7 ms·

The metaverse is a dystopian nightmare – let’s build a better reality

161 points by riebschlager 5y ago

ipsum2 5y ago
Title doesn't really reflect the content of the article. Niantic is describing how they're going to build their own Metaverse in AR.
- suyash 5y ago
  It's just a pitch in disguise for their new platform which is years behind major AR cloud platforms. I won't bother paying it any attention.
shmerl 5y ago
Virtuaverse seems to be describing something similar: https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse Permanent reality idea could be closer than it looks.
dougmwne 5y ago
Did Pokemon Go make any major progress in AR interactivity in the 5 years since it's release or is Niantic blowing smoke?
- quxpar 5y ago
  They bought out a couple companies who made major leaps, 6D.ai for example.
- dave5104 5y ago
  Depending on how you define AR, they've added a number of features to Pokémon GO over the years (ability to place Pokémon into the world and view them with your phone's camera, real-time in-game weather based on your location, and realistic sky graphics with everything from sunsets to accurate star constellations). But the common complaint I hear from players is that they don't really care about those developments since the AR additions haven't really altered the basic game play loop.
  - CobrastanJorji 5y ago
    "This is what the night sky would look like here if you didn't live within 100 miles of a pokestop."
freeone3000 5y ago
VRChat is working pretty well. The interface is a little clunky, but, it's pretty much what I think when I think metaverse. Not sure what Niantic is on about.
ericjang 5y ago
The title and content of the article, in which Hanke espouses the virtues if Niantic Labs (an AR company), were cognitively dissonant for me. > The concept reached one of its most complete expressions in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, where virtually everyone has abandoned reality for an elaborate VR massively multiplayer video game. A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one I'm trying to understand what Hanke is really saying. Is he saying that VR sucks, and AR, specifically AR that encourages people to interact with the real physical world, is where its at? I assume by "biggest names in technology and gaming" he is referring to Niantic's competitors? Specifically what about those bets does he disagree with?
- fullshark 5y ago
  I think you got it. I'm pretty sure he's saying: VR bad, AR good. VR = escape from reality, AR = richer engagement with reality.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    I don’t get why escaping reality is bad. Is theatre bad? Books? Movies? Providing a good escape from reality can lower people’s demands of reality, which can lead to a more sustainable future. If people can eat beans but be tricked into thinking they’re eating steak it can improve health and lower emissions, for example.
    - fullshark 5y ago
      Well recreational drug abuse is bad, and video game addiction is bad, and ignoring your problems forever is bad. Ultimately it's a matter of degree and costs associated with the escape. I would never make a blanket statement like VR or the metaverse is bad (especially cause it doesn't seem to exist in a fully realized form yet) but the vision doesn't particularly inspire me, and Hanke is trying to appeal to that POV by mentioning dystopian scifi representations of it, where it represented an escape from a disturbing reality.
niggerdude 5y ago
^
yuy910616 5y ago
There is a good reason to do something and there is a real reason. Coming from Niantic, who is a proponent of AR, it seems like the good reason is to care about building a better reality, but I'm curious if anyone knows enough to comment on their 'real' reason?
- fullshark 5y ago
  I mean the real reason is clearly to inspire people to work for / with them on their projects, the last section is hardly subtle on this front.
RGamma 5y ago
The metaverse is yet another thing no-one asked for but something we're still going to get. It doesn't matter what anyone thinks or says. The higher-ups have decided it's going to happen, the puppets are going to dance and so it will.
shock-value 5y ago
Whenever a company describes their vision of "the metaverse" (or I guess "reality channels" in this case) it's always exceedingly vague and never really explains in concrete terms what sort of utility or entertainment a person would derive from it. I guess it's just the latest vehicle to get investors or stockholders excited without needing to rely upon any work or logic beyond the unclear promise of technologies that themselves haven't even been proven out yet. (And this is coming from someone who does think VR is really cool -- with respect to some of the discrete, packaged, and targeted immersive experiences that are already available.)
- _jal 5y ago
  It is just a hype cycle, yes. Propose some use cases for it, preferably ones that involve lots of people throwing money at the people you're pitching to. Then do the other end - pick a market segmentation and explain why they are going to feel dumb, fat and poor for not jumping in. 4 iterations later, it becomes apparent it has replaced first person shooters, is good for trying on clothes and sex with robots, and is the favored environment for low-end interviews.
- sen 5y ago
  The reality of the "metaverse" as far as I'm seeing it, is literally just MMORPGs without a story/purpose, where you hang out with friends, chat, do shared activities, etc etc. Second Life done better, with the world size/style of WoW/Fortnite/Minecraft/Rust/etc (choose your graphics and fantasy genre). Plenty of people already join custom Minecraft servers just to hang out and voice-chat while messing around doing stupid stuff... it's just that taken to a new level. Everything else is just hype by massive advertising companies to try sell you on THEIR version of that, and make it seem like a universe-changing step in humanity that will raise you to the next level in evolution, so that they can fill it with ads (direct and indirect/subliminal) to make more money.
