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Shutting down AltSpace should be a loud warning bell for Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Horizon is basically a badly executed AltSpace. AltSpace was super niche, but s
by dougmwne 4y ago
Shutting down AltSpace should be a loud warning bell for Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Horizon is basically a badly executed AltSpace.
AltSpace was super niche, but some artists and marginalized people seemed to find a home there. It was like an odd cross between a digital Burning Man and a BIPOC LGTBQ+ neurodivergent support group. I had a memorable conversation during the height of the pandemic with an older gay man whose husband had recently died of cancer. VR can be a kind of ultimate safe space for people who are hurting. No one can touch you, you put on a disguise, and you can leave at any time.
It had something going on, but was a Grand Canyon away from mass market appeal.
- pharke 4y agoNah, Microsoft and Meta are obviously partnering up. This is likely just a symptom of that with Meta getting buy in from Microsoft to use Meta's VR platform. I agree that Horizon is the worse of the two but that doesn't mean they'll fail. Worse is better sometimes. The lynchpin will be if Meta is really married to Unity, Unreal Engine is eating Unity's lunch with adoption and features. If Meta makes the jump to UE they'll win a bigger share of the market with a far superior engine. It waits to be seen.
- h0l0cube 4y agoIt's more that the industry is bearish on long bets in a tight financial climate. The tech for VR/AR is too clunky to seamlessly integrate into peoples' daily lives like mobile phones and smart phones did. There will need to be an iPhone-like leap in affordable and portable vision tech before VR/AR becomes a feasible marketplace.
- andirk 4y agoThere was Google Glass but it got laughed out of town for being made for dorks. Seemed like perfectly good tech.
- relyks 4y agoI don’t think Google Glass provides any augmented reality functionality? It’s just a mobile head-up display. You need a lot more processing power (and clunkier hardware) to be able to do augmented reality
- boppo1 4y agoIirc there was some face-punching resistance to people recording discreetly. I suspect that may have subsided some in many areas due to the longer them of high-res-video-recorder ubiquity.
- mbfg 4y agodon't disagree, i find it interesting that people get unbelievably angered when individuals record them in public, but could care less when business do. I could understand some difference in reaction between the two, but the actual gulf displayed is astounding.
- elif 4y agoThe pizza place's security camera isn't going to prank me or ask me about a sensitive topic and then same day blast my reaction on 7 vertical format video platforms as an out of context meme with sensationally misleading captions.
- 9WwFaLaTtBDaoS 4y ago[dead]
- porknubbins 4y agoI’m not familiar with the google glass incidents but surely people have good reason to feel differently about being singled out and clandestinely recorded by an individual compared to a business that automatically records everyone who enters. I don’t think carrying a camera down the street would get you punched.
- polio 4y agoVR will always be more of a destination, whereas the vision for AR is that it'll integrate with your daily life via a wearable.
- h0l0cube 4y agoWhen display technology has miniaturised and matured, and the requisite wireless bandwidth is deployed at scale, you won’t need two different devices
- waynecochran 4y agoWe (https://www.quintar.ai/home https://www.quintar.ai/home) are learning we can do a lot with a phone. But I hope someone figures out AR glasses.
- slaw 4y agoIt is not tight financial climate it is normal financial climate.
- TomSwirly 4y agoCorporations are almost universally posting record profits. In what way is this a "tight financial climate"? Answer: some people will do anything to justify corporate cruelty to peope.
- pharke 4y agoOn the price point, the original iPhone retailed for $499USD which in inflation adjusted dollars today would be $714USD. The Quest 2 is significantly cheaper than that as a standalone device. The Quest Pro is much more expensive but is targeted at businesses, watch Zuck's intro of it if you doubt that. The biggest barrier is that for really good performance on any headset you need to tether to a gaming PC. That's a lot more cost and complication for non-technical people. That said, the hardware is there and capable of delivering outstanding visuals and inside out tracking. The compute and networking are lagging behind, we really need a small, user friendly and powerful device that anyone can go buy, plug in and then connect their VR headset to with 0 frustration. That would free up headsets to only worry about the displays and tracking. I don't think the future of VR is portable. I have an aversion to lumping AR in with it since they are fundamentally different. If it makes it easier, VR is desktop, AR is mobile. Similar but not at all the same. The way I envision the future of VR is that it does for your physical experiences what computers and the internet did for your paperwork and documents. Thinking about VR as a cellphone is the wrong mental model, it's not a peripheral that exists in your physical environment. It is a replacement for your physical environment or more congenially, it is another physical environment to which you can travel in addition to the places you currently go to.
