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> In a September 2021 Washington Post interview, Tim Sweeney imagined the future of advertising. "A carmaker who wants to make a presence in the metaverse isn't

> In a September 2021 Washington Post interview, Tim Sweeney imagined the future of advertising. "A carmaker who wants to make a presence in the metaverse isn't going to run ads," he said. "They're going to drop their car into the world in real time and you'll be able to drive it around. And they're going to work with lots of content creators with different experiences to ensure their car is playable here and there, and that it's receiving the attention it deserves." You can tell this absolutely makes no sense, because if we're in the metaverse, why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Or if I can't, I'm going to open up a shop next door that sells metaverse helicopter rides. If I make a vehicle in the metaverse, I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around. Not to mention, you don't need cupholders in VR, because your avatar doesn't have a stomach. You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse? Heck, I don't need the whole front of the car, because the engine doesn't actually exist. The whole metaverse idea is based on clunky, outdated metaphors to the real world like this. Someone who saw Ready Player One in theaters thinks that driving a car in VR is cool, without thinking for five more minutes about why it's actually not.

bosawq 5y ago
Forget about what other people who have nothing in common with you do. Its a trap to focus on it. Many have resources, energy and no sense, taste or imagination. You cant blame them. Its like complaining to a cactus for not producing strawberries. Or yelling at swampland for not turning fertile. What you can do is shift focus, and focus on what you and people like you are working on, and keep the focus there no matter what.
codingdave 5y ago
Roblox will be looked back upon as the MS-DOS of metaverses, yet people go gaga over any vehicle you can make. They (mostly kids) spend an absurd amount of hours just jumping from one place to another to prove they can without falling. They spend real money just to turn their hat a new color. Entire genres of games and activities exist basically to just move around, jump on a few things, see numbers get bigger, and see things change colors. With all that, I truly think yes... people absolutely will drive a car in VR.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  People already drive cars in VR, in multiplayer with force feedback steering wheels and chair based motion platforms with a fairly decent but not perfect simulation. My main gaming activity right now is flying WW2 aircraft in VR in big multiplayer fights. This is one of the articles main points this decentralised universe of cool shit you can do already exists. The question is whether interoperability actually brings anything useful.
- thom 5y ago
  People in tech, especially VCs, have this weird habit of seeing something simple (like music sharing, or Roblox) and instead of taking away the simplest lesson (people like free music, games are fun) they feel compelled to extrapolate some sort of vision of the future from it (people love P2P tech! Roblox isn’t just a bunch of games kids like, it’s a _metaverse_!) It’s certainly a fun job to have, massively overthinking everything all the time, but I’m not sure the results bear out.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    The funniest part of this for me was Roblox changing all their mention of games to experiences earlier this year during the start of the Epic-Apple thing.
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
In Second Life, you could create islands with their own rules, for example you could create a car racing game. Then when you enter the game, you can not fly around while you play the game. It really was very interesting, and amazing how many things people created in a very short time span.
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  You might not know this, but Second Life was not, uh, a wide success. And Second Life is the one we remember from that era. There are dozens of these metaverse things from the mid-90s through the 2000s, none of which achieved the notoriety anywhere near Second Life. Off the top of my head: Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Lively (2008), PlayStation Home (2008) It was such a tired cliché by then that even Homestarrunner was making fun of it in 2007 [0]. Go look back at some of the early VRML hype from the mid 90s, it's like watching history replay itself. Most of it is before the era of the Wayback Machine, but there's a few good articles out there still [1] [2]. I can't even find any news writeups of SGI WebSpace, just screenshots, despite it being the VRML plugin for Netscape back then. [0] https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147 https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147 [1] https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html [2] https://community-place.neocities.org/ https://community-place.neocities.org/
  - headmelted 5y ago
    Geocities and Xoom were all the metaverse we needed back in our day. You know what? the internet was better when it topped out at 56k for mortals.
    - acjohnson55 5y ago
      Amen to GeoCities. They had a concept of addresses within neighborhoods. My friends and I all made our own pages, experimenting with web tech. And remember webrings and Internet Link Exchange? I'd also say that MySpace and Tumblr carried that vision forward. It's ironic that Facebook won, with its bland conformity, and now they think they're going to bring us the metaverse.
modeless 5y ago
> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? By this logic nobody should play Gran Turismo because a Superman game exists. > You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse? By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you don't need a car to surf the web and you can't test the car by visiting the website. The web is pretty analogous to the metaverse and the most plausible path to an actual metaverse may be an evolution of the web browser. It's the only platform with a sandbox strong enough to run completely untrusted code on your local device with no centralized gatekeeper manually enforcing rules, which I think is a hard requirement for a real metaverse. Any metaverse contender that doesn't start with that is doomed to eventual irrelevance. But I don't think, as the author of the article seems to, that today's web is already the metaverse and nothing will change. What really drives platform change is input methods. The iPhone was a new platform because it used capacitive touch instead of mouse and keyboard, and the web evolved with it. The metaverse will be a new platform because it will use still different input methods (yet to be determined, probably not the VR controllers we use today) and the web will have to change again, perhaps more radically this time.