  - dopidopHN 5y ago
    Actually one of my first experience I can remember on the internet was something called “the 3D village” circa 1998. A proto second life, inhabited by French and québécois teenagers.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
Not a fan of VR or AR, personally.
cfeliped 5y ago
Please fix Go Battle League
rektide 5y ago
Putting more flat screens atop the real world has lost it's luster for me. I'm very much a fan of ubiquotous (& pervasive) computing, still as much of a torch for it as ever. But these days I tend to think more ambient, non-visual modalities & connecting the network fo devices is more interesting. Efforts like Web of Things standards (a web standard for exposing devices) and WebThings (a unrealted semantic-web powered iot engine spun out from Mozilla) talk to creating awareness & control over the seas of devices about us (& afar too). Systems like Eddystone/PhysicalWeb/Bluetooth-beacons provide ambient awareness of local systems & endpoints, and one day I hope people & interests too (that want to be so locally digitally available). These, to me, along with good interoperabile standards (like ActivityPub), feel like the seeds for a Rainbows End scenario, where comment trees hang in the world, where everything is annotateable. But I tend to think these connective mediums are well served by the screens we put & pull from our pockets, served by watches & vibrations and bluetooth headsets. I don't know what the metaverse might be. But back when ubicomp was younger, I remember being absolutely floored by Steve Mann piping his worn camera sensors over analog TV signal to an SGI box, processing it, and beaming it back to his immersive display. He was reprocessing reality, not simply overlaying digital atop it. I doubt there was all that much really going on on the SGI, but it filled me with the ideas of a world which was visually editable. And I think that's where we've seen little progress. Some of the hololens & magic leap demos were very compelling... 5 years ago. First Person Shooter type things played in the living room. And there are a steady march of really good phone based demos of virtual objects dropped into a similar camera-view of the world. But really, we need to get much better at having digital systems ingesting the world about us, and we need to start unleashing human creativity that people can redraw & reimagine the physical world. We need procedural toolkits galore to re-simulate environments. An augmentative metaverse needs filters, well beyond what a photo filter is, requiring both that input of the world, and the flexible programmatic world-shaders we can orchestrate & lean on to rewrite the world, before it gets to our eyes.
- vgel 5y ago
  Have you heard of Dynamicland / Paper Programs? If not, you might find them interesting in this vein.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cblconfederate 5y ago
I mean, we ve "reinvented" IRC for the n-th time, why not do the same for Second Life. again
visualradio 5y ago
If augmented reality leads to neural implants it can potentially lead to an even worse dystopia if the technology is not open source. Limited access to resources may result in the coercion of workers into accepting patented neural implants in order to participate in an idea-based economy in order to accumulate any personal property necessary for survival. Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors, implants also open up possibility of direct external suggestion to disable the ability of thinkers to consider whether or not they are free. The highest value of thinkers is freedom of thought. Since thought arises from material conditions and living in a community allows more time for thought by decreasing the time its members spend on basic survival there is always a social \ political \ economic component which must be considered when building better realities to avoid simply accelerating the essential trajectory of a current reality.
- leppr 5y ago
  > Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors With the prevalence of cleartext cloud-based workflows (Discord, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Github, ...) many people may already be living in a similar reality.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    You just don't enter private thoughts into such systems. The line is pretty clear. The only problem is that if you want to WfH, it becomes nearly mandatory to establish side-channels for unofficial, non-company discussion between co-workers to replace neutral spaces in the office like the break room or cafeteria.
    - visualradio 5y ago
      I think the only long term solution is to establish or work for a cooperative which does not patent ideas or which only patents ideas defensively to protect the free use of ideas for its members, to establish public banks, to levy distributive taxes on private land and natural resource holders.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
worldsayshi 5y ago
I see a potential in using VR as an interface to reality. Or rather, as a more immersive way to build models and test ideas about how we can solve problems in reality.
Animats 5y ago
We now have two visions of a metaverse. The augmented reality version is Google Glass with better graphics. That's what Niantic has in mind: "The Pokémon will finally be able to truly walk among us!" With better hardware, that becomes becomes the famous "Hyperreality" video.[1] That's also Zuckerberg's vision: everyone wearing Facebook goggles and logged into Facebook at all times. The virtual reality vision is less clear, because it doesn't really work yet. Moving around wearing VR headgear still doesn't work if you want to go very far, which is why Beat Saber is still the best VR game. Keyboard and screen, preferably with a big screen, still beats headgear for extended use. Nobody has a really good answer to that problem. VRChat is probably as good as it gets right now, short of the location-based systems. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
