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This has been said before, I'm sure, but the problem with "The Metaverse" is that it's trying to be controlled; to be captured and caged, by a select number of

This has been said before, I'm sure, but the problem with "The Metaverse" is that it's trying to be controlled; to be captured and caged, by a select number of corporate/quasi governmental agencies who sell themselves as "an open platform, welcome to all". If "The Metaverse" truly is to take off, it needs to be an open standard, like HTTPS or websockets, that any virtual device can connect to and let anyone with the compute power to create their own "virtual world". And, just like the internet, it will be pretty basic at the start, and there will be disgusting sites because there will be no gatekeepers.

astlouis44 5y ago
This x 1000.
technotony 5y ago
High Fidelity tried to build this and failed. I think one of the issues they had was that the whole hosting thing was pretty tricky and created barriers to having worlds up all the time, this meant there were never as many places to explore as other more closed systems like VRChat. I'm not totally sure how you solve for that, maybe they should have hosted some sites themselves?
- boardwaalk 5y ago
  There are plenty of places that already solve this for game server hosting. You pay, they pull up a VPS on their preferred provider with the game server installed and running, and you get a dashboard to control it. Having that sort of layman-can-do-it feature seems pretty vital.
simonh 5y ago
As I understand it, that's exactly the plan. The metaverse will be an open, standards based network of VR environments, each analogous to a web site. Each could be based on different products, in the way that a web site can run on apache or nginx. The key to it will be a public set of standards for avatars, identity management, authentication and persistent assets which is potentially where a blockchain comes in as a public ledger for shared information. Imagine being in Minecraft, then walking your avatar through a portal that takes you into Roblox. Or more likely just hitting a button and being there. This is exactly what Zuck is working on, plus of course a proprietary VR stack and suite of applications for his own implementation. there are other firms working on pieces of this too though and they are talking to each other. Here's another voice on this, independent of FB/Meta: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/11/02/herman-narula-on-why-the-metaverse-matters https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/11/02/herman-na... I'm a skeptic that it will be as big as they reckon, we're physical beings living in a real world and I think that will always be prime reality. Also mobile isn't going away, I'm still going to have my phone on me all the time, not so much a VR head set, but they do seem to have thought all of this through.
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  My hesitation about this is that he also said that Oculus was going to operate independent inside of Facebook: https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-why-facebook-bought-oculus-2014-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-why-facebook-boug... That lasted a few years and then was tossed away. It looks like, after a fairly huge backlash and a lot of technical issues, they've finally decoupled the Facebook account requirement.
- kurthr 5y ago
  Zuck wants to know where your eyes are pointed, in what order, and for how long. Whether he is showing you "user content" (user generated for free) or "sponsored content" (customer generated for free), they will build an adaptive attention model for you. Then they will show you what is most distracting/engaging. You have no control over where your eyes look. It is a gold standard in advertising. That attention model is likely worth more than even an extremely high end VR/AR/MR/XR setup. Guess what high resolution low latency binocular video requires, eye tracking for foveal rendering. You can do the calculations for 2x120Hzx(100deg)^2x(60pix/deg)^2 and multiple gaming GPUs can't keep up, transport HDMI/DP can't keep up, and display (MIPI/lpDP) can't keep up. Foveal rendering allows ~10x reduction in bandwidth, which makes it possible on mobile/wireless. "Sorry, honey, for all the billy goats in high heels... it was just a phase in college"
- babyshake 5y ago
