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.
I would be very interested in seeing how a multi-million user AR equivalent to VRChat would play out. Layers of it could be extremely compelling or extremely ugly, like different rooms in VRChat are. Gibson, Vinge, and Stross have all given their takes on what this would look like too, but I expect the reality will be stranger than the fiction.
But they can with NFTs. This metaverse is currently being built on Ethereum.
If I'm remembering the last NFT cycle correctly, what actually happened was that a lot of existing content got linked to tokens that transferred no rights over that content and that were basically completely pointless. Noticing this, some of the real content owners then looked into taking their content down so that the tokens would seem more valuable to any rich buyers that wanted to claim that they owned memes. It's very difficult for me to see how that result is pro-culture.
I think that a lot of the hype around NFTs is nonsensical and that the tokens are going to be mostly meaningless in the long run, but even in a world where NFTs do work, they're just as bad if not worse than any existing IP system that exists today. The goal of NFTs is to provide a mechanism that allows people to permenently own a non-tangible piece of shared culture in perpetuity for as long as they want until they decide to sell it to another buyer.
That's the complete opposite of what I was asking for above. Nobody is looking at the dystopian potential of the metaverse and saying, "the problem with existing copyright systems is that the ownership eventually expires."
"So anyways, we're building a metaverse with Pokemon and advertising, and it will NOT suck..."
> 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?
The actual book was about a virtual world gone extremely right. The dystopian part was the corporations that sought private control of the platform.
Bonus complaint: The evil corporation in the film literally enslaves people and brazenly murders others in public, yet it's CEO is brought down by some unremarkable local cops? What?
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.
Look at the web — against all odds, it has tons of content beside ads!
Most of people’s experience would happen in this subverse, work, relationships, etc. Gamification would direct behavior throughout. You would code for FB or moderate for FB via this subverse.
Even physiological necessities would happen in two dimensions: in the subverse and in reality.
You summon the plumber gor the broken toilet in the subverse, they come to fix it within the subverse which is also expressed necessarily in reality.
It’s a potentially very scary proposition for whoever dictates the subverse in effect controls reality.
Of course there are plenty of game where you do things that would be illegal: GTA built an empire on it. But Pokemon is marketed towards kids.
On the other hand... I think your concern here is just about the worst example of pearl-clutching over video game violence that I've seen. Kids don't have a problem sorting fact from fiction when capturing Pokémon involves throwing a ball at them and the Pokémon somehow becoming entrapped within.
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.)
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.
A proto second life, inhabited by French and québécois teenagers.
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.
3D game worlds have value, open systems have value, but in completely opposite and contradictory ways. The value is in the entertainment of playing a well-built one, which means there has to be monetization and centralization. In other words, they have "production value". Open systems are outright allergic to that: while you can monetize, say, a webpage; there's no central WWW server, so there's no technical protection (DRM) against you just reuploading someone else's webpages. This doesn't matter so much for the web, because the cost to produce is low and the web has something the game worlds don't: "interconnection value".
A decade and change ago we had Second Life, a 3D game world built like an open system. This meant that instead of just giving you a bunch of levels with characters and game mechanics, they gave you a sandbox and told you to build whatever. They even released the Viewer source under GPL and at one point even promised to do the same with the Simulator server (which never panned out, although they were trialling grid interconnection with IBM at one point). You could build your own entirely independent Grid via OpenSim. At the same time, the game also had a centralized in-game economy based around selling content to build with. Linden Labs' embrace of openness, as incomplete as it was, wound up totally pissing off a lot of long-time users whose content could now be trivially copied, reuploaded, and resold using Free tools. They also had to deal with malicious Viewer forks, which ultimately wound up with them having an approval process for third-party Viewers, walking back some of that openness promise.
(I'm, of course, skipping over all of the other systems that have cropped up before and since - ActiveWorlds, VRChat, and so on. AFAIK none of them had metaverse pretensions to the same level as Second Life did.)
I've heard people claim Roblox is "the metaverse", and they might be close. However, it's far more of a closed system than even SL's open-viewer, closed-grid approach. They wouldn't for a second tolerate, say, someone writing a custom Roblox client or server. They do have an element of the metaverse that nobody likes to talk about, however: copyright infringement. Roblox has plenty of unlicensed fangames and other content that you wouldn't dream of being able to legally ship in a game world normally. This, to me, is one of the core properties of "metaverse-ness"; the ability for content to just exist in the game world without an associated license.
(Epic, you can use the term "metaverse" when I can design my own Fortnite skins and levels. Just being able to play on my PS4 with Xbox players is only a small part of it.)
Someone might bring up Minecraft at this point. This also has some of the aspects of a metaverse - notably, the block-building lets you go crazy with custom content, and it also allows custom skins. Well... mostly. Custom skins are only present in some versions of the game - notably, all Java versions, as well as Windows, iOS, and Android Bedrock. Other versions replace your skin with the default. There's also some licensed skins that are locked to specific versions of the game, that get replaced with the default skin as well. Cross-play lets you join other player's game sessions, but if you want levels to actually move between devices, you need to have a Realms subscription. There are servers, but custom servers are very new (like, in-alpha new) and not allowed on consoles (or at least on Switch - I don't own the Xbox or PS4 versions to test).
So that's another problem with the idea of a metaverse - the current system has way too many barriers in play to make it work. Remember how Sony made your Fortnite account a PS4 exclusive so you couldn't use your lootboxes on Switch? Imagine that, but 2000x worse, if someone actually tried to bring the metaverse to consoles.
After many struggles, Second Life achieved social stability. The company has mostly a hands-off attitude and a minimal "governance" group of about half a dozen people. There are landlords and tenants, with grumbling on both sides, in more or less balance. Griefing is rare. The large-scale scams, such as a fake bank, are gone. Copying and uploading content happens occasionally but is not a huge problem. Land use is all over the place, but there are coherent communities. The main viewer is a third party open source system, and Open Simulator still chugs along, offering an option for people who want an environment under different ownership.
Ease of use is a serious problem in many dimensions. Just becoming a new users is frustrating. Upon entry, you go through a basic orientation and are dumped into a transit point full of jerks and scammers. It's like the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. You've been dumped into a large city, and, other than some signs suggesting various destinations, you're on your own. It really is a virtual world, not a game. What you do in it is entirely up to you. The world is indifferent to you. This throws many new users.
Then they discover their default avatar sucks, that the clothing system is really complicated, and the good stuff costs money, or good free stuff has to be searched out.
If they make it to day 3, they'll start to get the place figured out. But the new user experience is harsh.
Most of the people making metaverse noises are not far enough along to reach these problems, let alone solve them.
You have to do stuff as yourself/your avatar. MMOs are close, but you never feel like you escape the world of the MMO. Fortnite has some purely social stuff like concerts and I feel like that's closer to the mark.
Epic released a very high quality character creator called MetaHuman recently. It's a great free resource to devs. But if they really want this to be a metaverse kind of thing they should be opening up unreal service apis to let players take their character models and port them into games. That would be a big step in the right direction.
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.
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)
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”.
A rather grim one I found in Sicily last year was 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
With the prevalence of cleartext cloud-based workflows (Discord, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Github, ...) many people may already be living in a similar reality.
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... [2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/privacy-scandal-haunts-p...
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.
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
And now I'm working on the file formats: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449
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?
Permanent reality idea could be closer than it looks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