TechBro8615 5y ago
Surely if any metaverse is to truly compete with reality, we’ll need to build it on a federated fabric. Sometimes I wonder if people would invent the internet of today by modeling a company after Cloudflare. The success and resiliency of the Internet comes not from the strength of a single company, but from its focus on federation and interoperability. No single company could build the Internet and be successful, and the same is true for the metaverse. The focus should be on developers, shared spaces and protocols. How can I connect my server running a game on Unity engine to your server running a Godot engine? Can I walk between them, transport my avatar between worlds? Can I run copies of myself in multiple realms? Can I play Factorio inside the game room of my Minecraft megabase? I’d like to see more crazy ideas and wild hacks focusing along these lines. In fact I’m surprised there aren’t more “metaverse for crypto” initiatives. I guess we’re probably still 10-15 years away from the first successful application of these concepts.
- hanniabu 5y ago
  > I’m surprised there aren’t more “metaverse for crypto” initiatives There's a few projects working in this space, but individual components. The NFT space will converge onto what I believe will be the winning metaverse vision. Participants own the IP, the land, the characters, the tools, the weapons, etc.
  - cloudking 5y ago
    https://decentraland.org/ https://decentraland.org/
    - hanniabu 5y ago
      Another cool one is https://somniumspace.com/ https://somniumspace.com/
adenozine 5y ago
"Wow the metaverse sucks..." "So anyways, we're building a metaverse with Pokemon and advertising, and it will NOT suck..."
danShumway 5y ago
> Multiply this kind of channel x1000: Mario, Transformers, Marvel’s superhero universe, the world of Wakanda, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bladerunner, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, The Maltese Falcon — all of these and countless more will exist as reality channels that you can turn on, transforming your daily routine into something a bit more magical, intriguing, exciting — and most of all, a little more fun. Importantly, all of these experiences will be shared by countless other people, so that the adventure is a catalyst for spending time together and deepening social relationships. But even more importantly, none of those people you're interacting with have any agency over those brands or IPs, and their interaction with the metaverse will necessarily be filtered through a set of corporate-controlled allowed actions and responses. Those "social relationships" will be a guided experience. When replacing or overlaying reality with IP, it becomes necessary to ask the question, "who owns the IP?" The counter-cultural, weird sci-fi worlds of current platforms like VRChat exist in no small part because the people interacting with them have agency. They ignore copyright, they make whatever they want, they form whatever communities they want. I'm not interested in your vision of an AR metaverse if your vision of the metaverse is that Nintendo or Disney gets to put an extra layer over the real world that gives them even more control over how I can interact with it. The author keeps talking about culture, but the brands and IPs that they're championing are fundamentally opposed to the free expression of culture outside of their owners' control, and cementing the metaverse in an "official" way that retained that control would result in a world even more restrictive than our current one. Hard pass.
- dogman144 5y ago
  Very good take.
- taurusnoises 5y ago
  Was about to reply, but this basically sums up everything I was gonna say. Well played, my friend.
- nynx 5y ago
  My worry is that it’ll be impossible to stop this from happening.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Let’s do both, a metaverse will always be more interesting in some subset that can’t exist in reality.
karaterobot 5y ago
The biggest artificial universe, created by our smartest and most idealistic techno-utopian hippies, got subverted and then perverted into the internet of today. Now, the sort of people who did a lot of the subverting want to try again, but this time it'll be for profit and full of monetization and tracking ab initio, and I'm supposed to think it'll work out because we have AR glasses now. Yeah, that's what was missing, the glasses.
gfodor 5y ago
Everyone’s vision of the metaverse seems to be directly tied to their pre-existing business interests. Call me when you work on several of these projects in a row and debias yourself and your financial interests from what ought to be done to create the best possible future for spatial computing.
Stampo00 5y ago
This really smacks of Magic Leap for me, which is far from a compliment. I think we all know how this story ends already.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
I think the public blockchain is the only basis of a non-dystopian metaverse. With it, ownership over digital assets can transcend any specific proprietary platform. For that to happen, a general consensus needs to emerge that the public blockchain is the canonical source of truth on ownership of works of arts, and a convention needs to be established where platforms respect blockchain-based claims and reserve for possessors of such claims exclusive use of the respective artwork. Without an open ownership system, people will be compelled by market forces to converge to using a single proprietary platform that can provide a consistent account and set of rules on claims to digital property, and this platform being mutable by the proprietor, will make that proprietor inordinately powerful in a way that disfigures the socioeconomic landscape to make it less functional.