4 ms·

You run into trouble when talking about "the public" the same noises were made about the internet back in the 90s but the discussion forum of the day was major

You run into trouble when talking about "the public" the same noises were made about the internet back in the 90s but the discussion forum of the day was major news outlets, newspapers, magazines, etc. since "the public" weren't on online forums. Those that were saw that the internet was going to be huge but they were a tiny minority of nerds, enthusiasts and university students who didn't have much of a voice in the traditional media. Ironically, internet forums are now the traditional media to the nascent social metaverse. The people using those tiny virtual communities are once again the nerds, enthusiasts and students who don't have a lot of reach outside of their own communities. A confounding aspect is the real time and unrecorded nature of interactions in the metaverse. Unless you're a streamer who also publishes their previous streams there is little record of the social activity happening there. There are no web pages or blog posts no search and no links and the social graphs are contained within whatever app you are using so they're only available to participants. In effect, the metaverse is entirely invisible to the traditional web but it's a one way mirror since web content can be pulled into the metaverse inside flat windows, which seems another parallel to the early internet on which people posted content from traditional media but the media didn't at first broadcast content originating on the web. Anyways, all this is to say: don't let yourself get blindsided by a new paradigm while you're resting on the laurels of the last revolution.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> You run into trouble when talking about "the public" the same noises were made about the internet back in the 90s but the discussion forum of the day was major news outlets, newspapers, magazines, etc. since "the public" weren't on online forums. Those that were saw that the internet was going to be huge but they were a tiny minority of nerds, enthusiasts and university students who didn't have much of a voice in the traditional media. Well yes but the difference there is the Internet for all it's flaws is a new form of communication that improves upon it's predecessors. Early internet took it's cues from previously published communications; magazines became e-zines, newsletters became... newsletters I suppose, directories went online, newspapers became RSS feeds/websites. Basically any print media you wanted could incredibly easily become a website that was then infinitely updatable and didn't require sending a physical slice of paper to get the same information across. The trade-off was of course the technical competence required to use the Internet, but people adapted quickly(ish) to that once they understood it and computers were more widely available. There is a cost, but the benefits are clear as day, and the adoption/simplification trend with the migration to platforms combined with the ubiquity of devices with Internet access has only accelerated all of that. Now I grant, this is with the benefit of hindsight, but still, I challenge you to name any aspect of a VR shopping experience that is directly translatable in this way. VR shopping is slower, it requires an investment in niche technology, the experience itself is far from universally improved with many users having serious motion sickness issues with it, and the medium of text which remains an essential part of the shopping experience (prices, descriptions, dimensions) is uniquely difficult to convey in the VR format, you essentially need to create either popups which are obnoxious, or floating text that is difficult to read. The ONE aspect I can see is you could visually inspect the item you're looking to purchase in 3D, and while that's neat and useful, it's just as easily accomplished with AR which has been available and quite useful in the Amazon and Wayfair apps for years at this point, and lets you see, for example, a piece of furniture in your given room by just looking at where you'd put it through your phone camera, which doesn't require a headset, motion sensors, and the visualization is better because it collaborates with your existing lighting and decor instead of existing in a void. And, the benefit of in-person shopping which allows the tangible examination of a product is entirely unconveyable in VR because while vibration motors in the hands allow you to experience a proxy of touch, your hands still go straight through it, and the vibration features quickly run up against a wall of limitations with regard to like, simulating the touch and feel of different materials which is basically all you'd want to inspect in this regard. > The people using those tiny virtual communities are once again the nerds, enthusiasts and students who don't have a lot of reach outside of their own communities. Right, and this is the problem for Facebook. Because the product we're all unable to look inside just... isn't very compelling and doesn't show any signs of being it. Being able to communicate with people all over the