  It seems to be against the fiduciary duty of Meta the company to encourage a truly open environment where it would be easy to escape their advertising and other modes of generating revenue. As usual, the corporation says one thing while intending to essentially do the opposite.
  - simonh 5y ago
    It's not against facebook's fiduciary duty to allow you to post links to other sites in facebook, so I don't see why this would be different.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
zachmx 5y ago
This is going to be an unpopular opinion here on HackerNews, but I think that potential protocol is Ethereum. It will be the tool that enables all sorts of Metaverse type things to exist (via NFTs), but I don't think that's where it stops. The metaverse and the real world will eventually be one in the same and are going to become interlinked. In game items, Car titles, house deeds, and any sort of asset that requires proof of ownership are all going to be part of a future society/metaverse. All fungible as well as Non-Fungible tokens will represent the value that the users bring to the platforms/systems and reward us for participating. For example, imagine playing a video game where all in game items are built on the NFT standard. A super rare item in game might end up having some sort of real value that a user can then later extract for time spent in game. They could either sell the item via a decentralized market, or leverage that item and take a loan out on it by using it as collateral. And why shouldn't they be allowed to do that? If a user pours hundreds of hours into an online game, they are generating value for that game network by being someone that other users can play with.
- mehlmao 5y ago
  Why would anyone want to play a game like that though? That sounds significantly less fun than playing a game where everyone is on an even playing ground. Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?
  - jmathai 5y ago
    NTFs provide an elegant way to deal with this that an SQL database can't. 1) The ability to sell/trade items you've purchased is valuable and I don't believe is universally supported. NFTs make this trivial and supported on a number of marketplaces (like OpenSea) in a standard way. 2) Game makers could build resale revenue into the smart contracts of NFTs they sell through their games. This is just one example where it's a win-win and improvement over what exists today.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    People already play a lot of games where items are bought and sold for real money (not just gacha but e.g MMOs, Diablo etc.) so you can look through gaming forums to find what drives them. >Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database? I also don't see that many benefits to be sure it's worth it but there are some in theory. One people mention is that games can easily share items - e.g. owners of a cool sword NFT for one game can use it in another or cryptopunks can have cryptopunk skins etc. Trading would be more streamlined.I guess another potential benefit is you can also have them listed forever like Xbox achievments that can be looked at by others even if after the game is no longer active.
xxpor 5y ago
This has been what every techno-optimist has said about every technology since the dawn of the commercial internet, and it's always been wrong. There will be open standards up to the layer the user actually interacts with, and that final layer will be proprietary. It's basic aggregation theory (to continue the Ben Thompson point). There's too much money to be made, and modularized systems are too complicated for most people. Why did XMPP fail? Why is Discord more popular than Matrix? Why does Twitter still stomp Mastodon? Etc.
- zaik 5y ago
  XMPP failed only in the sense that Facebook and Google decided to stop participating in the federation. Other than that it's still alive and a good way to communicate.
- oneepic 5y ago
  What do money and modularization have to do with Twitter stomping Mastodon? IMO it would happen because Mastodon mostly looks like the same product to most people, just more complicated and it's not as easy to find and follow interesting people. My anecdata is that I joined out of curiosity and quit the same day, because it just looked like the same sarcasm and shitposters that made me drift away from Twitter.
- TrevorJ 5y ago
  Hmm. The closest analogue to metaverse is probably the internet. And the way that played out is probably the most notable counterexample to your claim. It's not clear to me that it's a foregone conclusion how this will play out.