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  The assumption I don't like here is that we're still fixated on an ownership and scarcity model. As has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, many of the most exciting experiences are the ones that don't bother playing ownership police. For every one person who says "Oh, everyone isn't celebrating and paying me because that widget is My Special Creation (R) (TM) (C) (GMbH), so I'll stop creating" there are a hundred who use that widget to make to build new and exciting things. Let him leave. The whole focus on intellectual property, and new IP-adjacent gimmicks like NFTs feels like a tragic Emperor's New Clothes skit. I'm waiting on the kid to point and say "bits aren't scarce" which causes the whole market bubble to come crashing down.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Yes, that is a fair point. One thing I'd note on that subject is that the current market of blockchain-based NFTs does not usually come with copyright restrictions. You are allowed to use a copy of an NFTized jpg, but of course the person possessing the NFT can always cryptographically prove that they own the 'official' version, which confers prestige. The analog world corollary would be owning the original Mona Lisa, while others still have the freedom to create copies. The latter does not diminish the value of the former. So in some sense, right now with most NFTs, you get the best of both worlds: a way to compensate creators of artwork, by giving them a scarce resource representing their creation that will command market value, and the freedom to use the art others release as you want.
imvetri 5y ago
hahaha
nathias 5y ago
I don't see the value in overlaying the earth with superheroes and tampon adds, but it would be cool to have a subtractive layer that blocks all this garbage from your view.
JakeAl 5y ago
Isn't Ninatic the company funded by the CIA's venture fund? And call me when when VR glasses are lightweight glasses and not head gear. I have a hard enough time using reading glasses as I get older.
L_226 5y ago
I built mirrorspace.net (beta up at https://app.mirrorspace.net/ https://app.mirrorspace.net/) which is a "mirror space" i.e. a virtual layer ontop of our normal physical space. Users can browse nearby landmarks (currently based on geolookup wikipedia entries) and also upload their own media. But the catch is, for anyone else to view your media and interact with it, they need to be within 50m of the upload location. This mechanic is meant to drive a dual virtual/physical interaction that gives a more holistic and potentially a more meaningful social media experience. My idea was to add search filters, commenting, voting etc. and allow people to "feel" how people currently interact with any location - so if I fly to SF from Berlin, I can immediately browse the mirrorspace and see what people are doing specifically where I am now, and also get a handle on the social fabric of that place. I wanted to have a platform that records significant events in a temporal way, maybe protests or similar - things that define each city/place uniquely. The monetisation strategy was to allow people to pay the platform to increase the visibility radius of their posts, and/or allow people to pay to view media items from outside the normal radius - where a share of this payment goes to the uploader. I was fucking around for a few years on this, and now I have another major project to work on so no longer have time or motivation to "finish" it. I might open source it in the future, if anyone is interested. (I haven't looked at the code in months)
- ay 5y ago
  This is really cool even in its current form! Was very interesting to learn some new details about the local landmarks (center of Brussels). How did you determine the precise position on the map for the articles ? I have a long time toyed with the idea of notes-photos-locations-time-internet activity interspersed into a single environment, which would allow to find things by association. Having this onto a private hosted instance might be a very nice approach to increasing invasiveness of the device manufacturers by just making them thin terminals onto your own “activity content hub”.
  - L_226 5y ago
    Thanks! Actually wikipedia has already a geolocate param in the mediawiki API, and many articles have associated GPS coords. A rather grim one I found in Sicily last year was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alitalia_Flight_4128 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alitalia_Flight_4128, I could see the exact coordinates on the mirrorspace map where the plane went down... I also think a hosted version, or secure (yeah I know) account for personal geospatial note type things would be useful; e.g. mark a location for a reminder to do something the next time you are nearby (store X has a sale, location Y has live music daily at 1300)
zacay 5y ago
The author, John Hanke, raised VC investment from the CIA as CEO of Keyhole [1] before their acquisition by Google in 2004. At Google, Hanke ran the Geo division while street-view cars were illegally collecting Wi-Fi data en masse [2]. Yet we're supposed to believe that he will build a metaverse that's NOT dystopian? [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20030801175255/http://www.keyhole.com/press_releases/20030625.html http://web.archive.org/web/20030801175255/http://www.keyhole... [2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/privacy-scandal-haunts-pokemon-gos-ceo/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/privacy-scandal-haunts-p...
bullen 5y ago
To me the metaverse is more about rules than the technical details. We need an internet where people are not constrained in what they are allowed to do for earnings. Open-source is only half the battle as content also need to shift. Open-content? I made the network protocol: http://github.com/tinspin/fuse http://github.com/tinspin/fuse And now I'm working on the file formats: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449
dotcoma 5y ago
Isn't this post a bit weird, coming from the makers of PokemonGo ?

