Future of the metaverse, and all that

[animats]

8 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Yes. If they're short of that many people, how on earth are they managing to keep anything going?

With the 960 people they already have.

This doesn't include "moderators". Moderation is apparently outsourced to IEnergizer in India. Roblox's average user age is 13, and they put a huge amount of effort into being kid-safe. One of SL's strengths is that, because of the powers of landowners to eject and ban people, SL only needs a tiny governance group. Because of SL's policy of not caring what people do on their own land if it doesn't impact the neighbors, there's no need for much censorship.

Which is why a Roblox-run metaverse is not what SL users want.

8 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Being cynical, advertising that many positions doesn't mean they want to recruit that much staff, it might be a sign of ambition with the intention of attracting investment.

They already attracted enough investment. On March 10, 2021, Roblox went public via an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Ticker symbol RBLX. Current market cap US$46.20 billion. SEC S-1 filing.

Not clear how this plays out. 150 more developers would be a mess for Second Life. The level of effort applied to Sansar or Tilia, applied well to Second Life, could turn things around.

[Coffee Pancake]

20 hours ago, animats said:

Not clear how this plays out. 150 more developers would be a mess for Second Life. The level of effort applied to Sansar or Tilia, applied well to Second Life, could turn things around.

150 developers for SL would be a product rebuild, a true "SL 3.0", and potentially not a bad idea considering how deep a vulkan pipeline would end up going into the existing code base

At this point I'd really like to see a roadmap that isn't based around squeezing things in around the many limitations in the current software stack

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 9/14/2021 at 4:34 AM, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I would (do, actually) agree with you, except the responses I kept hearing at the Server User Group meetings from the Lindens regarding such problems was "it's hard".

How to get over that mountain and find our way to happy-valley?

Someone needs to light a fire under their butts and teach them how to be like Scotty and not Reg Barclay.

How do you gain and maintain a rep as being a miracle worker? You tell them it will take twice as long as it really will and then do it in half the time in really takes.

That is the rep LL needs to develop and maintain.

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 9/14/2021 at 12:56 PM, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

there'll be a diaspora to whatever suitable alternatives there are.

IF there are any suitable alternatives. And I do mean IF. 

So far, in the past 18 years, I haven't found a suitable alternative that does not require VR equipment at some point. I'm not going to consider spending money I don't have on expensive equipment just to end up hanging out with me, myself and I all the time again. It's not because I don't like people. It's quite the opposite.  People don't like me. Maybe because they don't understand me and people fear what they don't understand. I don't know and I've gotten to the point where I pretty much don't care to know any more. Not much point in knowing now when the time I have left on this planet is pretty short even if anyone actually cared enough to speak up. No one ever bothered before, why start now.

 

Are you sure you mean suitable and not acceptable? 🤔

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 9/14/2021 at 1:04 PM, ChinRey said:

That's how it was right from the start. To understand LL, I think it's important to keep in mind that they weren't actually trying to make a virtual world. Linden World was only supposed to be a test environment for their Grand Project, a VR headset. Only after their original plan fell through did they decide to rename it Second Life and go public with it.

It was success by accident, not by design, and it seems to me this still affects their attitude towards product development even today.

 

Nailed it!

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 9/15/2021 at 8:26 AM, ChinRey said:

You need to explain this in a language progammers can understand, Molly:

default
{
	state_entry()
	{
		if(~llListFindList(AWGMembers,["Linden Lab"]))state Prosper();
		else state Oblivion();
	}
}

 

Engineers, architects and programmers all seem to have much in common. If it looks good on paper... 🤭

Edited September 18, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker

[Mr Amore]

The 'metaverse' is becoming more political than technical.

The full article is here.

Quote

Nick Clegg will on Monday set out the tech giant’s vision of a virtual world where you can work, shop and ‘live’. But the move is prompting new fears over privacy.

In Washington, Facebook’s political push to promote the metaverse is reportedly already in full flow. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and Nick Clegg, its vice-president for global affairs and communications, are leading the lobbying campaign. On Monday, Clegg is set to lay out the company’s plans for how the metaverse could reshape society in a talk entitled Journey to the Metaverse.

But experts fear that with regulation still struggling to catch up with the impact of the first wave of social media, the metaverse is likely to be a way for companies like Facebook to capture and profit from even more data. They also warn that more foresight and government protections are needed to counter the risk of the space, and people’s lives, being overrun by big tech.

“I know it’s not necessarily a popular view but I do think that the harms that we see after the fact, for children especially but also for adults, are sufficiently worrying that it would be more sensible to work to put in place governance arrangements – checks on transparency, on data protection, etc, and harms, especially to children – before these companies are permitted to come forth,” said Robin Mansell, professor of new media and the internet at the London School of Economics.

