There's a lot of talk, and a lot of press, but what's actually working?

• There's the NFT (Non-Fungible Token) crowd. Pay lots of money for things in virtual worlds. See Sandbox, Somnium Space, Decentraland, etc. Few actually play in those worlds; they just trade. Upland took the next step; their world is just a map with stickers.
• Tim Sweeney of Epic Games has been talking up the Metaverse for years, but so far the only thing that came out was a level editor for Fortnite.
• David Baszucki of Roblox has been talking a lot about the Metaverse, too. Roblox is a big, open world system, so they have experience in running a somewaht blocky metaverse.

The previous generation of this idea mostly flopped. High Fidelity, Sansar, Sinespace, Spatial OS - user counts in 2 digits.

So what's going on?

Here's Baszuki's critera for a metaverse:

• You have to have an avatar with a virtual identity. You can be everything from a rock star to a fashion model, and that’s one big draw of the metaverse.
• You can make friends with real people and socialize in the metaverse.
• It has to be “immersive,” or make you feel like you’re somewhere else and you lose your sense of reality.
• You should be able to log in from anywhere, regardless of the country or culture where you come from.
• The metaverse has to have low friction, meaning you can go anywhere instantly.
• If you’re studying ancient Rome at school, you should be able to transport yourself there within a second and take a tour with your class. It has to have a variety of content to support the long tail of interests people have.
• You need a vibrant economy to ensure that people can make a living in the metaverse — not just coders but artists and designers too.
• And finally, you need safety and stability, so that people can come together and improve digital civility.

What that adds up to is Second Life. Without the clunkyness of 20-year old technology.

Nagle said:
So what's going on with the Metaverse?

Can you rephrase the question?

Tom Sloper said:

Nagle said:
So what's going on with the Metaverse?

Can you rephrase the question?

?

Who's doing anything interesting? Anybody on here building something good? Anyone aware of something good in development? There's a huge amount of press hype. NVidia Omniverse is interesting. What am I missing?

(I'm writing a new client viewer for Second Life in Rust using Vulkan, to see how that approach can be improved. The client-server protocol is public. Images are coming out of early test versions.)

I don't usually speak too much about my personal journey, but this hits me square in the center, so I'll give you my two cents worth:

First: NFTs are a way to launder money. Nobody buys a shitty Second Life house model for $800,000 if there isn't an underlying need to show some source of this here cash that I have sitting around. There is currently zero reason for a metaverse to use block chains to prove ownership – it just makes things slower, less reliable, and more expensive.

Second: I've tried, really hard, in my career to build the metaverse, in graphics, physics, networking, art paths, and server technology. I don't think it's going to happen until we have fully-immersive “cable in your brain” interface technology, that's as easy to put on as it is to doom scroll on your cell phone.

I built a part of the technology in There.com. The avatar system there was a lot of fun, and ahead of its time at the time, and the art path in 3ds Max was pretty decent, assuming you could afford 3ds Max. I also did networking, physics, server management, and a few other bits and bobs.

I led the build of Online Live Interactive Virtual Environment (OLIVE, used by the US Army, bought by SAIC) While this re-used art assets and networking from There.com, it actually had a new terrain model, a new renderer, and a number of other interesting developments. The full-world full-geometry arbitrary-resolution terrain database we built (with double precision coordinates, but running on consumer cards!) was quite good.

I led several technology teams at IMVU. The IMVU avatar catalog is very large, and I actually like the “lightweight” approach to metaverse, but the community has struggled to break out of its niche look and feel, the art path has been quite byzantine, and the lack of scripting and physics held it back for game-like experiences.

I led the game engine / networking group at Roblox for a while. They have the game and user-creation system down, and a great team, but I think that the blox-ey part of it will prevent most people over 20 from taking it seriously other than as a way to develop games for younger people. This is the closest we've gotten to a widespread metaverse, but I left because I had become disillusioned with the chase for the metaverse.

At this point, I've retired from game technologies for money, and have co-founded a start-up aimed at making sense of all the data that our machines spits out – something a step function better than Elastic, or Splunk, or New Relic. Selling useful tools to enterprises seems to be a better option than trying to detach humans from the real world :-)

@Nagle I'm writing a new client viewer for Second Life in Rust using Vulkan

Are they still using their server-animation approach, where ever object and every joint needs to be driven from the server every frame?

That's … not a great part of their design, IMO.

Agree about NFTs. But I could be wrong. I thought Bitcoin was overpriced at $20.

I don't think it's going to happen until we have fully-immersive “cable in your brain” interface technology, that's as easy to put on as it is to doom scroll on your cell phone.

Ouch. But that's what the VR headgear people ran into. If the visual world moves relative to the user, some users get nauseated and most users get tired. If the visual world is locked to the real world, you can make Beat Saber. There's a reason that Beat Saber is the most succesful VR game.

(Roblox) have the game and user-creation system down, and a great team, but I think that the blox-ey part of it will prevent most people over 20 from taking it seriously.

Interesting point. Roblox has been moving towards more realistic items,, while staying with the blocky avatars. That may be a stylistic decision in a world made for kids. I'm wondering what Roblox will do. The CEO wants to get to a metaverse, and they have the money, competence, and user base to do it.

I had become disillusioned with the chase for the metaverse.

That's a problem. Once you've built it, what do you do in there? The metaverse itself is indifferent to you, like a big city.