161 points by riebschlager 5y ago

Title doesn't really reflect the content of the article. Niantic is describing how they're going to build their own Metaverse in AR.

suyash 5y ago
It's just a pitch in disguise for their new platform which is years behind major AR cloud platforms. I won't bother paying it any attention.

shmerl 5y ago

Virtuaverse seems to be describing something similar: https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse Permanent reality idea could be closer than it looks.

dougmwne 5y ago

Did Pokemon Go make any major progress in AR interactivity in the 5 years since it's release or is Niantic blowing smoke?

quxpar 5y ago
They bought out a couple companies who made major leaps, 6D.ai for example.
dave5104 5y ago
Depending on how you define AR, they've added a number of features to Pokémon GO over the years (ability to place Pokémon into the world and view them with your phone's camera, real-time in-game weather based on your location, and realistic sky graphics with everything from sunsets to accurate star constellations). But the common complaint I hear from players is that they don't really care about those developments since the AR additions haven't really altered the basic game play loop.
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  "This is what the night sky would look like here if you didn't live within 100 miles of a pokestop."

freeone3000 5y ago

VRChat is working pretty well. The interface is a little clunky, but, it's pretty much what I think when I think metaverse. Not sure what Niantic is on about.

ericjang 5y ago

The title and content of the article, in which Hanke espouses the virtues if Niantic Labs (an AR company), were cognitively dissonant for me. > The concept reached one of its most complete expressions in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, where virtually everyone has abandoned reality for an elaborate VR massively multiplayer video game. A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one I'm trying to understand what Hanke is really saying. Is he saying that VR sucks, and AR, specifically AR that encourages people to interact with the real physical world, is where its at? I assume by "biggest names in technology and gaming" he is referring to Niantic's competitors? Specifically what about those bets does he disagree with?

fullshark 5y ago
I think you got it. I'm pretty sure he's saying: VR bad, AR good. VR = escape from reality, AR = richer engagement with reality.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  I don’t get why escaping reality is bad. Is theatre bad? Books? Movies? Providing a good escape from reality can lower people’s demands of reality, which can lead to a more sustainable future. If people can eat beans but be tricked into thinking they’re eating steak it can improve health and lower emissions, for example.
  - fullshark 5y ago
    Well recreational drug abuse is bad, and video game addiction is bad, and ignoring your problems forever is bad. Ultimately it's a matter of degree and costs associated with the escape. I would never make a blanket statement like VR or the metaverse is bad (especially cause it doesn't seem to exist in a fully realized form yet) but the vision doesn't particularly inspire me, and Hanke is trying to appeal to that POV by mentioning dystopian scifi representations of it, where it represented an escape from a disturbing reality.

niggerdude 5y ago

yuy910616 5y ago

There is a good reason to do something and there is a real reason. Coming from Niantic, who is a proponent of AR, it seems like the good reason is to care about building a better reality, but I'm curious if anyone knows enough to comment on their 'real' reason?

fullshark 5y ago
I mean the real reason is clearly to inspire people to work for / with them on their projects, the last section is hardly subtle on this front.

RGamma 5y ago

The metaverse is yet another thing no-one asked for but something we're still going to get. It doesn't matter what anyone thinks or says. The higher-ups have decided it's going to happen, the puppets are going to dance and so it will.

shock-value 5y ago

Whenever a company describes their vision of "the metaverse" (or I guess "reality channels" in this case) it's always exceedingly vague and never really explains in concrete terms what sort of utility or entertainment a person would derive from it. I guess it's just the latest vehicle to get investors or stockholders excited without needing to rely upon any work or logic beyond the unclear promise of technologies that themselves haven't even been proven out yet. (And this is coming from someone who does think VR is really cool -- with respect to some of the discrete, packaged, and targeted immersive experiences that are already available.)

_jal 5y ago
It is just a hype cycle, yes. Propose some use cases for it, preferably ones that involve lots of people throwing money at the people you're pitching to. Then do the other end - pick a market segmentation and explain why they are going to feel dumb, fat and poor for not jumping in. 4 iterations later, it becomes apparent it has replaced first person shooters, is good for trying on clothes and sex with robots, and is the favored environment for low-end interviews.
sen 5y ago
The reality of the "metaverse" as far as I'm seeing it, is literally just MMORPGs without a story/purpose, where you hang out with friends, chat, do shared activities, etc etc. Second Life done better, with the world size/style of WoW/Fortnite/Minecraft/Rust/etc (choose your graphics and fantasy genre). Plenty of people already join custom Minecraft servers just to hang out and voice-chat while messing around doing stupid stuff... it's just that taken to a new level. Everything else is just hype by massive advertising companies to try sell you on THEIR version of that, and make it seem like a universe-changing step in humanity that will raise you to the next level in evolution, so that they can fill it with ads (direct and indirect/subliminal) to make more money.
- dopidopHN 5y ago
  Actually one of my first experience I can remember on the internet was something called “the 3D village” circa 1998. A proto second life, inhabited by French and québécois teenagers.

