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I know science fiction has really hyped up the idea of a metaverse, but I just don't see it happening culturally. In most fiction where a "metaverse" or equiva

I know science fiction has really hyped up the idea of a metaverse, but I just don't see it happening culturally. In most fiction where a "metaverse" or equivalent is popular, the world is in shambles. When you think about it, of course this would be the case. Why would people reject the real world for the internet? The reason why social-media is so popular is because it's basically a way to highlight reality and engage with it. I honestly don't see the metaverse taking off. Facebook should've went in the other direction IMHO. The pandemic has shown very clearly that people want to engage with one another in reality, not on the internet.

nonameiguess 5y ago
The Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica depicted this somewhat believably, as being a kind of place where people could do really extreme things you could never possibly get away with in real life, i.e. gladiator battles, just getting murdered over and over, extreme sex and partying with no consequences. I don't think that's what Zuckerberg wants to sell as a vision, but that seemingly has to be what something like this would become. Ironically, the creator of the technology in that show was a lot like Zuckerberg. He naively believed he was creating some transformative device to make people better but then they only wanted to use it for sex, violence, and escapism. And his daughter ends up becoming a terrorist radicalized by religious extremists after being appalled by the no ethics nihilism of her dad's world, whose digital avatar gains its own sentience and goes on to become the first Cylon, whose followers and descendents eventually end human civilization. I wonder what will eventually become of Zuckerberg's daughters, what they'll think of him when they grow up.
- neartheplain 5y ago
  >a kind of place where people could do really extreme things you could never possibly get away with in real life, i.e. gladiator battles, just getting murdered over and over, extreme sex and partying with no consequences The future is now. Welcome to VRChat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUqFFj5ePE&t=180s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUqFFj5ePE&t=180s VRChat is full of escapism, alchohol abuse, underage users, and explicit erotic roleplay. The latter typically involves nude avatars with full-body tracking using HTC Vive trackers. By the way, this game is free without age restrictions on Oculus Quest, a product which itself has no parental controls. VRChat has no system for filtering or proactively tagging NSFW content, so even users who opt-out of the private adult worlds will probably still see nudity and more in public worlds. Also, vulnerabilities in the official client (mostly in the Unity rendering pipeline and Photon RPC stack) means users of modded clients can crash others' PC or Quest from inside the game. "Crashers", as they're known to all longtime users, have been a problem for years with no solution in sight. In earlier versions of VRChat, users could attach arbitrary C# scripts to their custom uploaded worlds or avatars. At least one arbitrary remote execution vulnerability has been discovered and responsibly disclosed to VRChat: https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xz33p/hackers-hijacked-vr-chatrooms-to-manipulate-users-reality https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xz33p/hackers-hijacked-vr-c... The VRChat staff ostensibly review moderation requests for issues like hate speech or nudity in public lobbies, but each video clip I've included (as the report guidelines strongly recommend) in requests I've filed has 0 views per my video upload dashboard. I keep seeing many of the same perpetrators again and again in public worlds. Again, there are no age checks, even good-faith "enter your birthdate" dialogs, and this platform is full of suggestive and explicit NSFW content. Communication is mainly via voice chat, so children are highly visible to adult users who would abuse them, who sadly are also present on the platform. Unsupervised kids are all over the place in this game. VRChat moderation staff do not have any in-game presence. Despite these issues, VRChat continues to grow due to the total creative freedom it offers for user-uploaded content, its popularity among content creators on YouTube e.g. Jameskii, HeyImBee, SwaggerSouls, and the fact that it's a free game on Quest. It recently topped 50,000 concurrent active users. Advanced VRChat users have modded support for teledildonics, as one streamer describes in this safe-for-work YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUZoSiZV_I&t=19s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUZoSiZV_I&t=19s