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    Well its true the internet's most valuable open layers are TCP/IP and worked up to the user interaction layer (HTML5), but then shifted to proprietary/locked experiences. I think the reason is the answer to this simple question: What creates a better experience for an individual user? more money invested into the platform? or agreement of a protocol? It's money. And thats a deleware c corp. Until incremental investment leads to only infinitesimal experience change, we will be operating in this mode.
bagels 5y ago
Facebook, TikTok, Google aren't open standards, and they "took off". They use https just like the metaverse will.
deelowe 5y ago
The problem with the metaverse is that people don't actually want to live a virtual life in a virtual world for significant periods of time. I honestly think the only people who are interested by this are grifters.
- JohnPrine 5y ago
  Sooo many people already live a virtual life in a virtual world by using social media, netflix, youtube, etc for hours and hours every day. Imagine a VR platform where you could have a virtual living room and hang out with your friends while doing those same activities. Imagine the headset is so light as to be hardly noticeable and the resolution is indistinguishable from reality. You don't think people would want to use that?
  - Spivak 5y ago
    And my friends and I already hang out in virtual spaces to play games. I would jump at the opportunity to play board games in VR.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Standards are not the issue. Content is. There is no metaverse; just a lot of empty rooms and walled gardens with not a lot of compelling stuff to do in them. All the content is where the people and the audience with money are, which is the walled gardens provided by Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc. Then there are various social platforms. News, games, etc. All vaguely connected and accessible via this thing called "the internet" which despite the fact that is half a century old at this point is still a surprisingly loosely defined something. Creating more standards just adds more empty rooms. It's the content problem that needs to be solved. There's this notion that "the metaverse" is going to require special hardware, special software, etc. Of course many of us have been playing 3D games on 2D screens just fine for the last few decades. Adding goggles to the mix makes some of those games a bit more immersive of course but mostly they work fine without the goggles as well. It's not clear to me that the metaverse actually requires new hardware. Which raises the question why we don't have it (whatever it is, which is a relevant thing that people seem to be asking). A lot of those games are multiplayer and basically involve people socializing for large amounts of time. I never really engaged with world of warcraft but I know multiple people that spend enormous amounts of time on that and other games. Is that "the metaverse"? Maybe. It's definitely an escape from reality for some. Is doing the same with some VR goggles going to be massively different? Some people probably already do that. If you stop focusing on hardware and formfactor and just ask the question if having the same stuff that we have today (aka. the Internet), but with AR/VR goggles is actually worth having, the answer is probably going to be no. That's the problem. Either we have the meta verse already and it's a bit underwhelming or we don't really have it just yet because it hasn't actually been invented yet. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is 30 years old now and actually predates much of what we now are used to. His recent books are also quite nice and features some updated musings on what the internet used to be and could become. E.g. "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", published three years ago or so, features blockchains, ar goggles, post truth society, people using bots to spread misinformation and drive political (and other) agendas, and a few other things. It paints a pretty dystopian near future (or even present day). But no Metaverse. A nice observation in that book is that "the internet" stopped being a special thing when multiple generations had grown up with it and mostly a term used by older generations that actually still remembered a world without it. That would be us.

