I don’t understand how it’s being presented as something new and interesting and nobody seems to notice/comment on this?
In: 2921
This is based more on my perception of them than on in-depth knowledge, so take it with a grain of salt.
Second Life was meant more as a game / escape. It was a way to lead different life than your real one and an alternate way to interact with people, but it didn’t imagine itself as an end to traditional existence and communication.
The Metaverse is marketed as something revolutionary. It claims to be the way of the future, and seems to suggest that it can replace our current ways of life, rather than supplement them. Personally, I doubt it will amount to much, but people doubted the potential of computers before they became commonplace, so we’ll see what happens.
Second life is more of a traditional game – you pay a subscription and microtransactions, and in return you get social gameplay.
Metaverse is being targeted at the use cases that have otherwise been covered – remote workspace (currently done by Slack/Zoom), e-commerce (currently done by almost everyone), stuff like that – and hoping new use cases will emerge that will keep people in the platform. None of the technology is new, but the application is new. This isn’t that unusual – it’s rare that significantly new technologies are developed in industry, they are usually put together from academic research or iterated on from previously existing products. Everything that went into an iPhone already existed, but putting it together in that way happened to fill a marketing niche. Metaverse just has to outcompete (or more practically, leverage existing FB integration) all the existing products.
Most people don’t notice/comment because there’s no reason to comment on something about which you don’t care.
One difference between the two will likely end up being the competence of the execution. SL had profound scaling issues, but for as bad at they are at most things, Facebook is pretty okay at scaling. And to their credit, it’s not unreasonable to entertain the idea that a less broken version of something might do better in the market.
Another difference is the role of identity. SL lets people be more or less whoever (and typically whatever) they want, which became very _very_ silly. Facebook, on the other hand, wants the you in the Metaverse to be connected to the you in meatspace. Thus, it’s a far more restricted experience.
It’s also different in that SL wasn’t taxing and thereby driving away its creators.
One of them is a nebulous concept for ripping off venture capitalists, and the other is a social network for furries.
The same way Coke is different than Pepsi.
My previous job was working in metaverse stuff, and all it was was basically second-life/VR-chat type stuff. Metaverse is just Facebook’s branding for the concept, as they want *their* platform to be the main one everyone uses and other companies can integrate their own experiences into.
It’s all pretty silly though. They’re kind of imagining people practically living in VR which is just not how people are, or will likely ever be. Every pitch I hear of, and every pitch I worked on seemed like the person pitching it was disconnected from reality like “imagine how great it would be to walk through a virtual store to buy items!” Nobody wants to do that, but for some reason companies think they do so they’d hire us to develop the platform, the platform would fail, and then they’d give the ol’ surprise pikachu face as to why all that money practically vanished into thin air.
It isn’t any different. In fact the metaverse concept has been tried many times since the Internet became popular in 1994. A popular concept that never took off in the 90’s was a 3D virtual mall. Retailers would have paid more to have their virtual store front closer to the spawn point for users.
The first released software that could be considered a metaverse is ActiveWorlds. It released in 1995 and is still running today. They had limited land, although it wasn’t sold, it was just a landgrab where you placed objects to claim cells. They eventually started selling servers and tried to get businesses and universities to use it for virtual meetings.
We have yet to see the original metaverse concept of an infinite 3D virtual multiuser world. Nvidia Omniverse is almost there, but it’s made for developers to link different programs that normally can’t talk to each other. Nobody has come up with a good reason for a 3D metaverse besides online games and chatting.
The Internet can be argued to be a 2D metaverse however. It fits the metaverse concept except it’s 2D instead of 3D.
SL and Meta and almost all others are private walled gardens. SL sells very expensive land which gives you primitives to build with. It does not scale well. The Metaverse must scale up much bigger.
The Metaverse should be like Second Life but be more like a 3d www-like “Apache” server. It should be open source and free to anyone. With a Hypergrid between every server so it scales to any size. Where anyone can boot a server and populate it with real or virtual items and then become the next Amazon. Or run a gas station or just have a very personal home.
Opensimulator DreamGrid is better than Second Life yet us compatible. . Its free and open src and already has many times the land area of Second Life. Any windows PC can run hundreds to a thousand regions that would cost millions to rent on SL.
I’ve read through this and many other posts and I still don’t get it. Why would I ever use this?
Then again, I tend to be behind the curve on a lot of tech but this just seems stupid.
The term ‘metaverse’ was originally coined in the science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. In the novel, it’s essentially a virtual reality version of ‘Second Life’ – people (or corporations) can purchase virtual real estate in a virtual world, where people can shop in virtual stores, hang out in virtual bars, and so forth.
You see similar concepts in several other novels, notably the ‘Otherland’ series by Tad Williams and ‘Ready Player One’ by Ernest Cline. In Otherland, the metaverse is a very expansive series of virtual worlds, ranging from the ‘shop and hang out’ one we see in Snow Crash to mock-ups of Alice in Wonderland or Ancient Egypt, or just normal video games.
In Ready Player One, the metaverse is essentially an interconnection of virtual platforms that allow for more-or-less free travel between them. As an analogy, it would be like if you could play VR World of Warcraft, then go through a portal and be playing VR EVE Online, then travel via spaceship to VR Star Trek Online, all using the same log-in and character in a basically seamless experience.
I assume it’s this last one that people are mostly referring to when they talk about an upcoming ‘metaverse’ for VR. A way by which virtual spaces can be interconnected into a wider network. A seamless experience, instead of closing one game or app and then starting another.
I asked [this exact question](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/um74uz/naoki_yoshida_final_fantasy_xiv_director_doesnt/i80buqi/) a few months ago. The answer was basically “VR+NFTs”
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