store, scan all their products in, etc. The Internet won through being more convenient, I don't see how this isn't a step backwards. 2. What are we going to do about UGC kitsch? Second Life and more recently VRChat and NeosVR have provided demonstrations of what a metaverse combining content from thousands of creators of mixed skill levels is like. While I can appreciate it on some level, the fact is it's hideous. Are the operators of metaverse-Amazon really going to let their in-store aesthetics be ruined by a low-poly neon-purple wolf wandering through it while I'm trying to browse? If they are, why? If they aren't, how is this an interconnected metaverse? 3. Why is anyone going to respect the interconnectedness of the metaverse? Websites successfully resisted the Semantic Web. Businesses don't want to point the way to their competitors. Games want to constrain what the player character can be to fit a specific power level, tone or art style. Fortnite, for all of its metaverse cred, does not allow players to upload their own avatars and has never (to my knowledge) added a portal which when entered closes Fortnite and opens another game.

linkdd 5y ago
It's a hype-filled word. The metaverse is not interesting especially if it's operated by FAANG companies. Virtual Reality is a Sci-Fi thing. I'd rather have Augmented Reality so I can have reviews on products while I browse a real/physical store without taking out my smartphone (which is getting slower and slower as time pass by). IMHO, VR will never be a thing, not with the current technology at least. I don't want to live in a world were the idea of sitting at home to live in a virtual world instead of going out is considered "progress".
- andybak 5y ago
  > I don't want to live in a world were the idea of sitting at home to live in a virtual world instead of going out is considered "progress". It's not either/or. I enjoy VR experiences. I enjoy sunshine, fresh air and travel. For me VR is just an obvious upgrade to a flat screen for viewing spatial content and environments. I don't always need it but the fact that I can grab a headset from the shelf and view something properly rather than peering at it through a small rectangle seems to me to be a good thing.

kgarten 5y ago

The lead image is from Teamlab https://www.teamlab.art/ https://www.teamlab.art/ no ar glasses, no 3D. simple projection mapping, the beauty of math and immersive illusions.

motohagiography 5y ago

Notable that the people I've read talking about this so far (top down, influential people) talk about what is essentially an architecture based approach and not a product based one. Anything that succeeds is going to be the expression of desire, and anything that is not the expression of desire is necessarily imposed on people and requires an increasing proportion of its resources to sustain it against the people it is imposed on. This is why I think architecture and other artifacts of technocratic thinking are interesting, but diseconomic and dumb. Nobody will invent a metaverse where they do not rule or control it, just like nobody believes anything political that doesn't justify their own sense of protagonism. When someone says, "let's build a metaverse!" I am glad that they are distracted by own hubris, which costs them some months or years against leveraging their resources and conceits into doing any more harm. The way to see the future is not to invent it, but to listen to what people want, choose the ones you want to help, and help them to prevail. It's so much easier to invent internally consistent frameworks, models, and architectures than it is to make even the simplest useful tool. Want a metaverse? Write me a program that provides me security, and I'm not the dumb one for leaving that meaning unspecified, you're the dumb one for not being able to figure it out. The genius of the other metaverse (social media) is that it is a set of programs for providing another basic human desire: approval. If someone said, "write me a program that gives me personal validation and approval," almost nobody would invent facebook, but a few did, and the winner took all. Another basic need, sex, is also mostly integrated, I don't know what new form of transaction that is going to change that as much as online dating, porn, and the ongoing normalizaiton of sex work just did, as any change there seems marginal in comparison. Going up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, from physiological to self-actualization, we've got products that provide access to most of them, where Twitter is working on "esteem," where everyone imagines themselves as a kind of political micro-warlord with their followers. These weren't the artifacts of frameworks, they are responses to desire. Personally, I think the bargain of a metaverse is you can have simulated everything, so long as you give up self actualization and dignity. We will accumulate comforting symbols to distract and obscure the nagging shame of it, and to forget if only briefly that we forfeited our agency to a system controlled by others, and with it, any connection to something universal or divine. We'll even moralize it, saying there was never anything there but superstition, the self justifying fairy tales that people with less approval and stuff tell themselves, or perhaps artifacts of illigitimacy based on an injustice that is finally righted now that we are all subjects of the same system, with the only rules being the ones that sustain and preserve its order. In this sense, everything about the metaverse idea is a way for its inventors to break from being subject to the real, and reign over what appears to be a kind of hell for everyone else.

gfodor 5y ago

If you're not talking about 'responsiveness' and 'web' when talking about the metaverse, you're missing big pieces. The metaverse is going to be built on top of the web, and will be responsive not just in terms of device support but also projectionality. But most won't notice right away since it will be a poor way to make money. Just like the big service providers missed the web.

gnramires 5y ago

It looks like the author needs to play a (hardcore-ish) MMORPG. It's hard to compare the immersion to other types of games. The interesting thing about metaverse-type propositions is of course the insertion of not just play, but also development, education and work that's a part of our lives as well. MMORPGs are incredible in terms of providing a virtual life but don't enable our development as individuals and society beyond a certain point.

_greim_ 5y ago

There's been a big focus on video in developing VR, and it's definitely gotten better, but I think audio is too often overlooked. It's a potentially even harder problem than video. Audio has fallen victim to voice-specific compression and noise-gating in almost every talk-over-the-internet app. Music performances don't translate, for example. Audio nuance doesn't translate. But there's a further problem: how to you put everyone into the same acoustic space? Currently, all participants come from disjoint acoustic spaces. One person is in a large room with wood floors, another in a small, carpeted room. How do you strip out the sound of those rooms, and add artificial ambience as if everyone were gathered in the same room, or no room at all (outside)? People may not think of these things, but they profoundly affect our sense of "being there" in subconscious ways. I think we're still pretty impressed that we can send video and audio over the internet. We need to get over that, and realize we still have a long way to go.

flohofwoe 5y ago

Ugh, another pointless hype cycle where everybody reshapes their pet ideas to fit the new narrative. I could say "the metaverse already exists for half a century, we just called it 'internet'" and would be just as right. Also what's with Silicon Valley recycling old scifi novels, are they finally running out of ideas?

RalfWausE 5y ago

Somehow this reminds me of the 'Gopher VR' project...