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> 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 l

> 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - samjanis 5y ago
    Holy heck man, that made me LOL hard. That has to be the most self-explanatory comment, period.
- Banana699 5y ago
  >If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place. What? Why? A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution. Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (which is actually just your perspective if you prefer beer, the orange-juice-loving person in the group is seeing the whole group drinking orange juice) and discussing the latest celebrity scandal. All of the cosmopolitanism and variety of social media, none of its artficiality and bullshit. (Off course there is going to be new bullshit in this world, people will go through various hoops to pull idiotic pranks on other people and scammers will have a terrifying field day with the new convincing techniques the new medium will bring, but at this point this is just more or less real life. Real Life In Your Pocket that is. (hopefully eventually, it will have a PC phase first). Who is not excited by that?) Imagine a professional like an airline pilot or a heart surgeon transmitting a read-only record of a flight or an operation, complete with haptic feedback and a temperature-and-wind reconstruction of the transmission environment. Imagine those records dumped to storage and serving as humanity's Library Of Crafts, a correction to our ancient shortcoming of only being able to capture in symbols what could be said (and with photography and microphones, what could be seen or heard), but not what could be felt or experienced. Won't this absolutely revolutionise learning and communication? There is a very clear path from here to eventual Greg-Egan-style post-singular communication where you are roaming freely in abstract structures residing everywhere from your head to a server in orbit. Every thought or system or structure ever dreamt up by the human mind began with a 1:1 snapshot of reality that was then further filtered and compressed (Hume's golden mountain). The ability to arbitrarily construct, store, transmit and reconstruct 1:1 ever-more-convincing sensory representations of the world at will is nothing short of a revolution comparable to the invention of language.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    Why limit yourself to the real world though. Having 20 people with anime avatars in a fantasy fantasy world sounds much better.
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
narrator 5y ago
VR is great for video games, sure. What if I don't like video games though?
- wruza 5y ago
  What do you like?
- laumars 5y ago
  I do think the potential around VR is greatly oversold however there are still benefits outside of gaming: concerts, remote conferences, having kick ass multi-screen home office for those who don’t have the space for one.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    The office example is the real winner for me. But imagine what it would take: a wireless VR headset with massive resolution that still allows me to look at my surroundings so I can drink a coffee or eat my lunch and is comfortable enough to use for several hours with no breaks. A huge monitor is way cheaper.
    - laumars 5y ago
      That’s why I said “for those who don’t have the space”. You might live in a one bed apartment and not have the room for a dedicated work space so VR might be the alternative in such a situation. I appreciate this isn’t going to be a super common use case but it’s definitely something that might appeal to some who have well paid jobs in expensive to live locations (like London and SV).
- noduerme 5y ago
  Much as I hate FB, as a piano player I loved their little graphic showing how mixed reality would send the notes down to your hand positions on the piano as an endless Star Wars kind of scroll thing. I would do that just to exercise my mind with some classical or jazz pieces. I can think of a slew of other ways VR is useful. Training doctors for surgery. Training pilots. Mechanical engineering and prototyping. None of that means we should live in VR. Just that it's a powerful tool.
Jasper_ 5y ago
I'd say a sizable majority play Gran Turismo because it's a fun test of skill -- learning the controls of an intricate machine, the layout of the game's tracks, and achieving some form of mastery over it. And I'm also sure some people play it for the fantasy of doing car racing in a safe environment, which is a very dangerous, expensive, and inaccessible sport for a lot of people. So, perhaps I misread Tim Sweeney's point of view, but it seems like it starts and ends with "put cool car in metaverse, drive it down Main St., everyone stops and stares, like that one scene from Snow Crash. Or Ready Player One." If it's more specific than that, "put cool car in video game, in metaverse" product placement, well we already have that today. Mercedes Benz already did a whole Mario Kart thing [0], and countless other racing games like the Forza series have sponsorships from real car companies. So that's not really anything novel for the metaverse, it's just the same product placement marketing strategy that's already existed. Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years. > By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you can't test the car by visiting the website. Pretty much all of these websites have a call-to-action for "Schedule a test drive at your local dealership". Hell, I remember an entire campaign from a major car corporation that was to the tune of "anybody can watch a TV commercial, but driving it is believing" [0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/29/5760538/drive-a-mercedes-in-mario-kart-8 https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/29/5760538/drive-a-mercedes-...
- noduerme 5y ago
  I have two cars - a 1980 Datsun and a Fiat Spider. They're both a "test of skill". There's no reason it wouldn't be massively fun to play with lots of other cars on tracks or in all kinds of conditions in VR. "Fun test of skill" is the whole point. The original, like, Stephenson-ish "metaverse" was somewhere people fought with swords. This was getting directly at the idea that skill and challenge were more valuable than raw code. [edit: "entertainment"] Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?
scoopertrooper 5y ago
The metaverse goes against consumer trends in web browsing. People want to consume their information on the go while doing other things, this is why mobile presently dominates the web. Who wants to context switch from reality into a virtual world just so they can see what the new Ford pickup looks like? Nobody, thats who. This whole concept reads to make like a Facebook exec went into a coma just as Second Life was taking off and woke up recently demanding that Facebook cease on what they believe will clearly be the future of online interaction.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  I thought of a remark a day or two ago, but I have no idea, other than your remark, whether it applies at all: "Does Zuck have Second Life second-system syndrome?"
  - theelous3 5y ago
    Ofc. Nobody thinks he's cool in this world, so he'll just spam "new worlds" until somebody thinks he's cool in one of them.
    - bsenftner 5y ago
      Can you imagine being Zuck? Super rich for basically creating the global gossip exchange and fraud factory, and he knows this, he knows Facebook is a clusterfuck of misinformation chaos. And he probably knows he is surrounded by yes people... I wonder if he knows he is in a nightmare.
      - spacelamb 5y ago
        I don't think it's a nightmare because he has choice and a fair amount of power. He could quietly retire comfortably if he wanted to, but instead he's making the play to reorient his company around a virtual-reality space. That sounds like a motivated person, versus someone trapped and going through the motions.
zyemuzu 5y ago
Your input methods comment is key. Today we can have an almost true to life virtual driving experience with peripherals like direct drive steering wheels, loadcell pedals, shifters and a motorised driving rig. It's an expensive hobby with great innovation. Until the interface problem is fixed for VR then it will be a very subpar experience compared to what's already available. You can now extrapolate this to almost any interaction in VR; walking, flying, typing or shooting. Until there's an input method that is able to emulate these experiences effectively, then it is pure science fiction.

