Hello everyone 👋 Its probably due to facebook announcement, that I feel this topic gains attention. But I would be curious: What are your thoughts on the "*Metaverse*": Exciting <=> Frightening? Indifferent? Especially from what we often discuss here the agency perspective, will this development lead to more centralization and more negative effects? Will it lead to better or worse - human relationships? Thank you!

Definitely frightening. If you just look at the kind of culture we have, how could you think that more things like AR are even a good idea?

Indifferent at the moment: I think the extreme views (Black Mirror-type dystopia vs. a walled-garden Utopia) are amplified when a new technology is introduced, but that it's actually pretty difficult to gauge how the average person will use it, or whether it will ever gain traction outside of the high-tech cognoscenti: the value proposition for "the metaverse" has still not been proven. Another thing to keep in mind is that with any new technology, there will always be folks who will tell you that it will either revolutionize the way we live or cause the downfall of culture/humanity/civilization, but that the technologies themselves (AR/VR/immersive computing) are fundamentally neutral. IMO the concern around negative second and third-order effects that arise from a perverse incentive structure (cause by large centralized platforms "owning" the metaverse experience) is valid, but it's still way too early to tell what the competitive landscape will look like and, to my first point, I'm not sure whether the average person would even want to use something like this.

This will be an amplifier for just about everything we have in computing and the web: every type of interaction, every market and submarket etc. So then you have to ask the questions. Do we want to amplify these things? Do we need to? What is the good of it? These questions are not specifically about computing or related technologies, so any answers that allude to these are suspect.

I have thoughts, of course having worked in or adjacent to the metaverse space. But John Carmack explained how I feel in his keynote speech at Facebook Connect yesterday https://twitter.com/hmltn/status/1453885021371183104

It will be interesting to see Zuckerberg attempt to build something semi-novel, as his company history has been Friendster-at-scale-cum-FriendFeed-at-scale and 3 acquisitions I think his radar isn't terrible, obviously his creations and holdings haven't fallen on their face – just it seems like he's a magnet for neuroatypical (is that the polite term?) ideas which seem to amplify fictional qualities of life – no wonder he's attracted to the idea of the metaverse, an entire new-noosphere of nonsense It all seems predestined to recapitulate Jan 6-like US Capitol stormings as hourly events – but maybe the facegear will also succeed in keeping the (rapidly multiplying) agents of chaos mostly confined to their padded indoor cells

@Scott Anderson did you see the brutalist approach to end user programming thread?

Yes I contributed to it

Does Meta include the AR parts from the presentation? I think I might have been confused by that

What do you mean by include?

sorry I meant the "metaverse" product

Support for distributed objects that might appear and disappear be found or carried long distances

Probably best to prevent more of our experienced realities being dictated by large organizations whose driving purpose is short term profits

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=311651317030689 is a decent high level overview of what the Horizon World's tools look like today. I haven't worked on this product for two years, and its come a long way (especially in UX/UI implementation), but the core is the same

perhaps we should make the antiverse …

@Scott Anderson Did you guys look at/read about the original Croquet when you were working on Horizon World? Seems to have a lot of similar goals

I just waited for someone to bring in Snow Crash

I did

EleVR is one of the more interesting things I've seen in recent years

EleVR is really interesting and I like a lot of what Vi Hart does. @Scott Anderson do you know what’s happening over there these days?

I'm not sure, they haven't done a new blog post in over a year

AFAIK, Vi has been working on some more society-focused projects recently. She presented some stuff recently on a "Tech for Resilient Communities" track at the Microsoft Research summit. Haven't seen any VR stuff from her in a long while.

VR visions have a very difficult to pin down relationship with physical reality. The pitch seems to be simultaneously; "it's real", and "you can do anything", i.e. you are freed from the restrictions of physical reality, and also bound by them (as the story requires...) I haven't read any of the books, but I watched the film of Ready Player One and all I could think was, if I was actually looking for a golden egg I wouldn't be physically walking on a treadmill, I'd be trawling through network packets, hexdumps etc. This is how people looked for the jetpack in GTA5. To start off with they "played along" but pretty quickly, when they really wanted to know, they refused to engage with the interface the game was presenting. Ignoring what the game wanted made them more powerful. I think this is what Carmack was getting at. If the Metaverse was possible, we could do it GTA style with Xbox controllers and LCD screens. The fact we have good cheap VR headsets now is an orthogonal issue.

The competition is reality-based entertainment; so as long as the prices and perceived costs (safety, effort, willpower) are lower than RL and content keeps flowing, it will be popular and a big pile of cash to split. I have a less faith that it would make me happier (more connected, more autonomous, more creative, having a positive impact on people). But if others can have rich, fullfilling lives while leaving home less, all power to them.

I found this nice thread give some perspective on this (Facebook meta move) https://twitter.com/mayazi/status/1454182295733248004

Also worth noting is that the community power will lie in the toolmakers (both hard and software). If you could bring creation to the people and build a real secondary economy, it'd unlock the ability to be the middleman, ala "app store"

Especially this tweet Fronten thread: https://twitter.com/mayazi/status/1454186250127224834

I think this is what Carmack was getting at. If the Metaverse was possible, we could do it GTA style with Xbox controllers and LCD screens. The fact we have good cheap VR headsets now is an orthogonal issue.

This is complex... So what you said is true and practically when\if we have a "metaverse" most users will be or mobile or PC and not in VR. Mark Zuckerberg has said this in interviews, but he also really wants Facebook, not Apple, to own the hardware so there is this weird "the metaverse will be VR\AR"

Did anyone find the experiences shown in the demos compelling?

@Scott Anderson I totally agree with what you've written, having re-read my comment it is unnecessarily negative. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with VR I was actually one of those losers making headsets out of cardboard on MTBS3D 10 years ago 😂 (I wrote about it here http://chris-knott.appspot.com/projects/vr.html)

Lol I understand that especially after seeing Palmer effectively win the lotto there

How do you feel about the statement or inquiry: "The Metaverse fuels escapism, solutism and techno optimism"?