hammyhavoc 5y ago

Not a fan of VR or AR, personally.

cfeliped 5y ago

Please fix Go Battle League

rektide 5y ago

Putting more flat screens atop the real world has lost it's luster for me. I'm very much a fan of ubiquotous (& pervasive) computing, still as much of a torch for it as ever. But these days I tend to think more ambient, non-visual modalities & connecting the network fo devices is more interesting. Efforts like Web of Things standards (a web standard for exposing devices) and WebThings (a unrealted semantic-web powered iot engine spun out from Mozilla) talk to creating awareness & control over the seas of devices about us (& afar too). Systems like Eddystone/PhysicalWeb/Bluetooth-beacons provide ambient awareness of local systems & endpoints, and one day I hope people & interests too (that want to be so locally digitally available). These, to me, along with good interoperabile standards (like ActivityPub), feel like the seeds for a Rainbows End scenario, where comment trees hang in the world, where everything is annotateable. But I tend to think these connective mediums are well served by the screens we put & pull from our pockets, served by watches & vibrations and bluetooth headsets. I don't know what the metaverse might be. But back when ubicomp was younger, I remember being absolutely floored by Steve Mann piping his worn camera sensors over analog TV signal to an SGI box, processing it, and beaming it back to his immersive display. He was reprocessing reality, not simply overlaying digital atop it. I doubt there was all that much really going on on the SGI, but it filled me with the ideas of a world which was visually editable. And I think that's where we've seen little progress. Some of the hololens & magic leap demos were very compelling... 5 years ago. First Person Shooter type things played in the living room. And there are a steady march of really good phone based demos of virtual objects dropped into a similar camera-view of the world. But really, we need to get much better at having digital systems ingesting the world about us, and we need to start unleashing human creativity that people can redraw & reimagine the physical world. We need procedural toolkits galore to re-simulate environments. An augmentative metaverse needs filters, well beyond what a photo filter is, requiring both that input of the world, and the flexible programmatic world-shaders we can orchestrate & lean on to rewrite the world, before it gets to our eyes.

vgel 5y ago
Have you heard of Dynamicland / Paper Programs? If not, you might find them interesting in this vein.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cblconfederate 5y ago

I mean, we ve "reinvented" IRC for the n-th time, why not do the same for Second Life. again

visualradio 5y ago

If augmented reality leads to neural implants it can potentially lead to an even worse dystopia if the technology is not open source. Limited access to resources may result in the coercion of workers into accepting patented neural implants in order to participate in an idea-based economy in order to accumulate any personal property necessary for survival. Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors, implants also open up possibility of direct external suggestion to disable the ability of thinkers to consider whether or not they are free. The highest value of thinkers is freedom of thought. Since thought arises from material conditions and living in a community allows more time for thought by decreasing the time its members spend on basic survival there is always a social \ political \ economic component which must be considered when building better realities to avoid simply accelerating the essential trajectory of a current reality.

leppr 5y ago
> Accepting such implants might then allow direct surveillance of thoughts so that all novel ideas which thinkers come up with are patented by private investors With the prevalence of cleartext cloud-based workflows (Discord, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Github, ...) many people may already be living in a similar reality.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  You just don't enter private thoughts into such systems. The line is pretty clear. The only problem is that if you want to WfH, it becomes nearly mandatory to establish side-channels for unofficial, non-company discussion between co-workers to replace neutral spaces in the office like the break room or cafeteria.
  - visualradio 5y ago
    I think the only long term solution is to establish or work for a cooperative which does not patent ideas or which only patents ideas defensively to protect the free use of ideas for its members, to establish public banks, to levy distributive taxes on private land and natural resource holders.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

worldsayshi 5y ago

I see a potential in using VR as an interface to reality. Or rather, as a more immersive way to build models and test ideas about how we can solve problems in reality.

