Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse

[animats]

12 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

For example - There was at one time an attempt to go over a parcels Li allocation being putting objects metadata on a 3rd party external server that would require a special viewer. Users of regular viewers would see an incomplete build or nothing at all.

Have you seen "Ready Player Me"? This is a system used in some low-end virtual worlds. It outsources the entire avatar and clothing system to a third party. All avatar customization is done on the Ready Player Me site, the assets reside at Ready Player Me, and the game/virtual world uses a Ready Player Me library to render the avatar. So your avatar is portable across games/virtual worlds. It's free for a game to use this, because avatar clothing costs money and that's paid to Ready Player Me.

Because this is all they do, they're getting good at this, especially on the ease of use front.

[Lucia Nightfire]

11 hours ago, animats said:

Have you seen "Ready Player Me"? This is a system used in some low-end virtual worlds. It outsources the entire avatar and clothing system to a third party. All avatar customization is done on the Ready Player Me site, the assets reside at Ready Player Me, and the game/virtual world uses a Ready Player Me library to render the avatar. So your avatar is portable across games/virtual worlds. It's free for a game to use this, because avatar clothing costs money and that's paid to Ready Player Me.

Because this is all they do, they're getting good at this, especially on the ease of use front.

Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen in some form over some edge case.

[animats]

2 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen in some form over some edge case.

Why? It's a hosted tool.

You can use the web-based avatar creator without signing up or using their service. What you get are rather generic avatars, but it does work. You get out a .glb file, which Blender can import.

Newly created Ready Player Me avatar imported into Blender. 14,320 triangles.

That their avatars are not photorealistic is a deliberate choice. They tried photorealistic avatars, and people didn't like it. They have a useful paper on this. They're about at the Fortnite level of realism. Facebook Horizons is more abstract; SL and most AAA titles are more photorealistic.

It shouldn't be all that hard to translate these avatars into SL avatars. Somebody into Blender rigging could probably write a Python script to rename all the bones and adjust rotations where necessary. I'm not suggesting these should replace SL avatars, but it could be a nice way to get users from other systems, including VRchat, to visit SL.

Edited August 5, 2021 by animats
Add triangle count

[Coffee Pancake]

Just now, animats said:

I'm not suggesting these should replace SL avatars, but it could be a nice way to get users from other systems, including VRchat, to visit SL.

It would make them an instant mark.

Disposable avatars for disposable people.

[Lucia Nightfire]

13 hours ago, animats said:

So your avatar is portable across games/virtual worlds.

This is what I was focusing on. You think owners of MMOs want a third party networked app that allows people to see other people wearing avatars on their platforms that aren't assets from those platforms, ie, out of their control/governance? Let's not even mention the impact on the economy.

I'm sure there is already something in many MMO's ToS that prohibits this in some form.

It's sort of like an illegal TPV blowing the shared experience out of the water. As much as I hate the shared experience policy, there is a point where it is necessary.

Edited August 5, 2021 by Lucia Nightfire

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Disposable avatars for disposable people.

I would argue 95% of the avatars on VRChat are disposable. IDK the % of their users, but I bet it's not a minority, heh.

Edited August 5, 2021 by Lucia Nightfire

[animats]

8 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

You think owners of MMOs want a third party networked app that allows people to see other people wearing avatars on their platforms that aren't assets from those platforms, ie, out of their control/governance?

They sell this service to MMOs. "Don't spend months building a character system. Integrate Ready Player Me in less than a day and focus on the core experience of your product." It's not done without support from the MMO. These are showing up in games and virtual worlds that don't come from the biggest studios.

I'm bringing this up in the context of being able to visit across worlds. "Metaverse" proponents talk about that a lot. Someone saying "Hey, let's go visit this new club in Second Life" in VRchat could get more people into SL.

 

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, animats said:

They sell this service to MMOs. "Don't spend months building a character system. Integrate Ready Player Me in less than a day and focus on the core experience of your product." It's not done without support from the MMO. These are showing up in games and virtual worlds that don't come from the biggest studios.

I'm bringing this up in the context of being able to visit across worlds. "Metaverse" proponents talk about that a lot. Someone saying "Hey, let's go visit this new club in Second Life" in VRchat could get more people into SL.

 

With how entrenched and prominent avatar purchasing/assembly/customization is essential to the flow of money in SL, I doubt they will alienate the creator base allowing such a service, especially if said service offered a wide range of A to AAA game quality characters with ultra low complexity, a wide assortment of clothing and accessory options. It sounds lucrative only for games that already lack decent/appealing/competitive character creation/customization.