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    I did not realize that VRChat is still around. I only ever heard of it in the context of Ugandan Knuckles, a meme that was short lived but extremely hilarious and also offensive to some. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you can search for it on YouTube (example: https://youtu.be/eix7fLsS058 https://youtu.be/eix7fLsS058). I have never used VRChat but as an outsider it reminds me a bit of the old Internet before Web 2.0 and before everything became political.
    - neartheplain 5y ago
      Ugandan Knuckles was most users' introduction to VRChat. It's been a dead meme for a while, but that doesn't stop 9-year-old kids from running up to strangers in VR yelling, "Do you kno dae wae?" Aside from the risk to the children themselves, their presence in VRChat is a constant annoyance to adults. They tend to be loud and lack manners or social skills. If you meet an interesting stranger and strike up a conversation, some kid'll run up in your face mid-sentence to shout lines from Ugandan Knuckles or a TikTok meme. Ever since the great "Quest-mas" of December 2020, VRChat public lobbies have felt more and more like an unsupervised daycare. VRChat's Terms of Service specificy a minimum age of 13 for COPPA compliance, but in practice it seems this is never enforced, and I'm not even sure how it could be. It's really a shame, as aside from the kids and "crashers," VRChat's total creative freedom is a breath of fresh air. If you can model something in Blender and export it as Unity project, you can upload it to VRChat. There's a huge range of beautiful and immersive custom worlds, and all sort of hilarious or impressive custom avatars. It's a new digital Wild West, with all the good and bad that metaphor entails.
munchler 5y ago
Even in a dystopia, an immersive metaverse is totally impractical without something like neural implants. I think even the guy who wrote Ready Player One understood this.
- futuroptimist 5y ago
  I feel like AR headsets are a stopgap until we can achieve the same thing with neural implants. Just like how MR is a stopgap for AR.
munificent 5y ago
> In most fiction where a "metaverse" or equivalent is popular, the world is in shambles. I mean, the trajectory of the world isn't great right now... I could easily imagine a VR "game" in the near future that is just "walk around a virtual zoo that has leopards, rhinos, orangutans, gorillas and giraffes" because the real world no longer has them. > When you think about it, of course this would be the case. Why would people reject the real world for the internet? This is a good observation, but it's important to remember that quality of real world life is very fucking far from uniformly distributed now. There are already many people across the world whose personal life is in shambles enough that they spend every free moment escaping it in media consumption and video games. Sure, if you have a good life, the metaverse pales in comparison. But what if you're stuck in a shithole town with no jobs and no prospects? At some point, frame rate and vertex count becomes less of an issue than "not watching yet another friend get addicted to opioids". Maybe that's the real end-stage-capitalism opportunity for a soulless corporation: Everyone working on the metaverse is so focused on making it a primo experience that appeals to people already living well. Instead, maybe the audience to target is people whose real life already sucks. Sell virtual water in the desert, not the oasis. Heck, it would just a one letter change for Facebook to go from Meta to Meth.
vineyardmike 5y ago
> the world is in shambles. Why would people reject the real world for the internet? Things like a pandemic that forces people to be home. Rampant global warming that makes it hard to be outside comfortably. Maybe small apartments in urban areas where its just too expensive to have a real home because zoning doesn't allow new apartments to be built fast enough... lots of things come to mind.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Sounds like some people are already in their own metaverse and they just want Facebook to provide better hardware.
rchaud 5y ago
The metaverse is for the Roblox and Minecraft generation who are supposed to be even more doom and gloom than the one that preceded it. So the world in shambles condition may already be met for some. Gen Z have also grown up in this reverse Truman Show dystopia where everyone has their own TV show (Youtube, Snap, Tiktok) that allows them to edit out the blemishes and embarassments of real life to produce a nicely manicured image to 'build their brand' on.