- laumars 5y ago
  The point the OP is making is VR isn’t a domain where you test drive practical family cars. Sure you have racing games but how many people can afford, let alone justify, high ended performance cars for their family? And how many racing games do you see where people are driving boring (relatively speaking) family cars? The point about VR games are that they’re an unrealistic escape. If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    I for one am waiting for GT 10: Metaverse. So I can get stuck in virtual traffic, and be late for a virtual meeting.
emodendroket 5y ago
People are willing to pay thousands of dollars on setups precisely to simulate driving a car in VR. It's not totally implausible that if the VR technology gets convincing enough it could help move some cars too.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  Very few people are willing to spend it - that's coming from someone who has spent some money on getting a VR racing setup. Many people who have tried it think its fun but then ask me how much it was and say 'well I'm glad you enjoy it'. Driving a real car down a windy road is 1000x better than the best Vr setup.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Yeah but I'm not going to push my real car anything like I would a video game car because I do not wish to damage it or injure myself.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      I have literally hundreds of hours in VR racing and driving down a winding highway at 100km/h is still more fun. They sound the same on paper but they don't feel the same. Maybe if I had a full simulator that could replicate the feeling of acceleration but I don't - and nobody on metaverse on their $200 VR headsets will either.
AlexandrB 5y ago
One way to make money in a metaverse would be to artificially create limitations to what a user can do and then sell them the solutions to those problems. So why not add thirst and hunger meters and then sell food items? Or why not make travel non-instantaneous and then sell faster modes of transit? This is how heavily-monetized games work today and it's not surprising that some in the industry are salivating at the thought of extending this economic model beyond just entertainment.
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  If the metaverse is truly a decentralized, collaborative space, how can we add these limitations without others breaking them? If all that's stopping them is code, why wouldn't everyone have all the most powerful items, all the time? If the metaverse ever becomes a reality, I promise I will publish a blog post for people to copy/paste some code to make their own custom overpowered equipment and free food and break the whole economic system.
  - radicalcentrist 5y ago
    Hey now, you wouldn't download a car
    - Jasper_ 5y ago
      who would win: company burning $10,000,000,000 trying to create a brand new capitalist techno-utopia, or 1 GitHub repo boi
  - tgv 5y ago
    > If the metaverse is truly a decentralized, collaborative space We're talking about facebook here. I expect the metaverse to be designed 100% according to the wishes of ad buyers. And Cambridge Analytica.
    - aierou 5y ago
      Right. Just like we're currently living in a world where IBM controls all computers.
cgriswald 5y ago
Instead of watching a professional driver smoothly going around a switchback, you sit in first person POV in a car that feels, handles, and accelerates better and faster than the real thing. It even cheats to make you feel like you're a better driver—that the car makes you a better driver. You probably won't buy it on the spot, but you could; the car as an impulse buy right at the peak of your high. Even if you don't, now when you see that car on the road, you associate those good memories with the car. Maybe you even go in for a test drive of the real thing. Why would anyone want to do that rather than fly? Why would I rather play Gran Turismo when I can be Iron Man in LEGO Marvel Superheroes?
- Animats 5y ago
  I hate to tell you this, but in most driving games, the center of gravity is so low that it's below the ground. That keeps you from rolling the simulated car.
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    If it was below the ground, the car would roll in the other direction.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      Gravity acts downwards so having a low center of gravity resists rolling forces. This works in reality as well with vehicles with a high center of gravity being at increased risk of rolling over those with a low center. Games often take this a step further as physics engines let you manually specify where the center of gravity is so you can make it artificially low compared with the actual mass distribution.
      - dTal 5y ago
        You haven't addressed the point. Rolling moment is proportional to the distance of the center of gravity from the ground, in either direction. If the center of gravity is exactly at ground level, the car cannot be rolled. Moving it lower, into the ground, increases the rolling tendency again - in the "wrong" direction.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
bruce willis surrogates anyone? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263
- can16358p 5y ago
  Exactly what I had in mind. Underrated movie. Maybe metaverse will end up somewhere between the currently envisioned one and like the surrogates physically existing and people at their homes interacting with the world via them, where tech companies even give the main unit for free but sell unlockable content for their surrogates.
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    farmville comes to mind. oh what fun times we live in
pmontra 5y ago
> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Flying? I hope I can teleport as easily as I can jump to a web page by clicking a bookmark or typing its URL. Second Life had teleport. I walked, drove a car, went flying only for the fun of it or for very short distance movements.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Any game that implements a form of fast travel finds 95% or players use it all the time or most of the time. Sure you could run to Stormwind - but even the tram was completely dead one griffon flight points were usable.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    Weird example. That Gryphon ride is slower than taking the tram, or at least it used to be. The advantage of the Gryphon ride is that it was automatic.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      I remember those arguments and races - and it all fell aside when people just hearthstones you Dalaran which was faster than both.
      - Talanes 5y ago
        Don't forget Shattrath. The OG portal-hub town, though the run from Inn to Portal room was pretty bad until you could fly.
jonplackett 5y ago