Mansell said the social-political issues associated with the metaverse will be identical to those on existing social-media platforms, such as Facebook – including data, surveillance, regulation and representation of gender, race and ethnicity. But in the immersive world of the metaverse, they will be on a far larger scale. She believes tech giants should be forced to wait before launch until there is “clarity about how they’re going to be governed”.

“For me, it seems like it is simply another step in the monetisation of data to the benefit of Facebook and other large platforms sold to people as fun, exciting, helpful for productivity at work and so on,” she said.

 

The digital class system will be determined by which metaverses you have access too.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

3 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

The 'metaverse' is becoming more political than technical.

The full article is here.

 

The digital class system will be determined by which metaverses you have access too.

Good article. At least Linden Lab gives you the full avatar. Freakbook only gives half of one! Where Zuck will monetize the heck out of Horizons, the Lab been getting revenue the old school way by memberships and land purchases.

[animats]

On 9/26/2021 at 6:46 AM, Mr Amore said:

Nick Clegg (former deputy prime minister of the UK who moved up to becoming a Facebook VP) will on Monday set out the tech giant’s vision of a virtual world where you can work, shop and ‘live’.

Today is Monday, and the announcement is out.

Facebook announced the "XR Programs and Research Fund", a $50 million fund that it says will help it develop the metaverse "more responsibly".

So, no big product announcement.

[Mr Amore]

Yeah, nothing at all of substance today. Thankfully their presentation is watchable at 2x speed.

The first half is just a rehash of the metaverse concept, anything of note begins at 34 minutes in. Aside from the politics and regulation, the only real takeaway is the idea of multi-metaverses where users can carry their avatar and clothing(and presumably inventories) across metaverses.

Pixar's USD has been adopted all over this year, it's basically a format for sharing scenes(and live collaboration) between modelling software, game engines and anything. It's possible we'll see the USD format or similar in metaverses as a way of distributing builds(i.e. a scene of many objects, modeled in Blender, by a team, can be uploaded directly. In the game, everything is scaled and positioned identically.). A similar, universally agreed system could applied to avatars and their inventories too.

And on another note, Zuckerberg once tried to push the two-tier Internet. With the 'scum' slumming it on the slower, congested lines. And the privileged paying for premium access to the Internet. It's probable Facebook's metaverse will be tiered too, with the free users being farmed for their data, and the paid tiers enjoying enhanced levels of privacy. Hence, digital class systems of the future.

Edited September 27, 2021 by Mr Amore

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

Hopefully Freakbook will fall flat on their metaverse.

[Coffee Pancake]

56 minutes ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

Hopefully Freakbook will fall flat on their metaverse.

If they do, it will be a major setback for the concept as a whole.

[Quistess Alpha]

6 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

If they do, it will be a major setback for the concept as a whole.

So a lose-lose scenario . I vote for the lesser of 2 evils though.

[Lucia Nightfire]

So now it's metaverses we all need and not a metaverse? Got it.

Capitalism, patents and brand/IP rights/protection won't allow for a true metaverse anyway.

All this metaverse slanging that tech companies are doing now is to gage interest and to signal to those with less money to throw around that, "We got this. Don't even try it.".

All the while, no one is going to come up with anything remotely like the pie in the sky everyone is dreaming of.

Until the day full-dive is actually a thing, it's all an absolute waste of time.

 

P.S. Full-dive without RW-to-IW observed time ratioing will be a bummer to. I want to overclock my brain and live pseudo forever while acquiring the knowledge of a god and all the time to do it in. IDC if I lose my humanity/identity/compassion in the process. Yeah...

Edited September 28, 2021 by Lucia Nightfire

[animats]

On 9/27/2021 at 2:28 PM, Mr Amore said:

The first half is just a rehash of the metaverse concept, anything of note begins at 34 minutes in. Aside from the politics and regulation, the only real takeaway is the idea of multi-metaverses where users can carry their avatar and clothing(and presumably inventories) across metaverses.

There's much interest in asset portability. The trouble is, the interest is from people who want to sell assets, not those who own them. There are several approaches.

• Outsourcing. Ready Player Me is an avatar system where the company behind Ready Player Me sells avatars and clothing, and there's an API which can be put into games to render them. All clothing changes are done via the Ready Player Me site. They have this working on about a hundred second and third tier games, but the major game companies are thus far uninterested.
• Non-fungible tokens. NFTs are technically interesting. They're basically a way to make no-copy objects and track who owns them. Or at least being able to detect the copy. Unfortunately, the entire field has been taken over the make-money-fast crowd and the Ponzi schemers.
• Assets as a service. Some big central service (Amazon? Valve?) stores assets for multiple games and virtual worlds.

