It’s simple really, and most commenters don’t “get” what is going on with all this.
Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication. VR and AR have the necessary capabilities to do so, and deliver social presence on par with face to face. With a fully immersive experience, you can feel like you are standing next to a person talking to them, regardless of their physical location. Body language, eye contact, etc all come through.
That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if. The current hardware clearly is not hitting the mark for sudden mass adoption. The hardware will eventually, even if we have to wait until it becomes something like sunglasses or even contact lenses.
From first principles, having computers override what photons you see will have huge effects, but don’t focus so much on the shiny video game world aspects: it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence. This is why Zuck bought Oculus, and why he has pivoted his company around the entire thing. It’s not because of “Ready Player One”, but because he feels that hardware/software will modulate most person to person communication soon, and he wants it to be his stack.
Until we can see each other's faces in VR, this won't work for social presence. Shrinking everything down to contact lenses (even sunglasses get in the way of social contact) is likely to be beyond us for quite some while if ever. I'd rather not put something in my eye anyway.
Further, VR does not work well for switching - you can't be in VR and scribble notes at the same time. AR might be an improvement, but not by much.
Video conferencing does not suffer from any of these problems, and works pretty well for collaboration. 'Zoom fatigue' is definitely a thing though - it's unclear whether VR fatigue would be better or worse.
VR/AR will see limited adoption for certain specialised use cases only.
What you’re posting here is “common knowledge”, but it is actually in conflict with social presence research. VR beats video conferencing even without any facial tracking, and the abject failure of video conferencing in the pandemic to replace most of the feeling of face to face communication should be enough to convince people there is merit to the studies that have been done showing it scores poorly.
In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment. So there is no deficit there. I think you haven’t tried these things before so you are just speculating.
The ting is the "felling together" part is less dependent on the medium (real workd, audio, video, VR) but on the way the meeting is held.
Video conferencing didn't fail because video conferencing is fundamentally bad but because:
- meetings are often done in a fundamental bad way, where people don't have any "felling together" even is they sit physically in the same room.
- people having bad microphones, the video part in a video conference is the least important the audio part is what makes it work or fail (because meetings are all about speaking, except if you are mute/deaf, in which case VR might help).
- technical difficulties all over the place, there is no reason for this to get better with VR
- peoples homes being fundamental unsuited for conferences (i.e. a lot of background noise), again nothing which will change with VR
- also VR headsets and mimic don't work well together, proper gestic is possible but often requires full body tracking which put more requirements to the environment you use it in.
- VR headsets are much more straining to use then audio-only conferences, and somewhat more straining then video conferences. Which can be a major no-go for anyone doing many conferences, like the management deciding weather or not to buy into it.
- Companies want virtual meeting rooms not a meta-verse, something which already exists, and looks better then the honestly crappy looking thinks Facebook presented.
If people use microphones with noise cancellation, it can remove most of the background noise. When I was still in the office I used a Jabra headset with a noise suppressing microphone, I could speak on a call with people talking nearby and their conversation was not noticeable on the call. I would hope that a VR/AR headset for this purpose would have a similar microphone setup.
I'd be curious to know how VR beats video conferencing - by what metrics etc.
Video conferencing has certainly been wildly successful in actually getting (collaborative) work done - though in fact it is screen sharing that is the secret ingredient here. Would screen sharing in VR be any different? I guess 3D models or images could be shared usefully.
It is notable the difference between tele conferencing and video conferencing - and that difference is faces (and screensharing). Until VR can show faces, it is basically a tele conference with a puppet show.
My point about switching is that in VR you are completely immersed, so are limited to what the VR provides, whereas with a vid conference I can e.g. go make some coffee while still participating. I'm limited mainly by social convention, not the technology itself. The nature of modern work is we are at the centre of various tools and technologies (half of which are a bit broken) that we choreograph together to get useful stuff done. No VR system could hope to replicate it all.
Actually I'm currently working on a VR project (amongst other things), so these concerns are real and pertinent to me.
(As ever with engineering there is a tendency to focus on the what and the how, instead of the who and the why. Furthermore, people will use technology as they see fit, which might be quite different from how it's inventors intended or envisioned. To develop on this point, even the most 'non-technical' human is an accomplished tool user, and they won't be reading the manual anymore than they absolutely have to.)
