by riebschlager on 8/11/21, 9:47 PM with 114 comments
by danShumway on 8/12/21, 12:38 AM
But even more importantly, none of those people you're interacting with have any agency over those brands or IPs, and their interaction with the metaverse will necessarily be filtered through a set of corporate-controlled allowed actions and responses. Those "social relationships" will be a guided experience.
When replacing or overlaying reality with IP, it becomes necessary to ask the question, "who owns the IP?"
The counter-cultural, weird sci-fi worlds of current platforms like VRChat exist in no small part because the people interacting with them have agency. They ignore copyright, they make whatever they want, they form whatever communities they want. I'm not interested in your vision of an AR metaverse if your vision of the metaverse is that Nintendo or Disney gets to put an extra layer over the real world that gives them even more control over how I can interact with it.
The author keeps talking about culture, but the brands and IPs that they're championing are fundamentally opposed to the free expression of culture outside of their owners' control, and cementing the metaverse in an "official" way that retained that control would result in a world even more restrictive than our current one. Hard pass.
by adenozine on 8/11/21, 11:42 PM
"So anyways, we're building a metaverse with Pokemon and advertising, and it will NOT suck..."
by ericjang on 8/11/21, 10:09 PM
> The concept reached one of its most complete expressions in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, where virtually everyone has abandoned reality for an elaborate VR massively multiplayer video game. A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one
I'm trying to understand what Hanke is really saying. Is he saying that VR sucks, and AR, specifically AR that encourages people to interact with the real physical world, is where its at? I assume by "biggest names in technology and gaming" he is referring to Niantic's competitors? Specifically what about those bets does he disagree with?
by shock-value on 8/11/21, 10:19 PM
I guess it's just the latest vehicle to get investors or stockholders excited without needing to rely upon any work or logic beyond the unclear promise of technologies that themselves haven't even been proven out yet. (And this is coming from someone who does think VR is really cool -- with respect to some of the discrete, packaged, and targeted immersive experiences that are already available.)
by Animats on 8/11/21, 11:32 PM
The augmented reality version is Google Glass with better graphics. That's what Niantic has in mind: "The Pokémon will finally be able to truly walk among us!" With better hardware, that becomes becomes the famous "Hyperreality" video.[1] That's also Zuckerberg's vision: everyone wearing Facebook goggles and logged into Facebook at all times.
The virtual reality vision is less clear, because it doesn't really work yet. Moving around wearing VR headgear still doesn't work if you want to go very far, which is why Beat Saber is still the best VR game. Keyboard and screen, preferably with a big screen, still beats headgear for extended use. Nobody has a really good answer to that problem. VRChat is probably as good as it gets right now, short of the location-based systems.
by L_226 on 8/12/21, 6:48 AM
My idea was to add search filters, commenting, voting etc. and allow people to "feel" how people currently interact with any location - so if I fly to SF from Berlin, I can immediately browse the mirrorspace and see what people are doing specifically where I am now, and also get a handle on the social fabric of that place. I wanted to have a platform that records significant events in a temporal way, maybe protests or similar - things that define each city/place uniquely. The monetisation strategy was to allow people to pay the platform to increase the visibility radius of their posts, and/or allow people to pay to view media items from outside the normal radius - where a share of this payment goes to the uploader.
I was fucking around for a few years on this, and now I have another major project to work on so no longer have time or motivation to "finish" it. I might open source it in the future, if anyone is interested. (I haven't looked at the code in months)
by ipsum2 on 8/11/21, 10:07 PM
by rektide on 8/11/21, 10:45 PM
I'm very much a fan of ubiquotous (& pervasive) computing, still as much of a torch for it as ever. But these days I tend to think more ambient, non-visual modalities & connecting the network fo devices is more interesting. Efforts like Web of Things standards (a web standard for exposing devices) and WebThings (a unrealted semantic-web powered iot engine spun out from Mozilla) talk to creating awareness & control over the seas of devices about us (& afar too). Systems like Eddystone/PhysicalWeb/Bluetooth-beacons provide ambient awareness of local systems & endpoints, and one day I hope people & interests too (that want to be so locally digitally available). These, to me, along with good interoperabile standards (like ActivityPub), feel like the seeds for a Rainbows End scenario, where comment trees hang in the world, where everything is annotateable.
But I tend to think these connective mediums are well served by the screens we put & pull from our pockets, served by watches & vibrations and bluetooth headsets.
