3 ms·

I think the only BS is the way we.all talk about this stuff, same way the cloud is all hyped up. AR and VR are great tech, when it gets good enough that it's a

I think the only BS is the way we.all talk about this stuff, same way the cloud is all hyped up. AR and VR are great tech, when it gets good enough that it's a simple comfortable accessory to wear, and it incurs no strain on your eyes, it'll definitely find many uses. And for sure we'll pursue the tech for better full body tracking, walking in-place, simulated touch, and all that, and if all that one day works similarly well, you can bet lots of people will start using it all too. So now imagine you have this tech all figured out, what would the software look like? Obviously you're talking 3D UX, logically you'll start building virtual worlds to inhabit, eventually you'd want some things to if possible transfer from one app to another, and where all apps are virtual 3D spaces that might mean some of that stuff needs to transfer over. It can even be simple things, if I can now whiteboard virtually, and use my own hand writing on the board, and now I'm in another app, and I'd like to pull up that whiteboard I did? This is equivalent to say Slack letting you send photos or files over. I don't think any of this is far-fetched, it is just a matter of getting the tech to a point where it is easy, comfortable, convenient and all around pleasant to use. Now calling it all a Metaverse, that's in the same league as calling a bunch of remote servers the Cloud. And yes, the article is right, we all have this stuff already, but we have it in 2D, using 2D interfaces like flat monitors, stereo sound, physical keyboards and mouse. Now you're talking what if we had a surround 3D monitor? Surround 3D sound? Full body tracking with milimeter precision? You'd just take all we currently have and upgrade it to be full surround 3D as well. That's all it is.