> VR beats video conferencing even without any facial tracking
In what terms does it "beat it"? I still have Zoom meetings where people just dial-in, have crappy video, etc. In other words, video conferencing is still being adopted decades after it was introduced.
> In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment.
Multi-tasking isn't a real thing. The overhead from context switching is real and no amount of technology will improve this human deficiency.
> Further, VR does not work well for switching - you can't be in VR and scribble notes at the same time.
In VRChat, you could write something in the air by hands, or even play the piano. The problem might be the user experience is not as good as real world hand writing/typing, and there is no physical feedback when writing/typing. That might make people feel weird.
All of these points could start with the word, "Currently, ". Don't you think having one of the world largest companies throwing massive amounts of time and money into these issues could solve a few of these?
Given that several of the largest and wealthiest companies (google and Microsoft) in the world can’t make decent chat apps and meta seems unable to make a product that doesn’t incite ethnic tensions around the world. I’m skeptical of such organizations to solve many of these issues.
The progression from DK1 to Quest 2 proves that effective technological miracles are in the reach of Facebook’s VR group. It’s pretty insane what has been done so far.
You need to separate technical progression of VR headsets from the whole meta-verse idea.
It's out of question that Facebook (and other companies) did a good job in progressing VR headsets technology (through I wouldn't call it a miracle).
But the meta-verse idea as presented by Facebook doesn't look too promising IMHO. It looks out of touch with reality and it's from Facebook. A company well known to try to force their world view onto all other people around the world, ignoring any ethical questions arising. Sure by renaming themself they will manage to somewhat run away from their responsibilities, but as they don't really change their ways it's just a mater of time until we will have the next batch of scandals, now attached to the "meta"-name instead of Facebook.
We have very different definitions of insane apparently. I enjoy my quest 2 but it still very much feels like a smartphone strapped to my face. Basic aspects of the software like the guardian have issues all the time. Each software update seems to fix some bugs and introduce new ones.
I am deeply skeptical meta is going to make the kinds of fundamental breakthroughs that will make VR mainstream and useful to people. Right now they are basically brute forcing the issue with tons of money and even then I am a bit underwhelmed and I use my quest almost daily.
These trends are converging but the most valuable contribution of HMDs imo is remote social presence. It’s not their only contribution, and the economic revolution of web3 would have happened without HMDs imo.
Just because "remote social presence / coworking" is the future, doesn't mean that Facebook is on track to capitalize on it.
For example, I'd much prefer a "mirror-sized realtime video" (i.e. a "window into the other office") kind of experience, where I don't actually need to wear a helmet.
And there aren't even that many technological obstacles to that; just good TVs, with good software, and fast enough internet connection. Add a bit of eye/head tracking (to approximate 3D from different viewpoints) and it'll be very real-like.
No, there is a study that was done on PC rift hardware that showed it was already competitive with f2f on most measures of social presence except for facial expressions (which makes sense, given the lack of facial tracking.)
The bottleneck for adoption is probably mostly about UX, comfort, norms, marketing, etc. Not raw capabilities.
Not really, I’d imagine if you ran the same trial today with face and eye tracking HMDs you would match f2f social presence scores. Wouldn’t surprise me if the study has already been done. You’re confusing graphics quality and realism with just the subset of what is needed to hit face to face social presence. That bar is much lower: high resolution, low latency, good tracking. The actual GPU power beyond that doesn’t put a ceiling since conveying non verbal communication doesn’t require expensive rasterization.
It feels like you're just moving goalposts by defining some arbitrary metric of "f2f social presence scores". It doesn't really matter how much any individual test does against these "scores" if your average person walks away feeling "That felt nothing like a face to face meeting I'm used to having with actual, live humans."
You’re just arguing at this point. The scores I’m talking about are not arbitrary, there are a few standardized measures used in social presence research to attempt to make apples to apples comparisons between communications tools attempting to compete with f2f. The point is that the scores people give are literally asking users to convey their feeling that the experience met the baseline of face to face, or not, along various dimensions. You sound like you have an axe to grind, and aren’t actually looking to understand anything new here.
I wonder how much we need facial expressions for VR communication. You can convey a lot in Source games just by crouching and violently shaking your mouse... plus nobody's trying to blow you up in a work environment (hopefully).
You can also fake it. My app jel.app has avatars that have a lot of facial animation and it’s either random or just driven off voice, and conveys a lot imo.
