The Metaverse Is The Worst Thing Ever Made

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

On 10/1/2023 at 10:04 AM, Ceka Cianci said:

It's pretty easy to tell how and when the internet really took off.. Soon as high speed  internet came around  it started to get more populated across the board  with businesses and people.. Then  it really blew up when those little gadgets became available to most  everyone..

 

OMG that made me laugh so hard I peed a little! I'm stealing this.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Canada is putting in place a new voluntary code of conduct for the use of AI.

Thank goodness. After seeing the horror of what I've seen today, this is very reassuring. 

 

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

"We don't need more referees in Canada. We need more builders. Let other countries regulate while we take the more courageous path and say 'come build here.'"

God I hate these people.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ai-code-of-conduct-stopgap-1.6983064

LOL. Big same.

Re: the topic overall, I'm sure we'll be stuck with AI for quite a bit now that companies have figured out it can save them money over the long term (maybe), but man, I cannot wait until we can finally kick the "metaverse" term to the curb. 

[Katherine Heartsong]

On 10/1/2023 at 9:39 AM, AmeliaJ08 said:

I have absolutely no doubt that VR will progress to an actual metaverse full of these kinds of hyper-realistic almost perfect representations of participants, it seems almost inevitable. The maker of this video needs to keep up, the tech on show here is nothing new since you can create a textured 3D model from live camera data, you can even do something very similar to this at home with a basic camera although not in real time. For video/real time though just speed up the process, do it x times per second and you have real time ultra-realistic characters given enough processing power, it's not some infeasible feat of technology given what we have.

The tech isn't in doubt though. Some struggle to see the need but really we haven't scratched the surface yet, we tend to look at the current niches like VRChat/Horizon Worlds etc to make our criticisms but it should be clear that social VR has a much wider potential audience than is currently being catered to.

The big problem I can see is centralization. A true metaverse can't come about under the sole control of players like Meta since they have content policies, investors, advertisers and shareholders. Any sort of genuine metaverse is going to have to somehow cater to everyone, it is going to have to be decentralized and not under the control of any single provider or entity. It'll have to be something closer to the internet, something traversable and connected but broken down into many individual networks and providers to really break through and provide everything that people will want from it. It'll need to be open, affordable and will inevitably attract the same controversy that the internet does currently so it'll somehow need to be all things to all people to overcome this.

Also worth considering how gaming and the entertainment industry in general will move this way and might even become deeply integrated into a metaverse network that does everything, there's room for corporations and profit but there has to be something more for mass adoption.

Again though and as far as this video goes though I think the centralization desire of Meta will ensure their vision never sees mass adoption, I do think it is wiser to look at how internet ubiquity happened to see what is more likely to happen.

Where I'm seeing the larger corporations being in a larger metaverse (if not trying to control it outright) would be as major tourist attractions/destinations in a sense. They have the capital and content to create large, well designed, realistic, all encompassing pieces of the world that the normal person would never be able to create or host. Extravagant experiences backed by large amount of money and meant to hook you into their world to drive their profits.

But that means there will still be out of the way destinations and worlds on a much smaller scale to offer unique and intimate (emotionally) experiences. I liken the corporate metaverse worlds to Las Vegas, and the smaller ones an equivalent to the small landscaped gems that a few people create here to share (but will be larger than a 8186 parcel).

[Flea Yatsenko]

22 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Where I'm seeing the larger corporations being in a larger metaverse (if not trying to control it outright) would be as major tourist attractions/destinations in a sense. They have the capital and content to create large, well designed, realistic, all encompassing pieces of the world that the normal person would never be able to create or host. Extravagant experiences backed by large amount of money and meant to hook you into their world to drive their profits.

But that means there will still be out of the way destinations and worlds on a much smaller scale to offer unique and intimate (emotionally) experiences. I liken the corporate metaverse worlds to Las Vegas, and the smaller ones an equivalent to the small landscaped gems that a few people create here to share (but will be larger than a 8186 parcel).

Just because they have the money, doesn't mean they can.

[Belephannt]

don't go to their metaverse

funny animals live there

[Rat Luv]

This video is by the channel The Modern Investor - just to warn you, he usually covers Bitcoin...but he really slags off the Metaverse here 👎  

It's funny though...his ideas for what a 'metaverse' really should have all involve things that SL offers now, and has done for years...I time-stamped it for the relevant part, if anyone's interested! 

 

[animats]

Oh, that WalMart thing. That's a VR concept WalMart prototyped in 2018.

The state of the metaverse is pretty bad. The Game Developers Conference agenda for 2024 just went live, and no sessions mention "metaverse". Epic has been losing money and pulled back. Facebook now has a demo setup where you can have conference rooms with photorealistic avatars, but not a whole world. Roblox, which developed some nice technology (their avatar clothing system is very good) continues to lose money, their stock is way down, and they can't retain their 13-year old user base even into high school.