I wonder if this has it backwards. Cars are a symbol of status and people will want to have that status wherever they are - look at how much people will pay for a skin in Fortnite. I think it’s more likely car manufacturers (the expensive ones) will only let you drive their car in the metaverse if you buy it for real in the real world. If this metaverse really does come to pass, it will be just as (if not more) valuable as a place to be than the real world. I know that sounds mad to most of us, but by the time it happens we’ll all be 10 years older and not the main market for it anymore. Everyone else will have grown up paying for Fortnite skins and NFTs and it will all seem a lot more… normal.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  If they're doing that, eventually people will not really bother with the physical car - the prices for the physical car on the used markets would likely plummet (unless ownership is always tied to the metaverse one)
- ikr678 5y ago
  So, BMW amiibos? Sport team season ticket holders getting exclusive digital jerseys to wear? College students getting a code to unlock digital shirt of their alma mater? Brand affiliation as an identity marker in a virtual space makes sense.
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    Yeah, that’s kind what I mean But in the end it will be whoever’s walled garden the metaverse is planted in that makes the real money. 15% of everything. That’s why fb want this so bad.
- sundvor 5y ago
  Caveat, I haven't really read up in depth on their renaming to a html tag element. So: I don't know about all of that, but on this topic of virtual cars and such I've got a bit of knowledge. I've already paid a lot of money for a number of high quality car models I can drive quite accurately on high quality race track scans with lots of other people in iRacing. These are works of love, and I greatly appreciate that the interest in iRacing has boomed as much as it has since I joined the Papyrus guys' latest offering in 2008. Heck, soon I'll even be able to connect a real BMW M4 racing wheel to my sim setup, adding more $$$$s yet also more realism to a setup already deep my the investment path; I just don't see the use case for "having cars" in <meta name="rainbowpuke" content="Facebook" /> or whatever if it's only going to be window dressing; I mean, what's the point, unless we enter the fidelity of e.g. iRacing. So I can't see "meta" competing with them at all unless they either buy it (and they wouldn't; it's far too hardcore) or a competitor. I can see the value of motorsport companies investing in esports, however, as the newest generation of F1 drivers have their roots in that and e.g. karts - which enables a connection to the fanbase hitherto impossible. Would they find value in giving lots of money to MetaFace instead? Time will tell; it'll be interesting to see what eventuates from all of this. First impressions are pretty much Candy Crush in VR - with all the spam you could possibly tolerate, and then some. (No thanks.)
Aeolun 5y ago
I dunno man, if Ferrari drops their car into the game then that’s going to be more awesome then I can ever model on my own. Even if I can drive a square block by designating it a car, it’s not really a car I want to drive in.
- petepete 5y ago
  That's a bit harsh on the Nissan Cube!
b0rsuk 5y ago
I'm patiently waiting for the desktop metaphor to die. I'm a very happy user of i3 (tiling) window manager and it's beautiful how efficiently it uses space. Meanwhile in the "desktop metaphor" world, interface designers have settled on fullscreen applications (skype, even music players) and tabs. Because no one wants to bother moving application windows around with mouse. i3 is explicitly for power users, but someone will eventually take the idea of tiling window managers and make something with a low learning curve. And that will be the end of desktop icons and movable windows.
- nunodonato 5y ago
  So if I just use every window in maximized mode, what's the big advantage of i3?
  - b0rsuk 5y ago
    None. But I think you won't feel the need to maximize all if you use screen space efficient apps. When you use a tiling WM, you care about it much more. Old applications like winamp and even old skype had to fit inside resolutions like 800x600 or 1024x768. But UI designers and programmers started being lazy, just like they no longer care much about CPU/memory efficiency so we get lots of Electron and badly optimized websites(JS). And if tiling WMs became more common, developers would make fewer apps that waste screen space.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  fancyzones is a free windows powertoy already. Everyone who thinks they need one can have one.
headmelted 5y ago
If I’m living my life with my head stuffed into a doohicky then why do I need a car at all? How much extra do I pay to get wired up to feeding and waste tubes for 24/7 access? I’ve seen the Matrix, so I assume I need a big pod full of pink gloop in my bathroom too?
glenvdb 5y ago
The metaverse (not Facebook's/Meta's version) can be whatever you want it to be. That's the point. You could sign into different worlds, or turn different layers of reality on/off. Perhaps you choose to use a reality where the rules are more akin to the real world, and so the best way to get around is a car... a car that looks and behaves like a car. And then 15 minutes later you get bored and jump into a world where you can have rocket boots instead. There will be markets for all different types of realities.
elorant 5y ago
That’s not my concern. My main issue is that it would be pretty much impossible to recreate the dynamics of driving a car the way dedicated video game car simulators do. Who will write the code? The car manufacturer, or the platform? All you’ll end up with will be a precise 3-D model of the car and a generic driving “experience”. When you play Grand Turismo every car behaves differently because the creators took the time to customize each car. I don’t see how would this apply to a platform because the backend to support all this would probably not be there.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  If if the buyer can afford the car they can just to go a dealership and test drive one, and get a 1:1 experience. This is about advertising and trying to sell advertising as experience rather than advertising. What else would you imagine facebook's virtual space to be?
  - elorant 5y ago