world about niche or even mainstream interests has obvious appeal, that was the entire reason for the rise of social media later, and internet forums before. I struggle to conceive of this same level of appeal for metaverse content because it's... the same thing, but worse in basically every respect: it's costly to engage with, the density of interaction is significantly lower, the content you can experience is much more vast if that content is 3D models, but vastly REDUCED in the same way if it is not that. If you watch, for example, a 4K video in a VR headset on a massive screen, you miss out on a TON of the fidelity of that footage, and even if you're wanting a social aspect to that, basically every major streaming platform has co-watching abilities already designed that use a much less cumbersome and much less costly device to accomplish the same task. Add to it, the only headset I believe that could even get CLOSE to showing a 4K video on a massive screen that would preserve that fidelity is the Apple Vision Pro, which is THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Edit: Sorry that's $3,500!!! And yes I'm sure the headsets will get cheaper as they do with everything (though I have doubts about how much given the niche community around them about the speed of that) but again, if you wanted to watch a movie with friends... there are theaters, there's your living room, there are simul-stream services and webcams, there's discord with streaming functionality and video chat in the same app, there are just options upon options to accomplish this goal that don't require a thousand dollar bespoke video hardware device that amounts to a few pounds of electronics strapped to your dome. Don't misunderstand, VR is incredibly cool and I really enjoy it! For games. And that's it. As a full remote worker the thought of having to gear up for my weekly standup meetings and doing code reviews in a shitty metaverse meeting room is just... shudder
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  > Early internet took it's cues from previously published communications > I challenge you to name any aspect of a VR shopping I think I know where the disconnect is. You're comparing to the wrong historical period, granted they were rather short. I think this is a common mistake, for the metaverse it isn't 2002 when Amazon started selling clothing, it's not even 1995 when CNN launched their website, I don't even think it's 1991 since we haven't settled on a protocol that would allow the equivalent of websites which would be something like the worlds you see in VRChat but not limited to a single app. It's going to happen soon though, it seems like USD might be the HTML of the metaverse[0] and once that gets hammered out things will really take off. Shopping is not going to be the "killer app" of the metaverse no matter how much big corps want it. It'll come after the fact like it did with the web. > metaverse content because it's... the same thing but worse You're still thinking of flat content here. VR is not for flat content. You can have flat content in it if you want but it's not the reason people go to VR. The term used most often for the things people seek out in VR are "experiences" those can be interactive games, social gatherings or just passive full immersion. It's similar to what people seek out in the real world, novelty, surprise, laughter, connection. The best way to get across why this is better than just leaving your house is to imagine you live in a small town, without VR your options are pretty limited but with VR you have (or will eventually have as more content becomes available) any experience you want and the ability to share it with others available from within your own home. That was a similar proposition to the early internet, why would you endure the expense and difficulty of buying a computer, paying fees, and spending hours hunched over a monochrome terminal poking away at a keyboard just so you could talk to someone on the other end when you could just go talk to your neighbours? That's the motivation. Coming back to the flat content. Low resolution doesn't really matter that much when you're watching a movie on a theatre sized screen with a bunch of other people from around the world. What matters is being able to turn to the person beside you and say "omg this is my favorite part!" or whispering back and forth about the film or getting up and acting out the scene with friends and laughing about it. No one cares that it isn't 4k since you aren't there just to watch the movie in silence, do that in your living room if that's what you want. The best parts of social VR or "the metaverse" aren't browsing web pages, looking at pictures or watching movies. They're sitting around a room talking to people, wandering through a crowded world like you're at a party and taking in all the conversations, dancing, trying out different worlds and games with friends for the first time, going to a live show or any of the other varied experiences on offer. It's about being with people not about consuming content. [0] https://www.roadtovr.com/nvidia-usd-html-metaverse-foundation/ https://www.roadtovr.com/nvidia-usd-html-metaverse-foundatio...