nonameiguess 5y ago

The Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica depicted this somewhat believably, as being a kind of place where people could do really extreme things you could never possibly get away with in real life, i.e. gladiator battles, just getting murdered over and over, extreme sex and partying with no consequences. I don't think that's what Zuckerberg wants to sell as a vision, but that seemingly has to be what something like this would become. Ironically, the creator of the technology in that show was a lot like Zuckerberg. He naively believed he was creating some transformative device to make people better but then they only wanted to use it for sex, violence, and escapism. And his daughter ends up becoming a terrorist radicalized by religious extremists after being appalled by the no ethics nihilism of her dad's world, whose digital avatar gains its own sentience and goes on to become the first Cylon, whose followers and descendents eventually end human civilization. I wonder what will eventually become of Zuckerberg's daughters, what they'll think of him when they grow up.

neartheplain 5y ago
>a kind of place where people could do really extreme things you could never possibly get away with in real life, i.e. gladiator battles, just getting murdered over and over, extreme sex and partying with no consequences The future is now. Welcome to VRChat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUqFFj5ePE&t=180s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUqFFj5ePE&t=180s VRChat is full of escapism, alchohol abuse, underage users, and explicit erotic roleplay. The latter typically involves nude avatars with full-body tracking using HTC Vive trackers. By the way, this game is free without age restrictions on Oculus Quest, a product which itself has no parental controls. VRChat has no system for filtering or proactively tagging NSFW content, so even users who opt-out of the private adult worlds will probably still see nudity and more in public worlds. Also, vulnerabilities in the official client (mostly in the Unity rendering pipeline and Photon RPC stack) means users of modded clients can crash others' PC or Quest from inside the game. "Crashers", as they're known to all longtime users, have been a problem for years with no solution in sight. In earlier versions of VRChat, users could attach arbitrary C# scripts to their custom uploaded worlds or avatars. At least one arbitrary remote execution vulnerability has been discovered and responsibly disclosed to VRChat: https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xz33p/hackers-hijacked-vr-chatrooms-to-manipulate-users-reality https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xz33p/hackers-hijacked-vr-c... The VRChat staff ostensibly review moderation requests for issues like hate speech or nudity in public lobbies, but each video clip I've included (as the report guidelines strongly recommend) in requests I've filed has 0 views per my video upload dashboard. I keep seeing many of the same perpetrators again and again in public worlds. Again, there are no age checks, even good-faith "enter your birthdate" dialogs, and this platform is full of suggestive and explicit NSFW content. Communication is mainly via voice chat, so children are highly visible to adult users who would abuse them, who sadly are also present on the platform. Unsupervised kids are all over the place in this game. VRChat moderation staff do not have any in-game presence. Despite these issues, VRChat continues to grow due to the total creative freedom it offers for user-uploaded content, its popularity among content creators on YouTube e.g. Jameskii, HeyImBee, SwaggerSouls, and the fact that it's a free game on Quest. It recently topped 50,000 concurrent active users. Advanced VRChat users have modded support for teledildonics, as one streamer describes in this safe-for-work YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUZoSiZV_I&t=19s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUZoSiZV_I&t=19s
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  I did not realize that VRChat is still around. I only ever heard of it in the context of Ugandan Knuckles, a meme that was short lived but extremely hilarious and also offensive to some. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you can search for it on YouTube (example: https://youtu.be/eix7fLsS058 https://youtu.be/eix7fLsS058). I have never used VRChat but as an outsider it reminds me a bit of the old Internet before Web 2.0 and before everything became political.
  - neartheplain 5y ago
    Ugandan Knuckles was most users' introduction to VRChat. It's been a dead meme for a while, but that doesn't stop 9-year-old kids from running up to strangers in VR yelling, "Do you kno dae wae?" Aside from the risk to the children themselves, their presence in VRChat is a constant annoyance to adults. They tend to be loud and lack manners or social skills. If you meet an interesting stranger and strike up a conversation, some kid'll run up in your face mid-sentence to shout lines from Ugandan Knuckles or a TikTok meme. Ever since the great "Quest-mas" of December 2020, VRChat public lobbies have felt more and more like an unsupervised daycare. VRChat's Terms of Service specificy a minimum age of 13 for COPPA compliance, but in practice it seems this is never enforced, and I'm not even sure how it could be. It's really a shame, as aside from the kids and "crashers," VRChat's total creative freedom is a breath of fresh air. If you can model something in Blender and export it as Unity project, you can upload it to VRChat. There's a huge range of beautiful and immersive custom worlds, and all sort of hilarious or impressive custom avatars. It's a new digital Wild West, with all the good and bad that metaphor entails.

munchler 5y ago

Even in a dystopia, an immersive metaverse is totally impractical without something like neural implants. I think even the guy who wrote Ready Player One understood this.

futuroptimist 5y ago
I feel like AR headsets are a stopgap until we can achieve the same thing with neural implants. Just like how MR is a stopgap for AR.

munificent 5y ago

> In most fiction where a "metaverse" or equivalent is popular, the world is in shambles. I mean, the trajectory of the world isn't great right now... I could easily imagine a VR "game" in the near future that is just "walk around a virtual zoo that has leopards, rhinos, orangutans, gorillas and giraffes" because the real world no longer has them. > When you think about it, of course this would be the case. Why would people reject the real world for the internet? This is a good observation, but it's important to remember that quality of real world life is very fucking far from uniformly distributed now. There are already many people across the world whose personal life is in shambles enough that they spend every free moment escaping it in media consumption and video games. Sure, if you have a good life, the metaverse pales in comparison. But what if you're stuck in a shithole town with no jobs and no prospects? At some point, frame rate and vertex count becomes less of an issue than "not watching yet another friend get addicted to opioids". Maybe that's the real end-stage-capitalism opportunity for a soulless corporation: Everyone working on the metaverse is so focused on making it a primo experience that appeals to people already living well. Instead, maybe the audience to target is people whose real life already sucks. Sell virtual water in the desert, not the oasis. Heck, it would just a one letter change for Facebook to go from Meta to Meth.

vineyardmike 5y ago

> the world is in shambles. Why would people reject the real world for the internet? Things like a pandemic that forces people to be home. Rampant global warming that makes it hard to be outside comfortably. Maybe small apartments in urban areas where its just too expensive to have a real home because zoning doesn't allow new apartments to be built fast enough... lots of things come to mind.

rsj_hn 5y ago
Sounds like some people are already in their own metaverse and they just want Facebook to provide better hardware.

rchaud 5y ago

The metaverse is for the Roblox and Minecraft generation who are supposed to be even more doom and gloom than the one that preceded it. So the world in shambles condition may already be met for some. Gen Z have also grown up in this reverse Truman Show dystopia where everyone has their own TV show (Youtube, Snap, Tiktok) that allows them to edit out the blemishes and embarassments of real life to produce a nicely manicured image to 'build their brand' on.