    Like an enhanced version of Second Life. If you don't offer some kind of immersive experience then no one will bother participating. Advertising as experience is exactly what I'm describing by having a car that behaves like the real one. Otherwise it's a dumb model with no difference from any other car/ad there.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      You can't have a car that behaves like the real one in vr...especially not in oculus quest like set ups. Its just bullshit for advertisers.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  If it works a bit like Second Life, the creator of a thing (like a car) can define the behavior of the car. So people wanting to put their car into the metaverse presumably could expend as much effort on it as they want. I mean now if they simulate a car for Grand Turismo, they also use some kind of API (Unity Engine, OpenGL, whatever) to encode the behavior. Likewise a metaverse will have some API which you can use to encode behavior. It remains to be seen what options it provides. In SL I think you wouldn't have been able to create a very good car simulator because the engine was too limited. But the situation might be improved for newer metaverse attempts. I think most people in this thread are missing the point. It is not that people could only experience VR without the metaverse. People can still surf the internet, yet most people chose to spend their time on Facebook, because it is more convenient and makes some things easier. To the point that some non-Facebook internet sites make you sign in with your Facebook account. If everybody is on meta, it makes no sense for Mercedes to create an independent VR experience to advertise their cars. It makes more sense to do it in meta, where Facebook can direct users to the Mercedes VR world.
saltmeister 5y ago
what the fuck are you talking about you imbecile
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
Most people would tell you that the car showroom experience is one of the enjoyable parts of buying a car - the new car smells and discovering the knobs and features, and how comfy the lumbar support is in the shiny new models - VR doesn't come close. I was CTO in an Augmented Reality company that did a lot of user testing (using AR to showcase products) so have atleast a rudimentary understanding of the technology and peoples relationship to it: AR and VR are 'wow' experiences that really excite people before they've tried it and for the first few experience, but apart from a small subset of people the excitement and wonder wears off pretty quickly. When selling things, aspirational photos (the product in a desirable setting) is usually more useful to a buyer than seeing it in AR in their current home. I first used a $50K VR headset 30 years ago in a CS research department (Dire Straits - Money for Nothing video quality graphics) and it was thrilling but obviously didn't catch on because of the cost and lack of technical performance at the time. The technology available still isn't ready - poor battery / CPU performance really kills mobile AR, the low resolution/field of view/lifelike rendering makes VR painful for the average person.
- lowdose 5y ago
  We just don’t have the compute to render a full universe experience in God mode.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Obviously only God has. (Well, he would if he existed.)
deleted 5y ago
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LegitShady 5y ago
>You can tell this absolutely makes no sense, because if we're in the metaverse, why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Or if I can't, I'm going to open up a shop next door that sells metaverse helicopter rides. If I make a vehicle in the metaverse, I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around. The corporate metaverse will be advertiser driven. You won't be able to put rocket launchers on a car except in specific zones where violence is allowed. You'll have to pay the metaverse operator to get your helicopter approved, and they'll want 30% of anything you make from helicopter rides. All of this is an advertiser friendly second life with no reason to participate. I've had plenty of fun in VR but I want nothing to do with advertiser driven VR, and a metaverse even less.
- skohan 5y ago
  Just what we need: an escape from this world into one where corporations literally control the rules of reality.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    I think we need to rename the Metaverse into the Zuckerverse so that its more honest. In the zuckerberg you can take an ad from one game to another, a microtransaction from one game to another, and advertisers can send you ads right to your credit card! incredible work zuck.
krisoft 5y ago
Very true. Also if I choose to drive a car in metaverse it would be either a Lamborghini Aventador or a clown car propelled by bubbles. The kind of sensible cars I would consider in real life would be way too boring in an environment where anything can happen :p
skohan 5y ago
Not only that, but here you're talking about increasing the cost of advertising exponentially. The closest thing we have to what's being described here is a video game. 3D game development is one of the most difficult and unforgiving branches of software development. To achieve what is being talked about here, BMW is going to have to hire a team of 3D artists, animators and programmers to realize this asset. And someone is going to have to make sure this asset performs well, and interacts appropriately with the world, and with all the other assets which have been created by independent and unrelated teams. Part of that is, driving around in this car can't use too much CPU and GPU budget so that it brings the framerate to a halt when it appears on screen with any combination of the infinite number of combinations of things which could exist in this world. This stuff takes years and is hard to get right for mature AAA studios with decades of experience. The idea that every company with an ad department is going to get into this vastly expensive and unproven business is a dream for facebook but a nightmare for everyone else.
lucasverra 5y ago
Had the same sentiment when watching MZ presentation. Why on earth would my avatar be standing like regular people in the crowd in a concert? I want to be in the scene with hot shot musician, not in the tribune.
m-p-3 5y ago
> I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around. You'd be surprised how popular truck and flight simulators are.
smallerfish 5y ago
Back in the early 90s (late 80s?) Ford published a lame video game promoting (I think) the Mustang. It had a minimal feature walkthrough (now featuring 6 speakers!), terrible graphics, and a very limited driving simulator that was about as exciting as watching paint dry. The Metaverse version would no doubt look a lot better, but it'd be no more real than Ford's early attempt. Maybe as adware it'd be functional at selling some units, but only with people who were already invested enough in Ford to be able to engage with their ad. I'm also reminded of the US military's funding of FPS games like America's Army (and at least involvement in Call of Duty) as recruiting tools.
tarkin2 5y ago
So is the metaverse AR adverts? Makes sense I guess. "Please go into an AR world, then our advertisers will be able to 'physically' interact with you." Advertisers will no longer just manipulate what we read or see but now what we interact with. Makes me yearn for the ceefax thing on the frontpage.