Animats 5y ago

We now have two visions of a metaverse. The augmented reality version is Google Glass with better graphics. That's what Niantic has in mind: "The Pokémon will finally be able to truly walk among us!" With better hardware, that becomes becomes the famous "Hyperreality" video.[1] That's also Zuckerberg's vision: everyone wearing Facebook goggles and logged into Facebook at all times. The virtual reality vision is less clear, because it doesn't really work yet. Moving around wearing VR headgear still doesn't work if you want to go very far, which is why Beat Saber is still the best VR game. Keyboard and screen, preferably with a big screen, still beats headgear for extended use. Nobody has a really good answer to that problem. VRChat is probably as good as it gets right now, short of the location-based systems. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

TechBro8615 5y ago

Surely if any metaverse is to truly compete with reality, we’ll need to build it on a federated fabric. Sometimes I wonder if people would invent the internet of today by modeling a company after Cloudflare. The success and resiliency of the Internet comes not from the strength of a single company, but from its focus on federation and interoperability. No single company could build the Internet and be successful, and the same is true for the metaverse. The focus should be on developers, shared spaces and protocols. How can I connect my server running a game on Unity engine to your server running a Godot engine? Can I walk between them, transport my avatar between worlds? Can I run copies of myself in multiple realms? Can I play Factorio inside the game room of my Minecraft megabase? I’d like to see more crazy ideas and wild hacks focusing along these lines. In fact I’m surprised there aren’t more “metaverse for crypto” initiatives. I guess we’re probably still 10-15 years away from the first successful application of these concepts.

hanniabu 5y ago
> I’m surprised there aren’t more “metaverse for crypto” initiatives There's a few projects working in this space, but individual components. The NFT space will converge onto what I believe will be the winning metaverse vision. Participants own the IP, the land, the characters, the tools, the weapons, etc.
- cloudking 5y ago
  https://decentraland.org/ https://decentraland.org/
  - hanniabu 5y ago
    Another cool one is https://somniumspace.com/ https://somniumspace.com/

adenozine 5y ago

"Wow the metaverse sucks..." "So anyways, we're building a metaverse with Pokemon and advertising, and it will NOT suck..."

danShumway 5y ago

> Multiply this kind of channel x1000: Mario, Transformers, Marvel’s superhero universe, the world of Wakanda, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bladerunner, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, The Maltese Falcon — all of these and countless more will exist as reality channels that you can turn on, transforming your daily routine into something a bit more magical, intriguing, exciting — and most of all, a little more fun. Importantly, all of these experiences will be shared by countless other people, so that the adventure is a catalyst for spending time together and deepening social relationships. But even more importantly, none of those people you're interacting with have any agency over those brands or IPs, and their interaction with the metaverse will necessarily be filtered through a set of corporate-controlled allowed actions and responses. Those "social relationships" will be a guided experience. When replacing or overlaying reality with IP, it becomes necessary to ask the question, "who owns the IP?" The counter-cultural, weird sci-fi worlds of current platforms like VRChat exist in no small part because the people interacting with them have agency. They ignore copyright, they make whatever they want, they form whatever communities they want. I'm not interested in your vision of an AR metaverse if your vision of the metaverse is that Nintendo or Disney gets to put an extra layer over the real world that gives them even more control over how I can interact with it. The author keeps talking about culture, but the brands and IPs that they're championing are fundamentally opposed to the free expression of culture outside of their owners' control, and cementing the metaverse in an "official" way that retained that control would result in a world even more restrictive than our current one. Hard pass.

dogman144 5y ago
Very good take.
taurusnoises 5y ago
Was about to reply, but this basically sums up everything I was gonna say. Well played, my friend.
nynx 5y ago
My worry is that it’ll be impossible to stop this from happening.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Let’s do both, a metaverse will always be more interesting in some subset that can’t exist in reality.

karaterobot 5y ago

The biggest artificial universe, created by our smartest and most idealistic techno-utopian hippies, got subverted and then perverted into the internet of today. Now, the sort of people who did a lot of the subverting want to try again, but this time it'll be for profit and full of monetization and tracking ab initio, and I'm supposed to think it'll work out because we have AR glasses now. Yeah, that's what was missing, the glasses.

gfodor 5y ago

Everyone’s vision of the metaverse seems to be directly tied to their pre-existing business interests. Call me when you work on several of these projects in a row and debias yourself and your financial interests from what ought to be done to create the best possible future for spatial computing.

Stampo00 5y ago

This really smacks of Magic Leap for me, which is far from a compliment. I think we all know how this story ends already.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

I think the public blockchain is the only basis of a non-dystopian metaverse. With it, ownership over digital assets can transcend any specific proprietary platform. For that to happen, a general consensus needs to emerge that the public blockchain is the canonical source of truth on ownership of works of arts, and a convention needs to be established where platforms respect blockchain-based claims and reserve for possessors of such claims exclusive use of the respective artwork. Without an open ownership system, people will be compelled by market forces to converge to using a single proprietary platform that can provide a consistent account and set of rules on claims to digital property, and this platform being mutable by the proprietor, will make that proprietor inordinately powerful in a way that disfigures the socioeconomic landscape to make it less functional.

