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Could an old timer help me out? I was involved in Second Life around the turn of the century. I've been ignoring the metaverse since giving up on SL a long ti

by VLM 4y ago

Could an old timer help me out? I was involved in Second Life around the turn of the century. I've been ignoring the metaverse since giving up on SL a long time ago. Obviously the resolution, frame rate, and software integration in metaverse will be somewhat better than SL; aside from that, can anyone tell me the difference between modern metaverse and SL, also how does that difference translate into profitable sales? The new hype wave for SL sounds like someone hyping up the "new" idea of a CLI, and me feeling, uh, I think I've seen this before...

pastdiscovery 4y ago
VRChat is less LARP-heavy than SL. VRChat is more proprietary than SL. VRChat is more custom than SL in some ways and less in others. The SL people tried to make a VRChat clone. They sold it off, and now an EDM label uses it for virtual raves. VRChat is significantly more voice-heavy than SL, which is better or worse depending on your use-case. The best thing about VRChat is that you get to wear a toaster on your face and get physical interaction with people. If you want to take a dancing course in VRChat, you can. Buy a few gadgets to track your limbs, and it'll be shown accurately. VRChat is essentially the next step in the user-programmable social video game, and the community seems more ambitious. The platform is so open that they've ran emulated Linux on user avatars.
Animats 4y ago
> Obviously the resolution, frame rate, and software integration in metaverse will be somewhat better than SL; aside from that, can anyone tell me the difference between modern metaverse and SL, also how does that difference translate into profitable sales? Most of the modern metaverses are worse than Second Life. Their big advantages were VR, browser and mobile clients. Second Life is getting most of those features now. Their dev team finally got out of "can't do" mode. (That's client side. Server side, they still have trouble fixing long-standing bugs.) They hired some good game devs, and graphics started to get better. * Frame rates have increased substantially. There's more multi-threading in the clients now, and the servers have been upgraded to better AWS instances. Still OpenGL, but work is going on to use Vulkan. * Graphics realism has increased, again. Physically based rendering with high dynamic range lighting is in test. Not subsurface scattering, though, so skin still looks plastic under some lighting. Graphics realism is becoming comparable to GTA-V, but not Red Dead Redemption. * There's a mobile viewer in test. Uses Unity as the graphics engine.[1] * Full body tracking is in test, and being demoed. It's striking to see how someone rigged for full tracking dominates a meeting. Second Life may end up being the metaverse, after everybody else fails. It's one of the very few systems with a large, continuous world, one about the size of greater Los Angeles. Facebook failed to deliver much, the NFT guys delivered even less, and the people who announced and didn't ship probably never will. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tjRlVwlAXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tjRlVwlAXA

by VLM 4y ago

pastdiscovery 4y ago

VRChat is less LARP-heavy than SL. VRChat is more proprietary than SL. VRChat is more custom than SL in some ways and less in others. The SL people tried to make a VRChat clone. They sold it off, and now an EDM label uses it for virtual raves. VRChat is significantly more voice-heavy than SL, which is better or worse depending on your use-case. The best thing about VRChat is that you get to wear a toaster on your face and get physical interaction with people. If you want to take a dancing course in VRChat, you can. Buy a few gadgets to track your limbs, and it'll be shown accurately. VRChat is essentially the next step in the user-programmable social video game, and the community seems more ambitious. The platform is so open that they've ran emulated Linux on user avatars.

Animats 4y ago

> Obviously the resolution, frame rate, and software integration in metaverse will be somewhat better than SL; aside from that, can anyone tell me the difference between modern metaverse and SL, also how does that difference translate into profitable sales? Most of the modern metaverses are worse than Second Life. Their big advantages were VR, browser and mobile clients. Second Life is getting most of those features now. Their dev team finally got out of "can't do" mode. (That's client side. Server side, they still have trouble fixing long-standing bugs.) They hired some good game devs, and graphics started to get better. * Frame rates have increased substantially. There's more multi-threading in the clients now, and the servers have been upgraded to better AWS instances. Still OpenGL, but work is going on to use Vulkan. * Graphics realism has increased, again. Physically based rendering with high dynamic range lighting is in test. Not subsurface scattering, though, so skin still looks plastic under some lighting. Graphics realism is becoming comparable to GTA-V, but not Red Dead Redemption. * There's a mobile viewer in test. Uses Unity as the graphics engine.[1] * Full body tracking is in test, and being demoed. It's striking to see how someone rigged for full tracking dominates a meeting. Second Life may end up being the metaverse, after everybody else fails. It's one of the very few systems with a large, continuous world, one about the size of greater Los Angeles. Facebook failed to deliver much, the NFT guys delivered even less, and the people who announced and didn't ship probably never will. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tjRlVwlAXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tjRlVwlAXA