I don't know what the metaverse might be. But back when ubicomp was younger, I remember being absolutely floored by Steve Mann piping his worn camera sensors over analog TV signal to an SGI box, processing it, and beaming it back to his immersive display. He was reprocessing reality, not simply overlaying digital atop it. I doubt there was all that much really going on on the SGI, but it filled me with the ideas of a world which was visually editable. And I think that's where we've seen little progress.
Some of the hololens & magic leap demos were very compelling... 5 years ago. First Person Shooter type things played in the living room. And there are a steady march of really good phone based demos of virtual objects dropped into a similar camera-view of the world. But really, we need to get much better at having digital systems ingesting the world about us, and we need to start unleashing human creativity that people can redraw & reimagine the physical world. We need procedural toolkits galore to re-simulate environments. An augmentative metaverse needs filters, well beyond what a photo filter is, requiring both that input of the world, and the flexible programmatic world-shaders we can orchestrate & lean on to rewrite the world, before it gets to our eyes.
by freeone3000 on 8/11/21, 10:04 PM
by dougmwne on 8/11/21, 10:03 PM
by gfodor on 8/12/21, 1:33 AM
Call me when you work on several of these projects in a row and debias yourself and your financial interests from what ought to be done to create the best possible future for spatial computing.
by visualradio on 8/11/21, 11:06 PM
Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors, implants also open up possibility of direct external suggestion to disable the ability of thinkers to consider whether or not they are free.
The highest value of thinkers is freedom of thought. Since thought arises from material conditions and living in a community allows more time for thought by decreasing the time its members spend on basic survival there is always a social \ political \ economic component which must be considered when building better realities to avoid simply accelerating the essential trajectory of a current reality.
by zacay on 8/12/21, 7:01 AM
At Google, Hanke ran the Geo division while street-view cars were illegally collecting Wi-Fi data en masse [2].
Yet we're supposed to believe that he will build a metaverse that's NOT dystopian?
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20030801175255/http://www.keyhole... [2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/privacy-scandal-haunts-p...
by RGamma on 8/11/21, 10:19 PM
It doesn't matter what anyone thinks or says. The higher-ups have decided it's going to happen, the puppets are going to dance and so it will.
by bullen on 8/12/21, 7:37 AM
We need an internet where people are not constrained in what they are allowed to do for earnings.
Open-source is only half the battle as content also need to shift. Open-content?
I made the network protocol: http://github.com/tinspin/fuse
And now I'm working on the file formats: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449
by nathias on 8/12/21, 6:04 AM
by karaterobot on 8/12/21, 1:04 AM
by Stampo00 on 8/12/21, 2:34 AM
by cblconfederate on 8/11/21, 10:59 PM
by yuy910616 on 8/11/21, 10:18 PM
Coming from Niantic, who is a proponent of AR, it seems like the good reason is to care about building a better reality, but I'm curious if anyone knows enough to comment on their 'real' reason?
by shmerl on 8/11/21, 10:02 PM
Permanent reality idea could be closer than it looks.
by JakeAl on 8/12/21, 6:19 AM
by worldsayshi on 8/11/21, 11:17 PM
by mensetmanusman on 8/12/21, 12:41 AM
by hammyhavoc on 8/11/21, 10:23 PM
by dotcoma on 8/17/21, 4:02 PM
by cfeliped on 8/11/21, 10:43 PM
by TechBro8615 on 8/11/21, 11:41 PM
No single company could build the Internet and be successful, and the same is true for the metaverse. The focus should be on developers, shared spaces and protocols. How can I connect my server running a game on Unity engine to your server running a Godot engine? Can I walk between them, transport my avatar between worlds? Can I run copies of myself in multiple realms? Can I play Factorio inside the game room of my Minecraft megabase?
I’d like to see more crazy ideas and wild hacks focusing along these lines. In fact I’m surprised there aren’t more “metaverse for crypto” initiatives. I guess we’re probably still 10-15 years away from the first successful application of these concepts.
by CryptoPunk on 8/12/21, 3:26 AM
Without an open ownership system, people will be compelled by market forces to converge to using a single proprietary platform that can provide a consistent account and set of rules on claims to digital property, and this platform being mutable by the proprietor, will make that proprietor inordinately powerful in a way that disfigures the socioeconomic landscape to make it less functional.