[Drayke Newall]

5 hours ago, animats said:

I'm bringing this up in the context of being able to visit across worlds. "Metaverse" proponents talk about that a lot. Someone saying "Hey, let's go visit this new club in Second Life" in VRchat could get more people into SL.

The problem is that Second Life already, in a way, has this ability and better just not utilised how it should be. Lets say Second Life was updated to a platform where a gaming studio could create a game in second life. No region crossings, good scripting etc. All the nice things and became the true metaverse.

Now say that EA decided that they would make a game in second life's updated engine that is similar to unity or unreal. They talk to Linden Lab and cut a deal for renting 500 regions of space and build their world etc and the final thing they do is create their own avatars in Maya and import those to Second Life to use with their game. Now EA's new game has its own avatars unique to their world.

Now lets say Blizzard do the same as EA creating a game and the last thing they do is create their own avatars that are unique to their world.

Now lets say I have an avie that I use for exploring Second Life and decided I wanted to go to visit EA's new game. I teleport to the game EA made in Second Life using my avie I have for exploring and automatically as soon as I land in EA's game my avatar is changed to the same avatar I use for EA's game with all my gear on etc.

After that I teleport to Blizzards game and blizzards avatar and all the gear I had last I left is attached as soon as I land and EA's avatar and gear is removed.

That is how Second Life needs to be and also how the metaverse needs to be. Anything else regarding having a third party that hosts all avatars etc for multiple worlds etc just cant work as each game has its own look.

The funny thing is, whilst limited, experience tools with temp attachments etc already has this capability. So why would anyone need to use a system like Ready Player Me in a metaverse where everything can be hosted within that metaverse?

[animats]

10 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

With how entrenched and prominent avatar purchasing/assembly/customization is essential to the flow of money in SL, I doubt they will alienate the creator base allowing such a service, especially if said service offered a wide range of A to AAA game quality characters with ultra low complexity, a wide assortment of clothing and accessory options. It sounds lucrative only for games that already lack decent/appealing/competitive character creation/customization.

I agree, where SL is concerned. Although I might use this tool to make some new low-poly animesh NPCs. I'm always looking for human background characters with full perms and proper LODs.

[animats]

4 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

All the nice things and became the true metaverse.

Oh, I wish, I wish. But LL has neither the money nor the technical competence to pull that off. Unless, say, they get acquired by Roblox or Epic.

[Lucia Nightfire]

4 hours ago, animats said:

Oh, I wish, I wish. But LL has neither the money nor the technical competence to pull that off. Unless, say, they get acquired by Roblox or Epic.

To be fair, they could probably get a good deal on buying SL and as long as what follows is a complete regime change, I'd be all for it. Investment capital alone won't fix SL. It needs completely new staff. Staff that don't utter their favorite catch phrases like "It's too complicated." in regards to fixing bugs created years ago that still plague us today or "Would be nice." in regards to features/standards that other MMOs have had in place for over a decade or "Alrighty then." after another meeting meant to discuss content creation turns into yet another meeting about viewer release cycle coverage and any "discussion" about content creation is one sided and is just users bringing up wishlist items again and again without any mention from the company on what they're actually looking into pursuing feature-wise for the year or coming years.

Would a major game company buy SL? Most likely not. SL is an absolute hot mess in all areas.

[Adeon Writer]

Didn’t a big investment company recently buy SL? I would not expect them to sell it. They clearly have plans.

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, Adeon Writer said:

big investment company

A holding company "investment group" bought SL. Yes. 😉

[Adeon Writer]

Forgive me for not knowing or understanding the difference because I don’t 🙂

[animats]

9 minutes ago, Adeon Writer said:

Didn’t a big investment company recently buy SL? I would not expect them to sell it. They clearly have plans.

I suspect that Waterfield (the company), which has bought and sold various small banks and financial service companies, bought Linden Lab in hopes Tilia was going to be a significant player in the next generation of financial services. That did not happen.

If we could get Roblox to buy Second Life from Linden Lab, that might be a step forward.  Waterfield would still have Tilia, and could pursue their fintech dream.

Roblox says they are going to build the metaverse, and they have a pretty good track record in building big virtual worlds and getting people to use them. Their user base has been increasing by 20-30% per year for a decade, and they're now at the 1.8 million concurrent user level.

I met the Roblox CEO back when he had a tiny physics engine startup in San Francisco in an alley off 8th St near Folsom. He's a physicist by training. I used their early physics engine for some early legged locomotion R&D, and they used my work as a demo. They made good software. That was a long time ago, and I doubt he remembers me. I remember him as being basically sensible.

https://corp.roblox.com/technology/

It's like hearing the dreams from the early days of SL. From people who made it work at 20x bigger than SL ever got.