bosawq 5y ago

Forget about what other people who have nothing in common with you do. Its a trap to focus on it. Many have resources, energy and no sense, taste or imagination. You cant blame them. Its like complaining to a cactus for not producing strawberries. Or yelling at swampland for not turning fertile. What you can do is shift focus, and focus on what you and people like you are working on, and keep the focus there no matter what.

codingdave 5y ago

Roblox will be looked back upon as the MS-DOS of metaverses, yet people go gaga over any vehicle you can make. They (mostly kids) spend an absurd amount of hours just jumping from one place to another to prove they can without falling. They spend real money just to turn their hat a new color. Entire genres of games and activities exist basically to just move around, jump on a few things, see numbers get bigger, and see things change colors. With all that, I truly think yes... people absolutely will drive a car in VR.

meheleventyone 5y ago
People already drive cars in VR, in multiplayer with force feedback steering wheels and chair based motion platforms with a fairly decent but not perfect simulation. My main gaming activity right now is flying WW2 aircraft in VR in big multiplayer fights. This is one of the articles main points this decentralised universe of cool shit you can do already exists. The question is whether interoperability actually brings anything useful.
thom 5y ago
People in tech, especially VCs, have this weird habit of seeing something simple (like music sharing, or Roblox) and instead of taking away the simplest lesson (people like free music, games are fun) they feel compelled to extrapolate some sort of vision of the future from it (people love P2P tech! Roblox isn’t just a bunch of games kids like, it’s a _metaverse_!) It’s certainly a fun job to have, massively overthinking everything all the time, but I’m not sure the results bear out.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  The funniest part of this for me was Roblox changing all their mention of games to experiences earlier this year during the start of the Epic-Apple thing.

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

In Second Life, you could create islands with their own rules, for example you could create a car racing game. Then when you enter the game, you can not fly around while you play the game. It really was very interesting, and amazing how many things people created in a very short time span.

Jasper_ 5y ago
You might not know this, but Second Life was not, uh, a wide success. And Second Life is the one we remember from that era. There are dozens of these metaverse things from the mid-90s through the 2000s, none of which achieved the notoriety anywhere near Second Life. Off the top of my head: Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Lively (2008), PlayStation Home (2008) It was such a tired cliché by then that even Homestarrunner was making fun of it in 2007 [0]. Go look back at some of the early VRML hype from the mid 90s, it's like watching history replay itself. Most of it is before the era of the Wayback Machine, but there's a few good articles out there still [1] [2]. I can't even find any news writeups of SGI WebSpace, just screenshots, despite it being the VRML plugin for Netscape back then. [0] https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147 https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147 [1] https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html [2] https://community-place.neocities.org/ https://community-place.neocities.org/
- headmelted 5y ago
  Geocities and Xoom were all the metaverse we needed back in our day. You know what? the internet was better when it topped out at 56k for mortals.
  - acjohnson55 5y ago
    Amen to GeoCities. They had a concept of addresses within neighborhoods. My friends and I all made our own pages, experimenting with web tech. And remember webrings and Internet Link Exchange? I'd also say that MySpace and Tumblr carried that vision forward. It's ironic that Facebook won, with its bland conformity, and now they think they're going to bring us the metaverse.

modeless 5y ago

> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? By this logic nobody should play Gran Turismo because a Superman game exists. > You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse? By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you don't need a car to surf the web and you can't test the car by visiting the website. The web is pretty analogous to the metaverse and the most plausible path to an actual metaverse may be an evolution of the web browser. It's the only platform with a sandbox strong enough to run completely untrusted code on your local device with no centralized gatekeeper manually enforcing rules, which I think is a hard requirement for a real metaverse. Any metaverse contender that doesn't start with that is doomed to eventual irrelevance. But I don't think, as the author of the article seems to, that today's web is already the metaverse and nothing will change. What really drives platform change is input methods. The iPhone was a new platform because it used capacitive touch instead of mouse and keyboard, and the web evolved with it. The metaverse will be a new platform because it will use still different input methods (yet to be determined, probably not the VR controllers we use today) and the web will have to change again, perhaps more radically this time.

laumars 5y ago
The point the OP is making is VR isn’t a domain where you test drive practical family cars. Sure you have racing games but how many people can afford, let alone justify, high ended performance cars for their family? And how many racing games do you see where people are driving boring (relatively speaking) family cars? The point about VR games are that they’re an unrealistic escape. If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  I for one am waiting for GT 10: Metaverse. So I can get stuck in virtual traffic, and be late for a virtual meeting.

emodendroket 5y ago

People are willing to pay thousands of dollars on setups precisely to simulate driving a car in VR. It's not totally implausible that if the VR technology gets convincing enough it could help move some cars too.