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoI am afraid you are not paying much attention to the xr dev community which is overwhelmingly Unity vs UE. Both have their shortcomings but the new UE features like Nanite don't work out of the box double rendered and thats just one reason.
- curioussavage 4y agoI’m pretty sure it works in vr now. Just not on mobile vr which would matter for meta.
- pharke 4y agohttps://twitter.com/iBrews/status/1570844710155190275 https://twitter.com/iBrews/status/1570844710155190275
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoYes, Alex and his team(s) are out there in the front pushing what's possible but its not off the shelf he has a lot of talent. Big fan of his Heavenue work on live rendered VR/XR/3D shows & the one they did for A Christmas Carroll is still state of the art theater.
- pharke 4y agoI've also played a few indie VR games that are using it. It's not like you have to be some technical wizard to enable it, you just need to make sure you aren't stomping on your FPS with a bunch of other stuff at the same time.
- jimmySixDOF 4y agohttps://twitter.com/iBrews/status/1620930130150580224 https://twitter.com/iBrews/status/1620930130150580224
- nkrisc 4y agoThat’s cool for the people who are part of these communities, but also explains why I never heard of any of these things.
- cududa 4y agoI suspect Microsoft knows full well that 343 wouldn't be capable of producing a "metaverse". Activision though? With a sort of contiguous open world standardize "game engine" used by all the properties? Now we're talking real metaverse tech.
- pronlover723 4y agoNo one can touch you but they can hurt you in the same way people hurt others online all the time. Verbal abuse, name calling, derogatory remarks, unwanted solicitation, etc...
- generalizations 4y ago> and you can leave at any time
- l33t233372 4y agoYou can do that online as well, no? I suppose if you elect to not remain anonymous there could be an issue, but generally speaking I don’t know that this is a problem.
- dougmwne 4y agoYes, VR is online, but it’s a weird embodied immersive presence version of online that can feel a bit like hanging out in meatspace. And it has a off button.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoYes, but VR has the advantage of feeling closer to IRL meetups in some ways. Head and hand movement does a lot.
- Mikeb85 4y agoEveryone's pushing IRL meetings though. Apart from tech, most industries are back at the office...
- TulliusCicero 4y agoWere we talking specifically about corporate work? There's more to meetings or meetups than just your job. That said, I think VR/AR may eventually be a way to enhance online work meetings. It doesn't seem like it's there yet overall, but eventually I could definitely see it working.
- echelon 4y agoVRChat is winning VR. Despite there being a few alternatives (Neos, Chillout, etc.), nothing reaches the scale of VRChat's community, platform, and developer ecosystem. Whoever buys VRChat wins VR.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- transcriptase 4y agoWhoever buys VRChat will impose publicly-traded-tech-giant-“can’t upset the investors, Washington, or the media” guidelines/DMCA to it, and ruin it in the span of two years. It’s popular because you can do whatever you want, which is the antithesis of companies like Alphabet/Microsoft/Meta.
- troymc 4y agoThere's also Rec Room, with a similar number of monthly active users. More numbers can be found at https://www.metaversed.consulting/blog/metaverse-universe-q1-2023-update https://www.metaversed.consulting/blog/metaverse-universe-q1...
- KVFinn 4y agoYup. They both have social and game/physical aspects but each excels at the opposite. It's interesting to compare the Among Us and Fall Guys implementations in each. Together they basically make up a basic Meta Verse already. AltSpace and many others were actually pretty comparable technically, for a time anyway. Just never hit critical mass
- charcircuit 4y ago>VRChat is winning VR. >nothing reaches the scale of VRChat's community, platform, and developer ecosystem. Neos and Chillout require VR. Most VRChat players play the game without VR.
- andybak 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nonethewiser 4y ago[flagged]
- thwarted 4y agoVR can be a kind of ultimate safe space for people who are hurting. No one can touch you, you put on a disguise, and you can leave at any time. Maybe. Doesn't mean harassment is impossible. https://www.villagevoice.com/2005/10/18/a-rape-in-cyberspace/ https://www.villagevoice.com/2005/10/18/a-rape-in-cyberspace...
- Ntrails 4y agoSounds a lot like chat rooms on early community websites. Just a bunch of people (who in my case loved a specific set of books), chatting about whatever under a handle and without needing to carry around your real self - but nor with any fear to hide anything. I dunno, I cannot see anything like that ever surviving mass adoption
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoThat sounds like 4chan. And it doesn't work because you can't monetize it. Browse to 4chan and turn off your ad blockers if you want to understand.