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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- samjanis 5y ago
  Holy heck man, that made me LOL hard. That has to be the most self-explanatory comment, period.
Banana699 5y ago
>If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place. What? Why? A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution. Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (which is actually just your perspective if you prefer beer, the orange-juice-loving person in the group is seeing the whole group drinking orange juice) and discussing the latest celebrity scandal. All of the cosmopolitanism and variety of social media, none of its artficiality and bullshit. (Off course there is going to be new bullshit in this world, people will go through various hoops to pull idiotic pranks on other people and scammers will have a terrifying field day with the new convincing techniques the new medium will bring, but at this point this is just more or less real life. Real Life In Your Pocket that is. (hopefully eventually, it will have a PC phase first). Who is not excited by that?) Imagine a professional like an airline pilot or a heart surgeon transmitting a read-only record of a flight or an operation, complete with haptic feedback and a temperature-and-wind reconstruction of the transmission environment. Imagine those records dumped to storage and serving as humanity's Library Of Crafts, a correction to our ancient shortcoming of only being able to capture in symbols what could be said (and with photography and microphones, what could be seen or heard), but not what could be felt or experienced. Won't this absolutely revolutionise learning and communication? There is a very clear path from here to eventual Greg-Egan-style post-singular communication where you are roaming freely in abstract structures residing everywhere from your head to a server in orbit. Every thought or system or structure ever dreamt up by the human mind began with a 1:1 snapshot of reality that was then further filtered and compressed (Hume's golden mountain). The ability to arbitrarily construct, store, transmit and reconstruct 1:1 ever-more-convincing sensory representations of the world at will is nothing short of a revolution comparable to the invention of language.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Why limit yourself to the real world though. Having 20 people with anime avatars in a fantasy fantasy world sounds much better.
- Jasper_ 5y ago

narrator 5y ago

VR is great for video games, sure. What if I don't like video games though?