astlouis44 5y ago

This x 1000.

technotony 5y ago

High Fidelity tried to build this and failed. I think one of the issues they had was that the whole hosting thing was pretty tricky and created barriers to having worlds up all the time, this meant there were never as many places to explore as other more closed systems like VRChat. I'm not totally sure how you solve for that, maybe they should have hosted some sites themselves?

boardwaalk 5y ago
There are plenty of places that already solve this for game server hosting. You pay, they pull up a VPS on their preferred provider with the game server installed and running, and you get a dashboard to control it. Having that sort of layman-can-do-it feature seems pretty vital.

simonh 5y ago

As I understand it, that's exactly the plan. The metaverse will be an open, standards based network of VR environments, each analogous to a web site. Each could be based on different products, in the way that a web site can run on apache or nginx. The key to it will be a public set of standards for avatars, identity management, authentication and persistent assets which is potentially where a blockchain comes in as a public ledger for shared information. Imagine being in Minecraft, then walking your avatar through a portal that takes you into Roblox. Or more likely just hitting a button and being there. This is exactly what Zuck is working on, plus of course a proprietary VR stack and suite of applications for his own implementation. there are other firms working on pieces of this too though and they are talking to each other. Here's another voice on this, independent of FB/Meta: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/11/02/herman-narula-on-why-the-metaverse-matters https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/11/02/herman-na... I'm a skeptic that it will be as big as they reckon, we're physical beings living in a real world and I think that will always be prime reality. Also mobile isn't going away, I'm still going to have my phone on me all the time, not so much a VR head set, but they do seem to have thought all of this through.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago
My hesitation about this is that he also said that Oculus was going to operate independent inside of Facebook: https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-why-facebook-bought-oculus-2014-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-why-facebook-boug... That lasted a few years and then was tossed away. It looks like, after a fairly huge backlash and a lot of technical issues, they've finally decoupled the Facebook account requirement.
kurthr 5y ago
Zuck wants to know where your eyes are pointed, in what order, and for how long. Whether he is showing you "user content" (user generated for free) or "sponsored content" (customer generated for free), they will build an adaptive attention model for you. Then they will show you what is most distracting/engaging. You have no control over where your eyes look. It is a gold standard in advertising. That attention model is likely worth more than even an extremely high end VR/AR/MR/XR setup. Guess what high resolution low latency binocular video requires, eye tracking for foveal rendering. You can do the calculations for 2x120Hzx(100deg)^2x(60pix/deg)^2 and multiple gaming GPUs can't keep up, transport HDMI/DP can't keep up, and display (MIPI/lpDP) can't keep up. Foveal rendering allows ~10x reduction in bandwidth, which makes it possible on mobile/wireless. "Sorry, honey, for all the billy goats in high heels... it was just a phase in college"
babyshake 5y ago
It seems to be against the fiduciary duty of Meta the company to encourage a truly open environment where it would be easy to escape their advertising and other modes of generating revenue. As usual, the corporation says one thing while intending to essentially do the opposite.
- simonh 5y ago
  It's not against facebook's fiduciary duty to allow you to post links to other sites in facebook, so I don't see why this would be different.
- vineyardmike 5y ago

zachmx 5y ago

This is going to be an unpopular opinion here on HackerNews, but I think that potential protocol is Ethereum. It will be the tool that enables all sorts of Metaverse type things to exist (via NFTs), but I don't think that's where it stops. The metaverse and the real world will eventually be one in the same and are going to become interlinked. In game items, Car titles, house deeds, and any sort of asset that requires proof of ownership are all going to be part of a future society/metaverse. All fungible as well as Non-Fungible tokens will represent the value that the users bring to the platforms/systems and reward us for participating. For example, imagine playing a video game where all in game items are built on the NFT standard. A super rare item in game might end up having some sort of real value that a user can then later extract for time spent in game. They could either sell the item via a decentralized market, or leverage that item and take a loan out on it by using it as collateral. And why shouldn't they be allowed to do that? If a user pours hundreds of hours into an online game, they are generating value for that game network by being someone that other users can play with.

mehlmao 5y ago
Why would anyone want to play a game like that though? That sounds significantly less fun than playing a game where everyone is on an even playing ground. Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?
- jmathai 5y ago
  NTFs provide an elegant way to deal with this that an SQL database can't. 1) The ability to sell/trade items you've purchased is valuable and I don't believe is universally supported. NFTs make this trivial and supported on a number of marketplaces (like OpenSea) in a standard way. 2) Game makers could build resale revenue into the smart contracts of NFTs they sell through their games. This is just one example where it's a win-win and improvement over what exists today.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  People already play a lot of games where items are bought and sold for real money (not just gacha but e.g MMOs, Diablo etc.) so you can look through gaming forums to find what drives them. >Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database? I also don't see that many benefits to be sure it's worth it but there are some in theory. One people mention is that games can easily share items - e.g. owners of a cool sword NFT for one game can use it in another or cryptopunks can have cryptopunk skins etc. Trading would be more streamlined.I guess another potential benefit is you can also have them listed forever like Xbox achievments that can be looked at by others even if after the game is no longer active.

xxpor 5y ago

This has been what every techno-optimist has said about every technology since the dawn of the commercial internet, and it's always been wrong. There will be open standards up to the layer the user actually interacts with, and that final layer will be proprietary. It's basic aggregation theory (to continue the Ben Thompson point). There's too much money to be made, and modularized systems are too complicated for most people. Why did XMPP fail? Why is Discord more popular than Matrix? Why does Twitter still stomp Mastodon? Etc.