ikr678 5y ago
The tech quality developing is all well and good, but I dont see in these discussions much consideration to how much space you need clear for immersive VR. If Facebook want this to scale for private use, they need to solve for housing first. I've played a few VR games at friends places, and unless they had the luxury of a spare room for it it's a pain in the ass to create space. I dont see this taking off beyond the affluent first world for this reason, and even then, most first world countries have much smaller housing than the US - The average UK household is less than half the sqft of the US.
- machiaweliczny 5y ago
  They can also solve brain-conputer interface instead. Probably more profitable as well.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
As somebody who mixes TV and film, I can tell you right now that the overwhelming majority of consumers don't care about surround sound, even if it adds a lot to the experience. Consumers are easily pleased. The average consumer doesn't want to immerse themselves and inhabit another world, they want to append to their existing one in an unintrusive way. This is an America-centric fantasy. Internet connections aren't good enough in many places, and a VR/AR headset is going to be inaccessibly priced.
- sumedh 5y ago
  > Consumers are easily pleased or because most consumers dont have surround sound setup in their homes?
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    Most consumers have frequently experienced and enjoyed surround sound, and yet they generally don't find it compelling enough to be worth putting in their homes.
  - hammyhavoc 5y ago
    Not like surround sound kits aren't available easily and cheaply. Consumers simply aren't interested. Huge 4K television despite very little 4K content being available? Yep. Surround sound? Nope. I've seen playback stats for a large streaming service, very few people bother.
- didibus 5y ago
  For me personally, I don't care about surround sound if the visual material is not itself 3D surround. So I only found it important in VR and AR, and sometimes in 3D games it's nice too, but not as much as in VR games. > they want to append to their existing one in an unintrusive way That's what AR and mixed reality is about. You really need to think, what if there was hardware that could provide high fidelity mixed reality and be super comfortable to integrate. Maybe it's as thin and light as normal sunglasses. Maybe it projects things directly in your eyes, or in the air around you. Like obviously all of this is premised on hardware that reaches this level of comfort and quality to be mass produced. But I think companies think that's just a matter of time, just like for radio, television, computers, smartphones, etc. before it. If I'm wearing some glasses that make it look like my friends are sitting on the various chairs in my living room, then it matters a lot that the sound feels like it's coming from where they are.
ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
That's the problem, isn't it... we barely have support for this kind of thing in 2D. If I make a chair in SolidWorks, I can't even drag-and-drop it into a 3D printer, let alone open the document to use it in the Sims or in an email client. When I drag and drop an email into Excel I get a dialog box asking about what the delimiters are, and woe is me if I want to drag and drop an image to share it with another networked device. To get anything to work, one needs to be constantly aware of filetypes, which applications support which files, and the quirks they have when importing/exporting files (text encodings ftw /s). If we can't figure out metaverse-style interactions on text files, the only way it's going to happen with car files is in one company's interoperatability walled garden.
- contextfree 5y ago
  Yes, as I read the article I thought about interoperability between applications as a related problem. There has been lots of effort put into this over the decades with things like OLE and in some sense, object-oriented programming in general. They've achieved some success but it feels like they've always fallen far short of the level of reuse and interoperability envisioned, and for basically the same reasons alluded to in the article - even if you can solve the easier technical problem of defining protocols, there remain the harder technical and design problems of mapping semantics and user interfaces between application environments, and the social problem of divergent interests and priorities between the developers of those environments.
- didibus 5y ago
  Absolutely, interop will be just as janky as it is today, if not more. It will probably be a combination of "works but with problems" and explicit deals between some companies for certain things where they explicitly put the work in to allow some things to carry over. But my point is the whole Metaverse is marketing hype. The premise is really just that if the real world is one 3 dimensional surround universe you can experience, the Metaverse will deliver other such 3 dimensional surround experiences for you to go from one to the other. The amount of things you can also move between all these "real"/"virtual" worlds is probably gonna suffer from all the issues we have today as well when moving from the real world and all the various 2D worlds. But again, take out all the expensive hyperbolic terms. What we're talking about are just very obvious logical next step. Assume a very good VR setup, now assume a scanner that can take a 3D surround image of say your favorite teddy bear. What do you do? You make a feature that lets you bring that 3D scan into VR. This is the same as bringing a 2D photo of your teddy bear into your current 2D computer environment. In my opinion, nothing here is far fetched, even though people will probably have patents for these ideas, they just logically come out as obvious next step for this new technology. And it'll go the other way around too. You will be able to carve some 3D cup in VR, and then 3D print it into the real world. And that's the same as drawing something in Photoshop and printing it. The only change here is that when you add that third dimension and make it surround, everything starts to feel more "real". Which is where people are starting to hype it up with mental hyperboles like a Metaverse, or calling things New Worlds, Other Universes, etc. But the only change from today is adding the 3rd dimension. Think about a Zoom videoconference call with 5 of your friends where you make the background a photo of Mars. The only reason we call that videoconference and not: "Jump into a parallel universe in the deep landscape of Planet Mars with your friends and experience a new reality" is because it doesn't have the 3rd surround dimension.
kikimora 5y ago
> It can even be simple things, if I can now whiteboard virtually, and use my own hand writing on the board, and now I'm in another app, and I'd like to pull up that whiteboard I did? This is equivalent to say Slack letting you send photos or files over. Except that it is not at all equivalent. To pull your whiteboard the other app has to pull the code that draws and manipulates it. This has two problems a) security b) how the host app supposed to interact with yours? OLE and a few similar technologies tried to answer this. Never seen big use due to complexity. Since that time no new ideas emerged in the field and I don’t see how Metaverse would solve this. Without addressing interoperability and security Metawerse apps will be siloed in the same way as modern apps. That would impose non-physical constraints in the world that tries to by as close to physical reality as possible. I see this as a major concern.

ikr678 5y ago

The tech quality developing is all well and good, but I dont see in these discussions much consideration to how much space you need clear for immersive VR. If Facebook want this to scale for private use, they need to solve for housing first. I've played a few VR games at friends places, and unless they had the luxury of a spare room for it it's a pain in the ass to create space. I dont see this taking off beyond the affluent first world for this reason, and even then, most first world countries have much smaller housing than the US - The average UK household is less than half the sqft of the US.

machiaweliczny 5y ago
They can also solve brain-conputer interface instead. Probably more profitable as well.

hammyhavoc 5y ago

As somebody who mixes TV and film, I can tell you right now that the overwhelming majority of consumers don't care about surround sound, even if it adds a lot to the experience. Consumers are easily pleased. The average consumer doesn't want to immerse themselves and inhabit another world, they want to append to their existing one in an unintrusive way. This is an America-centric fantasy. Internet connections aren't good enough in many places, and a VR/AR headset is going to be inaccessibly priced.