LegitShady 5y ago
Very few people are willing to spend it - that's coming from someone who has spent some money on getting a VR racing setup. Many people who have tried it think its fun but then ask me how much it was and say 'well I'm glad you enjoy it'. Driving a real car down a windy road is 1000x better than the best Vr setup.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Yeah but I'm not going to push my real car anything like I would a video game car because I do not wish to damage it or injure myself.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    I have literally hundreds of hours in VR racing and driving down a winding highway at 100km/h is still more fun. They sound the same on paper but they don't feel the same. Maybe if I had a full simulator that could replicate the feeling of acceleration but I don't - and nobody on metaverse on their $200 VR headsets will either.

AlexandrB 5y ago

One way to make money in a metaverse would be to artificially create limitations to what a user can do and then sell them the solutions to those problems. So why not add thirst and hunger meters and then sell food items? Or why not make travel non-instantaneous and then sell faster modes of transit? This is how heavily-monetized games work today and it's not surprising that some in the industry are salivating at the thought of extending this economic model beyond just entertainment.

Jasper_ 5y ago
If the metaverse is truly a decentralized, collaborative space, how can we add these limitations without others breaking them? If all that's stopping them is code, why wouldn't everyone have all the most powerful items, all the time? If the metaverse ever becomes a reality, I promise I will publish a blog post for people to copy/paste some code to make their own custom overpowered equipment and free food and break the whole economic system.
- radicalcentrist 5y ago
  Hey now, you wouldn't download a car
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    who would win: company burning $10,000,000,000 trying to create a brand new capitalist techno-utopia, or 1 GitHub repo boi
- tgv 5y ago
  > If the metaverse is truly a decentralized, collaborative space We're talking about facebook here. I expect the metaverse to be designed 100% according to the wishes of ad buyers. And Cambridge Analytica.
  - aierou 5y ago
    Right. Just like we're currently living in a world where IBM controls all computers.

cgriswald 5y ago

Instead of watching a professional driver smoothly going around a switchback, you sit in first person POV in a car that feels, handles, and accelerates better and faster than the real thing. It even cheats to make you feel like you're a better driver—that the car makes you a better driver. You probably won't buy it on the spot, but you could; the car as an impulse buy right at the peak of your high. Even if you don't, now when you see that car on the road, you associate those good memories with the car. Maybe you even go in for a test drive of the real thing. Why would anyone want to do that rather than fly? Why would I rather play Gran Turismo when I can be Iron Man in LEGO Marvel Superheroes?

Animats 5y ago
I hate to tell you this, but in most driving games, the center of gravity is so low that it's below the ground. That keeps you from rolling the simulated car.
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  If it was below the ground, the car would roll in the other direction.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Gravity acts downwards so having a low center of gravity resists rolling forces. This works in reality as well with vehicles with a high center of gravity being at increased risk of rolling over those with a low center. Games often take this a step further as physics engines let you manually specify where the center of gravity is so you can make it artificially low compared with the actual mass distribution.
    - dTal 5y ago
      You haven't addressed the point. Rolling moment is proportional to the distance of the center of gravity from the ground, in either direction. If the center of gravity is exactly at ground level, the car cannot be rolled. Moving it lower, into the ground, increases the rolling tendency again - in the "wrong" direction.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

bruce willis surrogates anyone? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263

can16358p 5y ago
Exactly what I had in mind. Underrated movie. Maybe metaverse will end up somewhere between the currently envisioned one and like the surrogates physically existing and people at their homes interacting with the world via them, where tech companies even give the main unit for free but sell unlockable content for their surrogates.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  farmville comes to mind. oh what fun times we live in

pmontra 5y ago

> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Flying? I hope I can teleport as easily as I can jump to a web page by clicking a bookmark or typing its URL. Second Life had teleport. I walked, drove a car, went flying only for the fun of it or for very short distance movements.

bombcar 5y ago
Any game that implements a form of fast travel finds 95% or players use it all the time or most of the time. Sure you could run to Stormwind - but even the tram was completely dead one griffon flight points were usable.
- Talanes 5y ago
  Weird example. That Gryphon ride is slower than taking the tram, or at least it used to be. The advantage of the Gryphon ride is that it was automatic.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I remember those arguments and races - and it all fell aside when people just hearthstones you Dalaran which was faster than both.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      Don't forget Shattrath. The OG portal-hub town, though the run from Inn to Portal room was pretty bad until you could fly.

jonplackett 5y ago

I wonder if this has it backwards. Cars are a symbol of status and people will want to have that status wherever they are - look at how much people will pay for a skin in Fortnite. I think it’s more likely car manufacturers (the expensive ones) will only let you drive their car in the metaverse if you buy it for real in the real world. If this metaverse really does come to pass, it will be just as (if not more) valuable as a place to be than the real world. I know that sounds mad to most of us, but by the time it happens we’ll all be 10 years older and not the main market for it anymore. Everyone else will have grown up paying for Fortnite skins and NFTs and it will all seem a lot more… normal.

