Nagle said:
If they can pick up all that existing user engagement and transplant it into their nascent AR/VR worlds

The other obvious Metaverse failure from some big company trying to “bootstrap” it, is Google Lively. (And, if you want to be mean, Playstation Home.)

People don't want to do mundane things in the Metaverse. They want to interact with other people in as real and unconstrained environment as possible.

Staring into a screen, or, worse, strapping a scuba mask on your face, needs a significant reward, which mainly means entertainment.

Even fancy “AR assisted mechanical repair” type projects generally only improve performance based on making better information available in a better curated way, not the actual technical display. The same information, in easily searchable/browsable formats like PDF, tend to do just as well.

At some point, “real and unconstrained” will perhaps be possible to deliver through “cable into your head” kind of interfaces. At that point, I would be willing to reconsider my adoption rate prediction!

How do we make the metaverse fun?

I think the more interesting question is why would we try to take something that's entertainment and jam it into everyday life?

Technically, it may actually be possible to make “the metaverse” to be “fun” (enough) – deal with griefers, fatigue, repetition, and all the rest. But then, isn't that just another game?

I don't see anyone taking “paying my bills” or “going to the doctor” or “painting my house” and somehow turning that into a computer game that I'd be using. That's about as dumb as thinking that “because it's on the blockchain” makes anything happen in reality.

NFTs are a great money laundering scheme, nothing more. If I need to pay you a million bucks for … reasons … and want something to show in return so the authorities don't ask uncomfortable questions, then you will make an NFT and I will buy it. And you, the receiver, don't have to explain where the extra million bucks came from – no “very popular cash-only mattress store” charade needed.

Physical property accounted on the blockchain is only as secure as the overall society's will to apply physical force in its defense. Might as well remove the blockchain step.

I really do believe in the power of technology to significantly improve our lives, but these particular technologies, not as much!

hplus0603 said:
I really do believe in the power of technology to significantly improve our lives, but these particular technologies, not as much.

Probably right. After a huge collection of Metaverse hype articles, the mainstream press, or at least what Bing News searches, is starting to show skepticism. Seen today: "The Metaverse: Future of post-pandemic business, or just another attempt to kickstart VR/AR adoption?” (The title is the best part of the article; look it up if you like.)

Roblox is grinding away, with 50 teams and a US$48 billion market cap, making their virtual world better. They have a coherent path to the metaverse. Their current product is a world with customer-created mini-games, millions of them, forced to fight over users. Roblox just makes and runs the engine, and takes a 90%+ cut of revenue. All they have to do is improve the engine. The business model already works.

Roblox is really YouTube for junior game devs. Like YouTube, they just have to keep the content delivery system working really well, and provide the incentives that make content producers fight for high ratings. Everybody else is struggling with both inadequate technology and lack of a business model.

Nagle said:
Roblox is really YouTube for junior game devs. Like YouTube, they just have to keep the content delivery system working really well, and provide the incentives that make content producers fight for high ratings. Everybody else is struggling with both inadequate technology and lack of a business model.

I think this is a very apt analogy. 100% this!

hplus0603 said:
I think this is a very apt analogy. 100% this!

Thus, Roblox's job is to make their platform more powerful, better looking, and easier to use. Which they are hiring for. Really hiring. They have about 150 engineering openings. Most rather senior. See https://corp.roblox.com/careers/​​​​​ They are clearly serious about this, and have the money to back it.

Facebook's huge push, hiring 10,000 people to build the metaverse: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/18/tech/facebook-metaverse-10000-european-jobs/index.html​

Tom Sloper said:

Facebook's huge push, hiring 10,000 people to build the metaverse: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/18/tech/facebook-metaverse-10000-european-jobs/index.html​

As what, moderators? Roblox has somewhere around 4000 moderators, outsourced to some company in India. Ad sales reps? Can't be developers. That's like 20x an AAA title. AR headgear factory workers, maybe?

Nagle said:
Can't be developers. That's like 20x an AAA title.

I would imagine a feasible metaverse is at least 20x the complexity of a single AAA title ?

Jokes aside, big tech firms aren't subject to the same sort of economic constraints that game studios are. FB makes so much money from their primary business (ads) that they can float an investment of tens of billions pretty much indefinitely if they believe the metaverse is a future profit center.

New article from gamesindustry.biz - https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-10-21-improbable-takes-another-crack-at-explaining-the-metaverse​

Article author: “At the end of the conversation, we're unconvinced by Narula's optimism, but we do have a clearer idea where he's coming from.”

Improbable is pivoting again? They got a huge amount of venture capital to create the middleware for big shared virtual worlds, SpatialOS. They shipped it, but as a service; you had to run on Google Cloud, and every game transaction was metered. A few indy games used it, notably Worlds Adrift, which was well liked. But the system cost too much to run and free-to-play without heavy monetization broke three indy developers. There was also Nostos, a MMO with great game art that took about three hours to clear the game. That was shut down due to lack of interest.

Comments on here about Spatial OS were mostly negative. It's basically a distributed object store that tries to move objects near the process using them. It's an attempt to solve the big-world problem that you can't have too many people in one area. It works partly by moving the partitions between regions dynamically. Seems reasonable, but apparently wasn't. I was hoping they'd crack that problem. There's still no good general purpose back end for large dynamic-content virtual worlds.

So, with nobody using their middleware, they started an in-house game studio to use it. That resulted in Scavengers, which is yet another post-apoc FPS MMO. Reaction to that seems to be “meh”.

So now their CEO is talking about “blockchain”.

Hi. I think I can add to this discussion. My company has been working on an immersive VR metaverse for 3 years (even before Horizon was announced). It will satisfy all of Baszuki's criteria for a real metaverse (and immersive unlike second life).

MassiveLoop.com (Massive Loop Metaverse). Development is a picking up steam, funds have been raised, and we will be entering a closed alpha in a few weeks.

discord.gg/massiveloop

We started research in 2017 and by now have studied all metaverses in strengths and weaknesses in depth (vrchat,roblox,altspace,decentraland,secondlife,cryptovoxels,recroom,sandbox,somnium, I'm sure I left some out)

Our metaverse is meant to offer game devs a HIGH level of programmability, not just drawing node graphs. It utilizes Unity on the back end and LUA to abstract the SDK (like roblox).

You can write an A* script (or just drop a prefab that contains one). It also makes multiplayer and VR integration very easy. You can literally setup a unity scene, drop a spawn point and upload it and then walk around the world in like 2 minutes.

I think it's very promising.

But I can speak to the other topics too. For example, No, I don't believe NFTs are a requirement for a metaverse, but today there are a lot of companies attaching the word “metaverse” to their projects today just for the buzz.

I've even seen just websites called “metaverses”, they're missing the point. The metaverse is the 3D immersive representation of the web, not a website, not an NFT trading game. Personally I take offense to it ? because this has

been the most challenging project I've worked on in 20 years of software development, but what you gonna do. I just let it motivate me to build faster.