 

[Drayke Newall]

7 hours ago, animats said:

Oh, I wish, I wish. But LL has neither the money nor the technical competence to pull that off. Unless, say, they get acquired by Roblox or Epic.

I know that, I was just using second life as an example. The point was that having a system within a metaverse that allows for such things like Second Life's temp attachment system (obviously better and expanded) would be a better system than relying on a third party avatar system and having multiple metaverses that an avatar portals to.

The reason why the metaverse hasn't taken off yet despite many virtual worlds being around isn't because it cant be done. It is because no one wants a system that is segmented by 'x' company having one metaverse and 'y' company having another.

The same could be said about how Roblox works for instance. No one wants to download each world at many gigabytes every time they go to another 'world'. They want the system that Second Life employs where you download by streaming the content, which is precisely how the Ready Player One movie shows the metaverse to be and that has now set the standard of what people want.

Edited August 6, 2021 by Drayke Newall

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

The reason why the metaverse hasn't taken off yet despite many virtual worlds being around isn't because it cant be done. It is because no one wants a system that is segmented by 'x' company having one metaverse and 'y' company having another.

THIS.

[sirhc DeSantis]

7 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

They want the system that Second Life employs where you download by streaming the content, which is precisely how the Ready Player One movie shows the metaverse to be and that has now set the standard of what people want.

Agree on the segmented company bit 100%

But if its going to be like RPO then already bored with it.

Run, Jump, Pew, Pew, Product Placement - Yawn. Surprised I stayed awake long enough to watch the whole thing.

[Drayke Newall]

2 hours ago, sirhc DeSantis said:

Agree on the segmented company bit 100%

But if its going to be like RPO then already bored with it.

Run, Jump, Pew, Pew, Product Placement - Yawn. Surprised I stayed awake long enough to watch the whole thing.

I agree. Was only using Ready Player One as an example of one continuous metaverse where there is no per world download to go to whatever game, library, shop etc. People have seen that movie and know that is what it is and what they want. That aspect of the movie has a similarity with Second Life in that it is a continuous world with no per world download like Roblox or sansar.

[Mollymews]

9 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

The reason why the metaverse hasn't taken off yet despite many virtual worlds being around isn't because it cant be done. It is because no one wants a system that is segmented by 'x' company having one metaverse and 'y' company having another.

if all of the companies with the billions dollar budgets who have signed on to OpenXR, follow thru on their signon intent then it may eventuate a standard api framework on which an integrated metaverse could be built 

[Katherine Heartsong]

14 hours ago, animats said:

I suspect that Waterfield (the company), which has bought and sold various small banks and financial service companies, bought Linden Lab in hopes Tilia was going to be a significant player in the next generation of financial services. That did not happen.

If we could get Roblox to buy Second Life from Linden Lab, that might be a step forward.  Waterfield would still have Tilia, and could pursue their fintech dream.

Roblox says they are going to build the metaverse, and they have a pretty good track record in building big virtual worlds and getting people to use them. Their user base has been increasing by 20-30% per year for a decade, and they're now at the 1.8 million concurrent user level.

I met the Roblox CEO back when he had a tiny physics engine startup in San Francisco in an alley off 8th St near Folsom. He's a physicist by training. I used their early physics engine for some early legged locomotion R&D, and they used my work as a demo. They made good software. That was a long time ago, and I doubt he remembers me. I remember him as being basically sensible.

https://corp.roblox.com/technology/

It's like hearing the dreams from the early days of SL. From people who made it work at 20x bigger than SL ever got.

 

I worked right near there myself (5th and Folsom) decades ago during the first boom!

How a major buyer like Roblox would handle all the adult/sexual stuff here is another mess entirely. Even plain vanilla SLex? Most major companies don't want into that aspect of a metaverse, yet it's something the 18+ users have shown they want over and over.

@Sid Nagy said it best pages ago ... these two things are essential if you want adults on a platform. Major companies want nothing at all to do with these. Like the plague. Several years back I had a chance to speak with one senior EA exec at a conference and asked him about sex in games like The Sims? It was a fascinating 15 minutes.

On 7/27/2021 at 2:33 PM, Sid Nagy said:

Companies like Facebook remove pictures if a nipple is showing, but virtual romance and sex are two of the essential motors that keep SL afloat.
The Barbie thing and the house dressing up are the easy parts for all these big companies to get a lead on SL, but the other two [sex and virtual romance] .... are millstones around their necks, but they are essential for success IMHO.