Over in NFT land, there's still a new metaverse, token, and land sale announced about once a week. They're all junk. The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating some of them.

There are still people trying to make this happen. There's Improbable's M2. They had a system a few years ago good enough that there were about five big-world games based on it. But it was so expensive to run their system, which needs a huge number of servers, that free to play games where you could buy stuff (similar to SL) went broke. Improbable pivoted to military simulations for the British military, who weren't bothered by a few dollars per hour per user cost. Worked OK, but a small niche. Then they pivoted to NFT/crypto stuff, teaming with the Otherside/Yuga Labs/Bored Ape Yacht Club crowd. Did two live demos for a few hours each, with tens of thousands of identical avatars running around. The promised Otherside world never shipped. Now they're trying to do something with US major league baseball - sit anywhere in the stadium. The system only has to be on during game and they can charge, so the cost works out.

There's something called RP1, but I don't know much about it. It's far enough along that you can log in and build.

SL is still the winner in the metaverse space, but it's not a bigger space than it was a few years ago.

I'm rather encouraged about Second Life from a technical standpoint. At long last, important things are getting fixed. There's a big push from LL to fix the serious immersion-breaking bugs server side, such as failed teleports and avatars stuck in white/pink cloud mode for long periods.

What seems to be driving this is more crowds. WelcomeHub usually has a crowd, and about half of it is stuck in white/pink cloud mode. LL set up Motown, and got 120 avatars into a dance club. Look at Destinations Guide's "What's Hot Now". Often you'll see more than ten regions with over 50 avatars each.

But those regions look awful. Pink/white cloud avatars. Nude avatars with their heads on backwards because of rezzing delays. So there's a big push to fix avatar loading.

Something that's not obvious is that simulator speed is good enough to handle those 120-avatar regions. Go to a busy region and watch the simulator stats. It's usually 100% speed (the simulator runs at 45 FPS), and mostly 100% scripts run. I've been to some crowded places with my Sharpview viewer, which draws all the objects except avatars, which are drawn as a block. I can move freely through the crowd. So the bottlenecks are all in comms and viewer side. That's fixable. You do need a GPU that's at least a good model from 2016 or later to handle regions with crowds, though.

The "fun" problem remains. A new user recently wrote that SL lacks "punch". They're right. That's another subject.

[Istelathis]

Something of interest, for those of you keeping up with the Metaverse.  According to one article, Meta is supposedly planning to lay off even more employees in their FAST division, as to how many and what direction Meta will be taking is beyond my guess, this does not mean Meta is abandoning VR, it could just be shifting direction.  From what I have read so far, FAST mostly deals with the hardware side of their VR.  The total employees from what I have read is 600, so this is not as severe as the 11,000 reported last year.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-laying-off-metaverse-employees

 

I don't usually keep up with the business side of things,  I find it kind of boring.  But for those of you who do, I hope this gives you a better look at how things are progressing, as well as open the thread for more speculation as well as discussion.  

 

[Love Zhaoying]

30 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

Something of interest, for those of you keeping up with the Metaverse.  According to one article, Meta is supposedly planning to lay off even more employees in their FAST division, as to how many and what direction Meta will be taking is beyond my guess, this does not mean Meta is abandoning VR, it could just be shifting direction.  From what I have read so far, FAST mostly deals with the hardware side of their VR.  The total employees from what I have read is 600, so this is not as severe as the 11,000 reported last year.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-laying-off-metaverse-employees

 

I don't usually keep up with the business side of things,  I find it kind of boring.  But for those of you who do, I hope this gives you a better look at how things are progressing, as well as open the thread for more speculation as well as discussion.  

 

Yep,soon SL will be the only newsworthy platform, again.

[Istelathis]

4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Yep,soon SL will be the only newsworthy platform, again.

I'm not sure, Meta is really pushing this and has already invested a ton of money.  I think it will remain in the news for a while to come, not to say I think it is going to be a success, or even define what the metaverse is.  My own opinion, is that the focus should have been on augmented reality first, then as technology progressed to the point where VR was more in reach of your average consumer to invest more heavily in that.  I think Meta has gotten a bit ahead of itself, pushing for something most people are not interested in at this time.  

I think for a lot of people, a simple visual representation of a virtual world is not going to be enough to replace standard screens.  With augmented reality, we can have an interface over the real world, so that it builds upon all of our senses and overlays our visuals, things such as large screens projected before us, GPS navigation, AI that will explain what you are currently looking at, and so on.  

Google tried to do so, but ultimately failed, so who knows?  