There is a limit and a point where this can make things worse, but if it approximates what a person expects well enough and never conflicts with that expectation it’s a good tool.
From my experience working with VR hardware I came away thinking that we're very far away from hitting the required comfort zone for mass appeal.
The challenges you outline: UX, comfort are going to be crazy hard to over come and I think there's a lot more work on the hardware side.
Mobile phones offers people a very comfortable and easy UX that blends well with the requirements of the real world, you could say it does it too well as you often see people walking down the street faces glued to their screen and not looking where they're walking.
VR needs the power of immersion, but right now it comes at great cost. The friction of entering and exiting is big, the time between task switching of virtual and real is big.
You mentioned this:
> In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment. So there is no deficit there.
You cannot and bring all required tasks into the virtual. You can't quickly check on your dog, grab a drink, glance over to a person in your physical space, grab that note from your desk. We rely heavily on the real world and VR right now presents a big barrier. Phones do not, you can watch a movie on TV and glance at the message that pops up on your phone. Even desktop computing allows you to comfortably multitask by glancing between monitors. Some stuff can bring virtualized into VR windows, but it's limited.
I exited VR in 2018 after a few years of working on it. My conclusion was that we're still too early to get bullish. We still need to overcome some big technological hurdles that bridge the gap between comfortable and complete immersion (100% audio & visual simulation), a blend (AR), and 100% real world. We also needs to better address other immersive factors such as haptics and interfacing, because as you increase the potency in one area (visuals) the requirements in other areas start to rise as the playing field demands completeness or risks breaking that desired immersion level.
It’s surprisingly not that far behind. We’re already close to having commercial headsets with full-body tracking, eye tracking and facial tracking.
Even without those technologies current VR is quite different in terms of social presence to interacting on a flat screen. A lot of body language comes through even just tracking the head and hands.
I think we’re quite a bit away from having mass adoption of VR though. But that’s more form factor and comfort.
I see this conflation happening all the time from metaverse enthusiasts, but the metaverse != VR.
Would a high quality VR version of Zoom/Teams be awesome? Of course it would, it would be freaking amazing! But the “metaverse” ain't that, it's supposed to be a virtual universe (hence the name), where everything happens, including games, watching movies, etc. A gigantic MMORPG, containing every possible kind of online interaction and games. And this part is complete bullshit.
Which user story seems the most likely:
- the user open the app, select their contact or group, puts the VR headset on, join the chat room.
- the user puts the VR headset on, login in in “virtual flat”, go out, jump in his virtual (flying, as a DLC) car, and go to a virtual bar where your friends are waiting.
Only the second one is worth the “metaverse” name (the first one being just a “virtual chat over the internet”®), and even if it could be really fun in the beginning, and could even have a decent success as an MMO, it won't be the mainsteam way of communication.
Frankly there are like 50 working definitions for “metaverse” at this point so it’s not really worth the energy of trying to unpack it as a way to ground an argument.
The relevant definition in this discussion is the one described by Zuckerberg in the Meta presentation video.[1] Have a look a the 4' mark, the only missing part from my comment is the virtual car travel. (But there's “chose your virtual outfit” instead).
> fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication
Do they fail? I don't thinks so, when I e.g. play D&D like games over voice only chat + a shared map it totally convoys the "felling of being together" (just one of many examples).
On the other side when in-person sitting in a conference room where a person takes 30min to convey some (for me) mostly irrelevant facts which could have been summarized in a single slide there isn't really any "feeling together" and weather I'm sitting there or at home or use a headset on a train station makes literally no difference.
What makes people "feel together" is interaction and being focused together on a specific think. This doesn't need VR or AR at all.
Also what people totally forget is that moving company meetings and similar into VR has a number of problems:
- everyone needs to have a VR headset with them and a reasonable good internet connection
- everyone needs to be able to use a VR headset, but even with the best headset there are tons of people out there which get motion sickness from it (or from many things which convey 3D weather it's in VR or in a PC game) this people are much less rare then many thing.
- the platform needs to convey the feeling, as I mentioned above "just putting it in VR" doesn't mean it works. Also more important the "virtual venue" you meet has no reason to be anything like the real world, like at all. So there is no reason to replicate all the limitations from the real world. But Facebook seems to be exactly trying to do this.
Facebook positioned themself well by owning one of the most affordable VR headsets.