Edited August 6, 2021 by Katherine Heartsong

[Katherine Heartsong]

On 7/27/2021 at 3:31 PM, Bree Giffen said:

This is big. This is a technological shift that will take you regardless of what your opinions are. This is exactly what Philip was thinking. Only now it’s Mark. Imagine everyone using Second Life and that is the inevitable future. We should be happy about it. 

I agree it's big. And it will happen. And I am looking forwards to it.

But Zuckerberg? The guy who called his user's dumb f***s for giving him all their info? 

I'd rather swim in a vat of pig poop than even shake Mark's hand. I've said this a number of times (and I'm at the top of my profession IRL) ... there is no amount of money FB could ever offer me to work for them for even a day. 

Edited August 6, 2021 by Katherine Heartsong

[Katherine Heartsong]

On 7/31/2021 at 2:18 PM, Drayke Newall said:

It would depend I would think as to what could be done. If for instance LL grow their new mobile client to more than a text chat which I would hope they are thinking of, then they would likewise need to limit it as Apple do not allow adult content on their devices either.

Clearly you haven't looked at Roblox at all as, if you had you would stop saying it is only an FPS thing. You remember Second Life's old motto "your world, your imagination". It applies to Roblox as well.

Your book club that you say isn't in Roblox The Official Roblox Book Club - Roblox
Your education you say doesn't exist in Roblox Setting Up A Roblox Classroom
Oh hey look a concert held in Roblox by famous singers like Lady Gaga One World: Together At Home Virtual Concert - Roblox Blog
Cant ever recall Second Life making a deal with Sony Entertainment for Live concerts to be made in world. Here is the deal Roblox made Sony Music, Roblox Establish Partnership

Here is a link showing schools using Minecraft and Roblox for teaching and education during the pandemic... Notice how Second Life isn't mentioned at all Teachers Use Minecraft and Roblox to Educate Kids During Coronavirus Pandemic - Bloomberg

As for your dating thing it also takes place in Roblox. There are numerous hangout worlds and what not.

You need to get past the "Roblox is a game for kids and only shooters and made of blocks" and start to realise the world is treating it like SL back in 2006 where even mega corps like Sony Entertainment are doing things in there that Second Life would only dream of seeing again. Roblox has evolved well beyond what you and others seem to think it is (was).

:EDIT:

As to your video comparison of sl and Roblox, Roblox has far superior graphics to sl and is not blocky at all. Some people just build there world in that style in Roblox similar to how some people build cartoony style in sl. That sl video also has so much lag that even the camera fly through was lagging. Shows just how subpar sl is to modern creation platforms. Also Roblox has stated that realistic avatars will be coming and in concerts has even provided realistic avatars to music artists.

0.7 and 0.28 in the Roblox vid you posted and other times show graphic on par if not better than sl and not blocky at all as they are created mesh made in programs outside of Roblox and imported just like sl. So once again you have no clue what you are talking about.

I had no idea about the upcoming avatars designs in Roblox. I always see pics of avatars that look nothing better than LEGO block figures. And jaggy videos too, but whatever. My interest perked when I read they bought Loom.ai, and we're now expecting charters that look like this ... rather than kids toys.

That said, you'll not find anything sexual ever in Roblox or their ilk, which as pointed out, is a serious draw with adults. Love and relationships and sex need to be in these so-called life-simulator meta verses, as SL has shown.

Edited August 6, 2021 by Katherine Heartsong

[animats]

6 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

@Sid Nagy said it best pages ago ... (sex) essential if you want adults on a platform. Major companies want nothing at all to do with these. Like the plague.

Maybe not. "In fact, Second Life is so successful at this aspect of the business that it makes it almost impossible for any other adult virtual world to get a financial foothold." - Ryan Shultz, metaverse blogger, 2019.

SL has sufficient protections that you can't enter an adult area unless you want to. Of course, most of the people who get upset about this stuff are worried that someone else will see it. "A Puritan is someone who lives in fear that someone, somewhere is having fun."

The only barrier to accessing Pornhub is a popup that asks if you're over 18. The UK enacted a law requiring age verification for porn sites a few years ago, and cancelled the plan in 2019. It looks like the regulatory problem belongs to the past.

Suppressing sex is very expensive. Roblox has a huge number of moderators. Read their SEC  S-1 filing. It's a big fraction of their labor costs. Because their average user age is 13, they have to overdo it. They want to get an older demographic. That's where SL comes in, as the product you graduate to after outgrowing Roblox.

Facebook Horizon was determined to prevent sex. So all their avatars have nothing below the waist and float in midair. Facebook Horizon was a flop.

So there's a business case for doing this the SL way - have adult areas, make sure no one gets there who doesn't want to, and don't worry about it too much.

Edited August 6, 2021 by animats
Typo.