[AmeliaJ08]

Geekthoughts below, ignore if desired

--

As far as Second Life and VR goes (assumed to be a necessary component of becoming part of the 'metaverse' whatever that actually means):

I would assume LL have retained at least some of what they learned with Sansar and while VR hasn't exactly taken off for any purpose other than casual gaming it would seem wise to keep that knowledge somewhat current and ready to go at a moments notice. The hardware is definitely dropping in price and as time goes on the number of people with computers capable of running it adequately only increases.

That said the whole sitting down at a desktop PC thing is also dying so who knows, VR to me always seemed to have these physical limitations (no desktop PC, no space to do much other than sit down) that were limiting factors, you can still have nice head tracking and some of the experience sitting on your couch of course but the way most people use their computers these days is definitely a limiting factor given what the technology can do in ideal environments.

Then again SL would need some enormous changes to become a VR compatible platform. Modern physics, a real animation engine (maybe the puppetry project is part of this though? whatever happened to that), VR specific regions, possibly an engine update to enable higher performance etc... maybe it's just not really on the radar at all, it could mean some big changes.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

On 10/6/2023 at 2:33 PM, animats said:

 Nude avatars with their heads on backwards because of rezzing delays.

 

And people always ask me why i don't use bom and have a mesh head.😂

[BilliJo Aldrin]

Just imagine how many more lives will be destroyed if people can wear a headset and be fully immersed in a virtual world 24/7.

But what else will there be to do when AI robots have taken over every job.

 

Edited October 8, 2023 by BilliJo Aldrin
added a word

[Zalificent Corvinus]

11 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

But what else will there be to do when AI robots have taken over every job.

Serve as Conscript Infantry in the Corporate Wars, as poorly trained, poorly equipped and poorly led people will always be cheaper than expensive AI Combat Droids.

I thought THAT would have been obvious.

[QuietEventide]

The Metaverse (and an Internet taken over by a few extremely large corporations) can very easily turn into a digital prison, comparable to Plato's "Allegory of the Cave":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

[pizza7]

i think some people rather want a fake world because they have trouble dealing with the real one.

i do not have a mobile, i really see no need for it.

[Istelathis]

11 minutes ago, pizza7 said:

i think some people rather want a fake world because they have trouble dealing with the real one.

i do not have a mobile, i really see no need for it.

It is interesting to think about, while sitting on my chair, inside of a climate controlled house, playing on my computer.  We are all kind of living in a fake world, aren't we?  We live in countries that have been created for us, follow laws that exist for those countries, even our own form of ethics have been built for most of us, then we exchange currency which is sustained mostly through faith and imagination for goods and services, and watch the world through screens for hours a day.  When we get away from the screens, we go to allocated paces we are allowed to visit, or risk the chance of punishment by entering borders that belong to others.  Often we like to ramble on about being independent from the system, but more or less we are batteries for the Matrix, aren't we?  Providing it the power it needs to sustain itself.

Many will clamor on how this is reality, but is it?  Is this environment we find ourselves in, our own reality, or something built for us?  The thing that has always fascinated me about gaming and virtual worlds, is that we gain the ability to fashion our own worlds, to somewhat free ourselves from the world around us, at least as much as possible, without heading for the mountains and becoming hermits 🤣

We kind of already live in an artificial world, and the only means most people have to escape it is through another artificial world of their own creation.  

I think out of all creatures on this planet, humans are the ones who live furthest away from the real world, and have perhaps the ultimate goal in mind for some is to get further and further away from the reality that has been fashioned for them, by other people.

 

Hey at least with mobile, we can get out of our houses, and play in a virtual environment from within another virtual environment😊

[Zalificent Corvinus]

33 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

Many will clamor on how this is reality, but is it? 

Ahhh Solipsism...

 

How to cure a Solipsist.

!. Punch them in the face.

2. when they scream and ask why you hurt them, say "I didn't, I'm a figment of your imagination in an unreal world, you created me to punch you", then punch them again.

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until they abandon solipsism.

Hahaha

 

[Istelathis]

3 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Ahhh Solipsism...

 

How to cure a Solipsist.

!. Punch them in the face.

2. when they scream and ask why you hurt them, say "I didn't, I'm a figment of your imagination in an unreal world, you created me to punch you", then punch them again.

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until they abandon solipsism.

Hahaha

 

I've been smacked way to many times in the face to be a solipsist 🙃 I don't like smacking others in the face as a result, let them live in their own world as long as they don't try to force me to live in theirs.

Edited October 9, 2023 by Istelathis

[Zalificent Corvinus]

3 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

I've been smacked way to many times in the face to be a solipsist 🙃

SEE! Proof that the method works!