wruza 5y ago
What do you like?
laumars 5y ago
I do think the potential around VR is greatly oversold however there are still benefits outside of gaming: concerts, remote conferences, having kick ass multi-screen home office for those who don’t have the space for one.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  The office example is the real winner for me. But imagine what it would take: a wireless VR headset with massive resolution that still allows me to look at my surroundings so I can drink a coffee or eat my lunch and is comfortable enough to use for several hours with no breaks. A huge monitor is way cheaper.
  - laumars 5y ago
    That’s why I said “for those who don’t have the space”. You might live in a one bed apartment and not have the room for a dedicated work space so VR might be the alternative in such a situation. I appreciate this isn’t going to be a super common use case but it’s definitely something that might appeal to some who have well paid jobs in expensive to live locations (like London and SV).
noduerme 5y ago
Much as I hate FB, as a piano player I loved their little graphic showing how mixed reality would send the notes down to your hand positions on the piano as an endless Star Wars kind of scroll thing. I would do that just to exercise my mind with some classical or jazz pieces. I can think of a slew of other ways VR is useful. Training doctors for surgery. Training pilots. Mechanical engineering and prototyping. None of that means we should live in VR. Just that it's a powerful tool.

Jasper_ 5y ago

I'd say a sizable majority play Gran Turismo because it's a fun test of skill -- learning the controls of an intricate machine, the layout of the game's tracks, and achieving some form of mastery over it. And I'm also sure some people play it for the fantasy of doing car racing in a safe environment, which is a very dangerous, expensive, and inaccessible sport for a lot of people. So, perhaps I misread Tim Sweeney's point of view, but it seems like it starts and ends with "put cool car in metaverse, drive it down Main St., everyone stops and stares, like that one scene from Snow Crash. Or Ready Player One." If it's more specific than that, "put cool car in video game, in metaverse" product placement, well we already have that today. Mercedes Benz already did a whole Mario Kart thing [0], and countless other racing games like the Forza series have sponsorships from real car companies. So that's not really anything novel for the metaverse, it's just the same product placement marketing strategy that's already existed. Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years. > By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you can't test the car by visiting the website. Pretty much all of these websites have a call-to-action for "Schedule a test drive at your local dealership". Hell, I remember an entire campaign from a major car corporation that was to the tune of "anybody can watch a TV commercial, but driving it is believing" [0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/29/5760538/drive-a-mercedes-in-mario-kart-8 https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/29/5760538/drive-a-mercedes-...

noduerme 5y ago
I have two cars - a 1980 Datsun and a Fiat Spider. They're both a "test of skill". There's no reason it wouldn't be massively fun to play with lots of other cars on tracks or in all kinds of conditions in VR. "Fun test of skill" is the whole point. The original, like, Stephenson-ish "metaverse" was somewhere people fought with swords. This was getting directly at the idea that skill and challenge were more valuable than raw code. [edit: "entertainment"] Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?

scoopertrooper 5y ago

The metaverse goes against consumer trends in web browsing. People want to consume their information on the go while doing other things, this is why mobile presently dominates the web. Who wants to context switch from reality into a virtual world just so they can see what the new Ford pickup looks like? Nobody, thats who. This whole concept reads to make like a Facebook exec went into a coma just as Second Life was taking off and woke up recently demanding that Facebook cease on what they believe will clearly be the future of online interaction.

a9h74j 5y ago
I thought of a remark a day or two ago, but I have no idea, other than your remark, whether it applies at all: "Does Zuck have Second Life second-system syndrome?"
- theelous3 5y ago
  Ofc. Nobody thinks he's cool in this world, so he'll just spam "new worlds" until somebody thinks he's cool in one of them.
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    Can you imagine being Zuck? Super rich for basically creating the global gossip exchange and fraud factory, and he knows this, he knows Facebook is a clusterfuck of misinformation chaos. And he probably knows he is surrounded by yes people... I wonder if he knows he is in a nightmare.
    - spacelamb 5y ago
      I don't think it's a nightmare because he has choice and a fair amount of power. He could quietly retire comfortably if he wanted to, but instead he's making the play to reorient his company around a virtual-reality space. That sounds like a motivated person, versus someone trapped and going through the motions.

zyemuzu 5y ago

Your input methods comment is key. Today we can have an almost true to life virtual driving experience with peripherals like direct drive steering wheels, loadcell pedals, shifters and a motorised driving rig. It's an expensive hobby with great innovation. Until the interface problem is fixed for VR then it will be a very subpar experience compared to what's already available. You can now extrapolate this to almost any interaction in VR; walking, flying, typing or shooting. Until there's an input method that is able to emulate these experiences effectively, then it is pure science fiction.