hakfoo 5y ago
The assumption I don't like here is that we're still fixated on an ownership and scarcity model. As has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, many of the most exciting experiences are the ones that don't bother playing ownership police. For every one person who says "Oh, everyone isn't celebrating and paying me because that widget is My Special Creation (R) (TM) (C) (GMbH), so I'll stop creating" there are a hundred who use that widget to make to build new and exciting things. Let him leave. The whole focus on intellectual property, and new IP-adjacent gimmicks like NFTs feels like a tragic Emperor's New Clothes skit. I'm waiting on the kid to point and say "bits aren't scarce" which causes the whole market bubble to come crashing down.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Yes, that is a fair point. One thing I'd note on that subject is that the current market of blockchain-based NFTs does not usually come with copyright restrictions. You are allowed to use a copy of an NFTized jpg, but of course the person possessing the NFT can always cryptographically prove that they own the 'official' version, which confers prestige. The analog world corollary would be owning the original Mona Lisa, while others still have the freedom to create copies. The latter does not diminish the value of the former. So in some sense, right now with most NFTs, you get the best of both worlds: a way to compensate creators of artwork, by giving them a scarce resource representing their creation that will command market value, and the freedom to use the art others release as you want.

imvetri 5y ago

hahaha

nathias 5y ago

I don't see the value in overlaying the earth with superheroes and tampon adds, but it would be cool to have a subtractive layer that blocks all this garbage from your view.

JakeAl 5y ago

Isn't Ninatic the company funded by the CIA's venture fund? And call me when when VR glasses are lightweight glasses and not head gear. I have a hard enough time using reading glasses as I get older.

L_226 5y ago

I built mirrorspace.net (beta up at https://app.mirrorspace.net/ https://app.mirrorspace.net/) which is a "mirror space" i.e. a virtual layer ontop of our normal physical space. Users can browse nearby landmarks (currently based on geolookup wikipedia entries) and also upload their own media. But the catch is, for anyone else to view your media and interact with it, they need to be within 50m of the upload location. This mechanic is meant to drive a dual virtual/physical interaction that gives a more holistic and potentially a more meaningful social media experience. My idea was to add search filters, commenting, voting etc. and allow people to "feel" how people currently interact with any location - so if I fly to SF from Berlin, I can immediately browse the mirrorspace and see what people are doing specifically where I am now, and also get a handle on the social fabric of that place. I wanted to have a platform that records significant events in a temporal way, maybe protests or similar - things that define each city/place uniquely. The monetisation strategy was to allow people to pay the platform to increase the visibility radius of their posts, and/or allow people to pay to view media items from outside the normal radius - where a share of this payment goes to the uploader. I was fucking around for a few years on this, and now I have another major project to work on so no longer have time or motivation to "finish" it. I might open source it in the future, if anyone is interested. (I haven't looked at the code in months)

ay 5y ago
This is really cool even in its current form! Was very interesting to learn some new details about the local landmarks (center of Brussels). How did you determine the precise position on the map for the articles ? I have a long time toyed with the idea of notes-photos-locations-time-internet activity interspersed into a single environment, which would allow to find things by association. Having this onto a private hosted instance might be a very nice approach to increasing invasiveness of the device manufacturers by just making them thin terminals onto your own “activity content hub”.
- L_226 5y ago
  Thanks! Actually wikipedia has already a geolocate param in the mediawiki API, and many articles have associated GPS coords. A rather grim one I found in Sicily last year was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alitalia_Flight_4128 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alitalia_Flight_4128, I could see the exact coordinates on the mirrorspace map where the plane went down... I also think a hosted version, or secure (yeah I know) account for personal geospatial note type things would be useful; e.g. mark a location for a reminder to do something the next time you are nearby (store X has a sale, location Y has live music daily at 1300)

zacay 5y ago

The author, John Hanke, raised VC investment from the CIA as CEO of Keyhole [1] before their acquisition by Google in 2004. At Google, Hanke ran the Geo division while street-view cars were illegally collecting Wi-Fi data en masse [2]. Yet we're supposed to believe that he will build a metaverse that's NOT dystopian? [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20030801175255/http://www.keyhole.com/press_releases/20030625.html http://web.archive.org/web/20030801175255/http://www.keyhole... [2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/privacy-scandal-haunts-pokemon-gos-ceo/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/privacy-scandal-haunts-p...

bullen 5y ago

To me the metaverse is more about rules than the technical details. We need an internet where people are not constrained in what they are allowed to do for earnings. Open-source is only half the battle as content also need to shift. Open-content? I made the network protocol: http://github.com/tinspin/fuse http://github.com/tinspin/fuse And now I'm working on the file formats: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449

dotcoma 5y ago

Isn't this post a bit weird, coming from the makers of PokemonGo ?