zaik 5y ago
XMPP failed only in the sense that Facebook and Google decided to stop participating in the federation. Other than that it's still alive and a good way to communicate.
oneepic 5y ago
What do money and modularization have to do with Twitter stomping Mastodon? IMO it would happen because Mastodon mostly looks like the same product to most people, just more complicated and it's not as easy to find and follow interesting people. My anecdata is that I joined out of curiosity and quit the same day, because it just looked like the same sarcasm and shitposters that made me drift away from Twitter.
TrevorJ 5y ago
Hmm. The closest analogue to metaverse is probably the internet. And the way that played out is probably the most notable counterexample to your claim. It's not clear to me that it's a foregone conclusion how this will play out.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Well its true the internet's most valuable open layers are TCP/IP and worked up to the user interaction layer (HTML5), but then shifted to proprietary/locked experiences. I think the reason is the answer to this simple question: What creates a better experience for an individual user? more money invested into the platform? or agreement of a protocol? It's money. And thats a deleware c corp. Until incremental investment leads to only infinitesimal experience change, we will be operating in this mode.

bagels 5y ago

Facebook, TikTok, Google aren't open standards, and they "took off". They use https just like the metaverse will.

deelowe 5y ago

The problem with the metaverse is that people don't actually want to live a virtual life in a virtual world for significant periods of time. I honestly think the only people who are interested by this are grifters.

JohnPrine 5y ago
Sooo many people already live a virtual life in a virtual world by using social media, netflix, youtube, etc for hours and hours every day. Imagine a VR platform where you could have a virtual living room and hang out with your friends while doing those same activities. Imagine the headset is so light as to be hardly noticeable and the resolution is indistinguishable from reality. You don't think people would want to use that?
- Spivak 5y ago
  And my friends and I already hang out in virtual spaces to play games. I would jump at the opportunity to play board games in VR.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Standards are not the issue. Content is. There is no metaverse; just a lot of empty rooms and walled gardens with not a lot of compelling stuff to do in them. All the content is where the people and the audience with money are, which is the walled gardens provided by Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc. Then there are various social platforms. News, games, etc. All vaguely connected and accessible via this thing called "the internet" which despite the fact that is half a century old at this point is still a surprisingly loosely defined something. Creating more standards just adds more empty rooms. It's the content problem that needs to be solved. There's this notion that "the metaverse" is going to require special hardware, special software, etc. Of course many of us have been playing 3D games on 2D screens just fine for the last few decades. Adding goggles to the mix makes some of those games a bit more immersive of course but mostly they work fine without the goggles as well. It's not clear to me that the metaverse actually requires new hardware. Which raises the question why we don't have it (whatever it is, which is a relevant thing that people seem to be asking). A lot of those games are multiplayer and basically involve people socializing for large amounts of time. I never really engaged with world of warcraft but I know multiple people that spend enormous amounts of time on that and other games. Is that "the metaverse"? Maybe. It's definitely an escape from reality for some. Is doing the same with some VR goggles going to be massively different? Some people probably already do that. If you stop focusing on hardware and formfactor and just ask the question if having the same stuff that we have today (aka. the Internet), but with AR/VR goggles is actually worth having, the answer is probably going to be no. That's the problem. Either we have the meta verse already and it's a bit underwhelming or we don't really have it just yet because it hasn't actually been invented yet. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is 30 years old now and actually predates much of what we now are used to. His recent books are also quite nice and features some updated musings on what the internet used to be and could become. E.g. "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", published three years ago or so, features blockchains, ar goggles, post truth society, people using bots to spread misinformation and drive political (and other) agendas, and a few other things. It paints a pretty dystopian near future (or even present day). But no Metaverse. A nice observation in that book is that "the internet" stopped being a special thing when multiple generations had grown up with it and mostly a term used by older generations that actually still remembered a world without it. That would be us.