HPsquared 5y ago
If they're doing that, eventually people will not really bother with the physical car - the prices for the physical car on the used markets would likely plummet (unless ownership is always tied to the metaverse one)
ikr678 5y ago
So, BMW amiibos? Sport team season ticket holders getting exclusive digital jerseys to wear? College students getting a code to unlock digital shirt of their alma mater? Brand affiliation as an identity marker in a virtual space makes sense.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Yeah, that’s kind what I mean But in the end it will be whoever’s walled garden the metaverse is planted in that makes the real money. 15% of everything. That’s why fb want this so bad.
sundvor 5y ago
Caveat, I haven't really read up in depth on their renaming to a html tag element. So: I don't know about all of that, but on this topic of virtual cars and such I've got a bit of knowledge. I've already paid a lot of money for a number of high quality car models I can drive quite accurately on high quality race track scans with lots of other people in iRacing. These are works of love, and I greatly appreciate that the interest in iRacing has boomed as much as it has since I joined the Papyrus guys' latest offering in 2008. Heck, soon I'll even be able to connect a real BMW M4 racing wheel to my sim setup, adding more $$$$s yet also more realism to a setup already deep my the investment path; I just don't see the use case for "having cars" in <meta name="rainbowpuke" content="Facebook" /> or whatever if it's only going to be window dressing; I mean, what's the point, unless we enter the fidelity of e.g. iRacing. So I can't see "meta" competing with them at all unless they either buy it (and they wouldn't; it's far too hardcore) or a competitor. I can see the value of motorsport companies investing in esports, however, as the newest generation of F1 drivers have their roots in that and e.g. karts - which enables a connection to the fanbase hitherto impossible. Would they find value in giving lots of money to MetaFace instead? Time will tell; it'll be interesting to see what eventuates from all of this. First impressions are pretty much Candy Crush in VR - with all the spam you could possibly tolerate, and then some. (No thanks.)

Aeolun 5y ago

I dunno man, if Ferrari drops their car into the game then that’s going to be more awesome then I can ever model on my own. Even if I can drive a square block by designating it a car, it’s not really a car I want to drive in.

petepete 5y ago
That's a bit harsh on the Nissan Cube!

b0rsuk 5y ago

I'm patiently waiting for the desktop metaphor to die. I'm a very happy user of i3 (tiling) window manager and it's beautiful how efficiently it uses space. Meanwhile in the "desktop metaphor" world, interface designers have settled on fullscreen applications (skype, even music players) and tabs. Because no one wants to bother moving application windows around with mouse. i3 is explicitly for power users, but someone will eventually take the idea of tiling window managers and make something with a low learning curve. And that will be the end of desktop icons and movable windows.

nunodonato 5y ago
So if I just use every window in maximized mode, what's the big advantage of i3?
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  None. But I think you won't feel the need to maximize all if you use screen space efficient apps. When you use a tiling WM, you care about it much more. Old applications like winamp and even old skype had to fit inside resolutions like 800x600 or 1024x768. But UI designers and programmers started being lazy, just like they no longer care much about CPU/memory efficiency so we get lots of Electron and badly optimized websites(JS). And if tiling WMs became more common, developers would make fewer apps that waste screen space.
LegitShady 5y ago
fancyzones is a free windows powertoy already. Everyone who thinks they need one can have one.

headmelted 5y ago

If I’m living my life with my head stuffed into a doohicky then why do I need a car at all? How much extra do I pay to get wired up to feeding and waste tubes for 24/7 access? I’ve seen the Matrix, so I assume I need a big pod full of pink gloop in my bathroom too?

glenvdb 5y ago

The metaverse (not Facebook's/Meta's version) can be whatever you want it to be. That's the point. You could sign into different worlds, or turn different layers of reality on/off. Perhaps you choose to use a reality where the rules are more akin to the real world, and so the best way to get around is a car... a car that looks and behaves like a car. And then 15 minutes later you get bored and jump into a world where you can have rocket boots instead. There will be markets for all different types of realities.

elorant 5y ago

That’s not my concern. My main issue is that it would be pretty much impossible to recreate the dynamics of driving a car the way dedicated video game car simulators do. Who will write the code? The car manufacturer, or the platform? All you’ll end up with will be a precise 3-D model of the car and a generic driving “experience”. When you play Grand Turismo every car behaves differently because the creators took the time to customize each car. I don’t see how would this apply to a platform because the backend to support all this would probably not be there.

LegitShady 5y ago
If if the buyer can afford the car they can just to go a dealership and test drive one, and get a 1:1 experience. This is about advertising and trying to sell advertising as experience rather than advertising. What else would you imagine facebook's virtual space to be?
- elorant 5y ago
  Like an enhanced version of Second Life. If you don't offer some kind of immersive experience then no one will bother participating. Advertising as experience is exactly what I'm describing by having a car that behaves like the real one. Otherwise it's a dumb model with no difference from any other car/ad there.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    You can't have a car that behaves like the real one in vr...especially not in oculus quest like set ups. Its just bullshit for advertisers.
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
If it works a bit like Second Life, the creator of a thing (like a car) can define the behavior of the car. So people wanting to put their car into the metaverse presumably could expend as much effort on it as they want. I mean now if they simulate a car for Grand Turismo, they also use some kind of API (Unity Engine, OpenGL, whatever) to encode the behavior. Likewise a metaverse will have some API which you can use to encode behavior. It remains to be seen what options it provides. In SL I think you wouldn't have been able to create a very good car simulator because the engine was too limited. But the situation might be improved for newer metaverse attempts. I think most people in this thread are missing the point. It is not that people could only experience VR without the metaverse. People can still surf the internet, yet most people chose to spend their time on Facebook, because it is more convenient and makes some things easier. To the point that some non-Facebook internet sites make you sign in with your Facebook account. If everybody is on meta, it makes no sense for Mercedes to create an independent VR experience to advertise their cars. It makes more sense to do it in meta, where Facebook can direct users to the Mercedes VR world.