sumedh 5y ago
> Consumers are easily pleased or because most consumers dont have surround sound setup in their homes?
- JohnFen 5y ago
  Most consumers have frequently experienced and enjoyed surround sound, and yet they generally don't find it compelling enough to be worth putting in their homes.
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  Not like surround sound kits aren't available easily and cheaply. Consumers simply aren't interested. Huge 4K television despite very little 4K content being available? Yep. Surround sound? Nope. I've seen playback stats for a large streaming service, very few people bother.
didibus 5y ago
For me personally, I don't care about surround sound if the visual material is not itself 3D surround. So I only found it important in VR and AR, and sometimes in 3D games it's nice too, but not as much as in VR games. > they want to append to their existing one in an unintrusive way That's what AR and mixed reality is about. You really need to think, what if there was hardware that could provide high fidelity mixed reality and be super comfortable to integrate. Maybe it's as thin and light as normal sunglasses. Maybe it projects things directly in your eyes, or in the air around you. Like obviously all of this is premised on hardware that reaches this level of comfort and quality to be mass produced. But I think companies think that's just a matter of time, just like for radio, television, computers, smartphones, etc. before it. If I'm wearing some glasses that make it look like my friends are sitting on the various chairs in my living room, then it matters a lot that the sound feels like it's coming from where they are.

ravel-bar-foo 5y ago

That's the problem, isn't it... we barely have support for this kind of thing in 2D. If I make a chair in SolidWorks, I can't even drag-and-drop it into a 3D printer, let alone open the document to use it in the Sims or in an email client. When I drag and drop an email into Excel I get a dialog box asking about what the delimiters are, and woe is me if I want to drag and drop an image to share it with another networked device. To get anything to work, one needs to be constantly aware of filetypes, which applications support which files, and the quirks they have when importing/exporting files (text encodings ftw /s). If we can't figure out metaverse-style interactions on text files, the only way it's going to happen with car files is in one company's interoperatability walled garden.

contextfree 5y ago
Yes, as I read the article I thought about interoperability between applications as a related problem. There has been lots of effort put into this over the decades with things like OLE and in some sense, object-oriented programming in general. They've achieved some success but it feels like they've always fallen far short of the level of reuse and interoperability envisioned, and for basically the same reasons alluded to in the article - even if you can solve the easier technical problem of defining protocols, there remain the harder technical and design problems of mapping semantics and user interfaces between application environments, and the social problem of divergent interests and priorities between the developers of those environments.
didibus 5y ago
Absolutely, interop will be just as janky as it is today, if not more. It will probably be a combination of "works but with problems" and explicit deals between some companies for certain things where they explicitly put the work in to allow some things to carry over. But my point is the whole Metaverse is marketing hype. The premise is really just that if the real world is one 3 dimensional surround universe you can experience, the Metaverse will deliver other such 3 dimensional surround experiences for you to go from one to the other. The amount of things you can also move between all these "real"/"virtual" worlds is probably gonna suffer from all the issues we have today as well when moving from the real world and all the various 2D worlds. But again, take out all the expensive hyperbolic terms. What we're talking about are just very obvious logical next step. Assume a very good VR setup, now assume a scanner that can take a 3D surround image of say your favorite teddy bear. What do you do? You make a feature that lets you bring that 3D scan into VR. This is the same as bringing a 2D photo of your teddy bear into your current 2D computer environment. In my opinion, nothing here is far fetched, even though people will probably have patents for these ideas, they just logically come out as obvious next step for this new technology. And it'll go the other way around too. You will be able to carve some 3D cup in VR, and then 3D print it into the real world. And that's the same as drawing something in Photoshop and printing it. The only change here is that when you add that third dimension and make it surround, everything starts to feel more "real". Which is where people are starting to hype it up with mental hyperboles like a Metaverse, or calling things New Worlds, Other Universes, etc. But the only change from today is adding the 3rd dimension. Think about a Zoom videoconference call with 5 of your friends where you make the background a photo of Mars. The only reason we call that videoconference and not: "Jump into a parallel universe in the deep landscape of Planet Mars with your friends and experience a new reality" is because it doesn't have the 3rd surround dimension.

kikimora 5y ago

> It can even be simple things, if I can now whiteboard virtually, and use my own hand writing on the board, and now I'm in another app, and I'd like to pull up that whiteboard I did? This is equivalent to say Slack letting you send photos or files over. Except that it is not at all equivalent. To pull your whiteboard the other app has to pull the code that draws and manipulates it. This has two problems a) security b) how the host app supposed to interact with yours? OLE and a few similar technologies tried to answer this. Never seen big use due to complexity. Since that time no new ideas emerged in the field and I don’t see how Metaverse would solve this. Without addressing interoperability and security Metawerse apps will be siloed in the same way as modern apps. That would impose non-physical constraints in the world that tries to by as close to physical reality as possible. I see this as a major concern.