They're really copy protection schemes.

On 9/27/2021 at 2:28 PM, Mr Amore said:

Pixar's USD has been adopted all over this year, it's basically a format for sharing scenes(and live collaboration) between modelling software, game engines and anything.

Yes. I haven't looked at USD format that deeply, but Blender supports it now, and some SL creators I know speak well of it. NVidia and Khronos are suporting it. Disney and Pixar defined it. It's powerful enough for Hollywood. This is one of the more promising developments.

[Quistess Alpha]

On 9/27/2021 at 5:28 PM, Mr Amore said:

Pixar's USD

The write-up by Pixar is worth a read:

https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html

in particular, they say they specifically didn't include rigging stuff because there's not enough industry agreement on what sort of rigging stuff would be needed:

Quote

Not an execution or rigging system

USD provides a lightweight, optimized scenegraph to facilitate authoring and efficient extraction of composed scene description.  However, it provides no other behaviors than composition of a namespace hierarchy and property value resolution, and in the tradeoff space between low-memory footprint, higher-latency data access and high-memory footprint, low-latency access to data, USD's scenegraph leans more towards the former, whereas a high-performance execution engine requires the latter.  

Further, the more rigging behaviors and execution semantics we would add to USD, the more difficult it would become to interchange the data successfully between DCC's, since there is not, currently, broad agreement between vendors of what these behaviors should be.

USD and its schema generation tools should be suitable for encoding rigging for round-tripping rigging data in a particular application or custom pipeline, and USD does provide facilities that a client could use to build more extensive in-memory caches on top of a UsdStage to provide lower-latency access to data encoded in USD. But for now, these do not play a significant role in what we feel is the primary directive of USD: scalable interchange of geometric and shading data between DCC's in a 3D content creation pipeline.

 

[Luna Bliss]

25 minutes ago, Quistess Alpha said:

The write-up by Pixar is worth a read:

https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html

in particular, they say they specifically didn't include rigging stuff because there's not enough industry agreement on what sort of rigging stuff would be needed:

 

Wow this is very exciting...being able to upload an entire scene all at once.

[Coffee Pancake]

29 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Wow this is very exciting...being able to upload an entire scene all at once.

Lets just add add avatars and chat to blender if that's where we're all going to be living from now on

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

32 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Wow this is very exciting...being able to upload an entire scene all at once.

Lets just add add avatars and chat to blender if that's where we're all going to be living from now on

Nooooo....that would be too distracting to the creative process    

[Luna Bliss]

Where might these full scenes be able to be uploaded in the beginning...does anybody know?  I mean, should I get set up at Unity or something?

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

7 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

ets just add add avatars and chat to blender

Isn't that what you could do in the old Blender Game engine?

[Lucia Nightfire]

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Lets just add add avatars and chat to blender if that's where we're all going to be living from now on

INB4 one of SL's prominent user base asks, "Where's the 'Blender After Dark' version?".

Edited September 29, 2021 by Lucia Nightfire

[animats]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Lets just add add avatars and chat to blender if that's where we're all going to be living from now on

You can do that! It's called NVIdia Omniverse. It's a way for people to work collaboratively in 3D tools including Blender, Maya, and Photoshop. Anyone tried this? It could be useful to creators who collaborate remotely.

[Silent Mistwalker]

36 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

INB4 one of SL's prominent user base asks, "Where's the 'Blender After Dark' version?".

🤭

 

 

[asteriddle]

totally unrelated to ongoing conversation but just my 2 cents;

i browse the secondlife tag on twitter frequently, as creators will post very cool things there! but, also... you get crypto dudebros talking about the 'metaverse' being the 'second coming' of SL , and that's kind of what i fear.

idk. i'm generally in the boat of 'thinks crypto is dumb' for a multitude of reasons, and the cryptobro's idea of the metaverse seems so... bleached. in a palatable to silicon valley way. it feels soulless.

20 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Capitalism, patents and brand/IP rights/protection won't allow for a true metaverse anyway.

lucia put it wonderfully imo

i love SL for what it is. the only limit is your imagination and skillset (and... wallet depth in many cases >>;;), and it doesn't matter who you are - you can create things as long as you have the will. this idea of the metaverse feels very 'corporate', if that makes sense.

like dont get me wrong, i LOVE virtual worlds and experiences, it's been a huge interest since i was a kid. i'd love for more people to find out about secondlife and what you can do in it... i just don't want SL to become watered down as a result.