So what's going on with the "Metaverse"?

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.

hplus0603 said:
Are they (Second Life) still using their server-animation approach, where every object and every joint needs to be driven from the server every frame?

Second Life doesn't control character joints from the server. The server sends updates with position, orientation, velocity, angular velocity, and acceleration, and the client moves the object accordingly. Character animations are entirely client side; the server just tells a character to run a .BVH file, which the client does blindly, without any attention to collisions.

It's also not frame oriented. Server and client are not synchronized at all. Simulation frame rate is 45Hz, while refresh frame rate is up to the client. Which usually goes compute-bound making OpenGL draw calls from a single thread.

The result is that movement control is rather loose and soggy by modern game standards. Roughly the right things happen, but not with the precision one expects from a game today.

Sounds a bit similar to what I'm working on.

Metaverse, by Luca Grabacr. At the end, you'll see where this was made.

Nagle said:
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.

hplus0603 said:
I had become disillusioned with the chase for the metaverse.

Which is the core problem. How do we make the metaverse fun? I do not know how to answer that. Nor, as far as I can tell, does anyone else.

Current ideas in the press are not very good. Mostly, they're Make Money Fast schemes. In-game purchases of really overpriced NFTs, branding, etc. All the worst parts of middle school, in VR. Here's a piece of writing on that: https://blog.bitmex.com/rock-paper-scissors-says-go/​​​​ That is a depressing but necessary read.

It's noteworthy that the people making NFT noise all have bad or nonexistent 3D worlds, and the people with good 3D worlds don't mention NFTs much.

There are people who want to hold meetings in there. That's Facebook Workroom and Breakroom. OK, that's fine, but it doesn't need a whole big-world virtual world with real-time building. NVidia Omniverse is impressive, but it's basically doing for 3D programs what shared text editors do for text. That's a different kind of application. Good work, though.

I can sort of figure out how to get the performance of something as general as Second Life up to acceptable game levels. (Basically, they just need a technology refresh, with some extra server side stuff to do in semi real time the optimizations level builders in Unity and Unreal do during offline level building.) Roblox is taking something that already has good performance and moving it towards photorealism. All this is hard, but do-able.

But the classic question of the new Second Life user remains: “What do I do now?”

Nagle said:
But the classic question of the new Second Life user remains: “What do I do now?”

This is the angle the social media companies are betting on. They already have user engagement pretty much solved in flatland (how many hours a day does the average user spend doom scrolling?) And if they can in parallel sell in-VR meetings to a bunch of big companies, you can pull people into this medium for a good chunk of their workday.

If they can pick up all that existing user engagement and transplant it into their nascent AR/VR worlds… their metaverse might just be sticky enough.

swiftcoder said: If they can pick up all that existing user engagement and transplant it into their nascent AR/VR worlds… their metaverse might just be sticky enough.

That's clearly what Facebook has in mind. So far, they've struck out twice, with Facebook Spaces and Facebook Horizon. Three times, if you count the Oculus acquisition, which remains a niche market at Facebook scale.

Virtual worlds just don't fit on phone screens. Social network engagement depends on “always on”, which requires a mobile device. You can be in the real world, or the virtual world, but not both at once. So immersive social worlds will be a place you go to for a while, like a club or bar, not full-time communication, like messaging.

Facebook, I have the horrible feeling, will end up offering some AR thing like Hyperreality. (Look up the video.) That's a well made dystopian video of artificial reality, heavy on the ads. That's totally Facebook's niche. That will probably come out as soon as, as John Carmack says, AR goggles get down to swim goggle size.

What does that leave as the niche for the virtual world/metaverse side? Virtual worlds seem to be an escape from the real world, like games, not an adjunct to it, like social networks. Not clear how this plays out.

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.