saltmeister 5y ago

what the fuck are you talking about you imbecile

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

Most people would tell you that the car showroom experience is one of the enjoyable parts of buying a car - the new car smells and discovering the knobs and features, and how comfy the lumbar support is in the shiny new models - VR doesn't come close. I was CTO in an Augmented Reality company that did a lot of user testing (using AR to showcase products) so have atleast a rudimentary understanding of the technology and peoples relationship to it: AR and VR are 'wow' experiences that really excite people before they've tried it and for the first few experience, but apart from a small subset of people the excitement and wonder wears off pretty quickly. When selling things, aspirational photos (the product in a desirable setting) is usually more useful to a buyer than seeing it in AR in their current home. I first used a $50K VR headset 30 years ago in a CS research department (Dire Straits - Money for Nothing video quality graphics) and it was thrilling but obviously didn't catch on because of the cost and lack of technical performance at the time. The technology available still isn't ready - poor battery / CPU performance really kills mobile AR, the low resolution/field of view/lifelike rendering makes VR painful for the average person.

lowdose 5y ago
We just don’t have the compute to render a full universe experience in God mode.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Obviously only God has. (Well, he would if he existed.)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

LegitShady 5y ago

>You can tell this absolutely makes no sense, because if we're in the metaverse, why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I? Or if I can't, I'm going to open up a shop next door that sells metaverse helicopter rides. If I make a vehicle in the metaverse, I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around. The corporate metaverse will be advertiser driven. You won't be able to put rocket launchers on a car except in specific zones where violence is allowed. You'll have to pay the metaverse operator to get your helicopter approved, and they'll want 30% of anything you make from helicopter rides. All of this is an advertiser friendly second life with no reason to participate. I've had plenty of fun in VR but I want nothing to do with advertiser driven VR, and a metaverse even less.

skohan 5y ago
Just what we need: an escape from this world into one where corporations literally control the rules of reality.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  I think we need to rename the Metaverse into the Zuckerverse so that its more honest. In the zuckerberg you can take an ad from one game to another, a microtransaction from one game to another, and advertisers can send you ads right to your credit card! incredible work zuck.

krisoft 5y ago

Very true. Also if I choose to drive a car in metaverse it would be either a Lamborghini Aventador or a clown car propelled by bubbles. The kind of sensible cars I would consider in real life would be way too boring in an environment where anything can happen :p

skohan 5y ago

Not only that, but here you're talking about increasing the cost of advertising exponentially. The closest thing we have to what's being described here is a video game. 3D game development is one of the most difficult and unforgiving branches of software development. To achieve what is being talked about here, BMW is going to have to hire a team of 3D artists, animators and programmers to realize this asset. And someone is going to have to make sure this asset performs well, and interacts appropriately with the world, and with all the other assets which have been created by independent and unrelated teams. Part of that is, driving around in this car can't use too much CPU and GPU budget so that it brings the framerate to a halt when it appears on screen with any combination of the infinite number of combinations of things which could exist in this world. This stuff takes years and is hard to get right for mature AAA studios with decades of experience. The idea that every company with an ad department is going to get into this vastly expensive and unproven business is a dream for facebook but a nightmare for everyone else.

lucasverra 5y ago

Had the same sentiment when watching MZ presentation. Why on earth would my avatar be standing like regular people in the crowd in a concert? I want to be in the scene with hot shot musician, not in the tribune.

m-p-3 5y ago

> I'm going add rocket launchers and nos, because that's way more fun than driving a Camry around. You'd be surprised how popular truck and flight simulators are.

smallerfish 5y ago

Back in the early 90s (late 80s?) Ford published a lame video game promoting (I think) the Mustang. It had a minimal feature walkthrough (now featuring 6 speakers!), terrible graphics, and a very limited driving simulator that was about as exciting as watching paint dry. The Metaverse version would no doubt look a lot better, but it'd be no more real than Ford's early attempt. Maybe as adware it'd be functional at selling some units, but only with people who were already invested enough in Ford to be able to engage with their ad. I'm also reminded of the US military's funding of FPS games like America's Army (and at least involvement in Call of Duty) as recruiting tools.

tarkin2 5y ago

So is the metaverse AR adverts? Makes sense I guess. "Please go into an AR world, then our advertisers will be able to 'physically' interact with you." Advertisers will no longer just manipulate what we read or see but now what we interact with. Makes me yearn for the ceefax thing on the frontpage.