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

> You run into trouble when talking about "the public" the same noises were made about the internet back in the 90s but the discussion forum of the day was major news outlets, newspapers, magazines, etc. since "the public" weren't on online forums. Those that were saw that the internet was going to be huge but they were a tiny minority of nerds, enthusiasts and university students who didn't have much of a voice in the traditional media. Well yes but the difference there is the Internet for all it's flaws is a new form of communication that improves upon it's predecessors. Early internet took it's cues from previously published communications; magazines became e-zines, newsletters became... newsletters I suppose, directories went online, newspapers became RSS feeds/websites. Basically any print media you wanted could incredibly easily become a website that was then infinitely updatable and didn't require sending a physical slice of paper to get the same information across. The trade-off was of course the technical competence required to use the Internet, but people adapted quickly(ish) to that once they understood it and computers were more widely available. There is a cost, but the benefits are clear as day, and the adoption/simplification trend with the migration to platforms combined with the ubiquity of devices with Internet access has only accelerated all of that. Now I grant, this is with the benefit of hindsight, but still, I challenge you to name any aspect of a VR shopping experience that is directly translatable in this way. VR shopping is slower, it requires an investment in niche technology, the experience itself is far from universally improved with many users having serious motion sickness issues with it, and the medium of text which remains an essential part of the shopping experience (prices, descriptions, dimensions) is uniquely difficult to convey in the VR format, you essentially need to create either popups which are obnoxious, or floating text that is difficult to read. The ONE aspect I can see is you could visually inspect the item you're looking to purchase in 3D, and while that's neat and useful, it's just as easily accomplished with AR which has been available and quite useful in the Amazon and Wayfair apps for years at this point, and lets you see, for example, a piece of furniture in your given room by just looking at where you'd put it through your phone camera, which doesn't require a headset, motion sensors, and the visualization is better because it collaborates with your existing lighting and decor instead of existing in a void. And, the benefit of in-person shopping which allows the tangible examination of a product is entirely unconveyable in VR because while vibration motors in the hands allow you to experience a proxy of touch, your hands still go straight through it, and the vibration features quickly run up against a wall of limitations with regard to like, simulating the touch and feel of different materials which is basically all you'd want to inspect in this regard. > The people using those tiny virtual communities are once again the nerds, enthusiasts and students who don't have a lot of reach outside of their own communities. Right, and this is the problem for Facebook. Because the product we're all unable to look inside just... isn't very compelling and doesn't show any signs of being it. Being able to communicate with people all over the world about niche or even mainstream interests has obvious appeal, that was the entire reason for the rise of social media later, and internet forums before. I struggle to conceive of this same level of appeal for metaverse content because it's... the same thing, but worse in basically every respect: it's costly to engage with, the density of interaction is significantly lower, the content you can experience is much more vast if that content is 3D models, but vastly REDUCED in the same way if it is not that. If you watch, for example, a 4K video in a VR headset on a massive screen, you miss out on a TON of the fidelity of that footage, and even if you're wanting a social aspect to that, basically every major streaming platform has co-watching abilities already designed that use a much less cumbersome and much less costly device to accomplish the same task. Add to it, the only headset I believe that could even get CLOSE to showing a 4K video on a massive screen that would preserve that fidelity is the Apple Vision Pro, which is THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Edit: Sorry that's $3,500!!! And yes I'm sure the headsets will get cheaper as they do with everything (though I have doubts about how much given the niche community around them about the speed of that) but again, if you wanted to watch a movie with friends... there are theaters, there's your living room, there are simul-stream services and webcams, there's discord with streaming functionality and video chat in the same app, there are just options upon options to accomplish this goal that don't require a thousand dollar bespoke video hardware device that amounts to a few pounds of electronics strapped to your dome. Don't misunderstand, VR is incredibly cool and I really enjoy it! For games. And that's it. As a full remote worker the thought of having to gear up for my weekly standup meetings and doing code reviews in a shitty metaverse meeting room is just... shudder

throwaway4aday 3y ago
> Early internet took it's cues from previously published communications > I challenge you to name any aspect of a VR shopping I think I know where the disconnect is. You're comparing to the wrong historical period, granted they were rather short. I think this is a common mistake, for the metaverse it isn't 2002 when Amazon started selling clothing, it's not even 1995 when CNN launched their website, I don't even think it's 1991 since we haven't settled on a protocol that would allow the equivalent of websites which would be something like the worlds you see in VRChat but not limited to a single app. It's going to happen soon though, it seems like USD might be the HTML of the metaverse[0] and once that gets hammered out things will really take off. Shopping is not going to be the "killer app" of the metaverse no matter how much big corps want it. It'll come after the fact like it did with the web. > metaverse content because it's... the same thing but worse You're still thinking of flat content here. VR is not for flat content. You can have flat content in it if you want but it's not the reason people go to VR. The term used most often for the things people seek out in VR are "experiences" those can be interactive games, social gatherings or just passive full immersion. It's similar to what people seek out in the real world, novelty, surprise, laughter, connection. The best way to get across why this is better than just leaving your house is to imagine you live in a small town, without VR your options are pretty limited but with VR you have (or will eventually have as more content becomes available) any experience you want and the ability to share it with others available from within your own home. That was a similar proposition to the early internet, why would you endure the expense and difficulty of buying a computer, paying fees, and spending hours hunched over a monochrome terminal poking away at a keyboard just so you could talk to someone on the other end when you could just go talk to your neighbours? That's the motivation. Coming back to the flat content. Low resolution doesn't really matter that much when you're watching a movie on a theatre sized screen with a bunch of other people from around the world. What matters is being able to turn to the person beside you and say "omg this is my favorite part!" or whispering back and forth about the film or getting up and acting out the scene with friends and laughing about it. No one cares that it isn't 4k since you aren't there just to watch the movie in silence, do that in your living room if that's what you want. The best parts of social VR or "the metaverse" aren't browsing web pages, looking at pictures or watching movies. They're sitting around a room talking to people, wandering through a crowded world like you're at a party and taking in all the conversations, dancing, trying out different worlds and games with friends for the first time, going to a live show or any of the other varied experiences on offer. It's about being with people not about consuming content. [0] https://www.roadtovr.com/nvidia-usd-html-metaverse-foundation/ https://www.roadtovr.com/nvidia-usd-html-metaverse-foundatio...