But the meta-verse thing isn't looking too good IMHO.
What companies want isn't a virtual world, but a virtual meeting room.
What people want is being whatever they want to be in VR, and potentially have different identities for different social cycles (mainly work, friends, family). So not quite what Facebook is building, to some degree even the opposite thing.
If that’s the plan, Google is well ahead of Facebook for recreating presence with their starline demo. That gives you body language eye contact etc without the big headset and paddles - and you’re still able to interact with your real world environment.
I agree I’ve been working in and out of VR for the last 8 years or so and it was the first thing I saw that made me question the assumption that VR was the only possible solution to this problem.
As someone who spends way too much time on video--including meetings I should be in in case something directly relevant to me comes up but mostly can pay partial attention to while I do stuff on another computer--I would mostly hate the idea of wearing a headset. Heck, at in person meetings for better or worse, a lot of people do the same thing.
High-fidelity, lifesize, no stuttering, etc. plus collaborative docs and I'm pretty sure you may have a better experience than VR.
They all have trade offs but the first track in particular it is an error to look at current form factors as a fixed condition. They will be changing rapidly insofar as traction and/or investment continues.
Certainly. Though I'd be inclined to argue that full VR/immersion is mostly of interest in an exploration context (e.g. 3D construction walk through, virtual tourism) or simulation (including gaming)--especially for situations where you can participate from a fixed location.
Rather than contact lenses, how plausible would it be to project an image into someone's eyes from a distance?
As in you'd have an external VR unit that's as bulky as needed to handle face tracking, photonic override, etc. without any direct physical contact or uncomfortable accessories. Does that kind of tech sound further or closer than contact lenses, or would it be so different as to be hard to say?
Yeah I would put that into the same bucket as contact lenses: really hard to imagine tech in terms of execution, but probably possible from first principles. The invariant is basically if code is determining what photons you see, and if it has full governance or partial governance (ie, the real world has the ability to leak in or not.)
There was some pro type contact lens technology in a talk at Hot Chips but nowhere near prime time yet. Saw a thread. Forget if it was here or Twitter.
> Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence
When we have Star Trek's transporters, we can achieve "social presence". Until then, you can have "this is cool". There is a real problem with VR: it requires way more focus and attention that being live, in person. Where VR does shine is shared experiences you can't have in real life. Those shared experiences are really cool, but are not such that people want to have them whenever they want to interact with grandma or Bob in accounting.
> it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence.
We already have technology that may be "good enough". The issue with VR is that it requires so much cognitive effort to work... so you really are dealing with something that is cool. Cool to the level that it seems magical, but not cool enough to beat the ease we can communicate via other channels. Playing a flight sim with VR? actually great. Trying to have a conversation with my kids via VR? Not so great.
No, you don’t need transporters to archive social presence, this is a specific measure that is quantifiable to a large degree via standardized surveys and measurements. Doesn’t require transporters, just the ability to deliver the feeling of unmediated communication. VR gets closer than any other tool I know of on this specific measure, though the recent google work on their magic light field window may also be able to compete with face to face.
Note this has nothing to do with photo realism, seeing the physical form of people, or cool immersive environments. It’s the feeling of unmediated communication.
I suspect you haven’t actually tried hanging out with your kids in VR on a reasonable setup when they are physically far away from you. I’d suggest trying it to get a more concrete view on what is probably going to happen with regards to physical co-locality and it’s value prop.
I agree that social presence is the most underrated aspect of VR, especially from people who have never tried it. Of course, it's not there yet, but if you experience it today you can see glimpses of how it will be in the future.
However, that has nothing to do with the "metaverse". Metaverse is just a fancy word Facebook is trying to establish to somehow rebrand their walled-off social media platforms.
> ... social presence is the most underrated aspect of VR ... Of course, it's not there yet, ...
All this "body language" talk neglects that vr tracks at most your head and hands. Not how people are stood, or even facial expressions. "Body language" indeed. Too day nothing of the whirly Hurley motion sickness from it.
Maybe one day, but I put it in the same bucket as fusion.
No, we were doing full body tracking with perception neuron inertial sensors tracking 7 years ago in AltspaceVR. My guess is the zero cost option is going to be using a home mirror, as recently demoed. It can also be done with outside in cameras, was done with Kinect literally almost a decade ago or with lighthouse pucks from valve 4-5 years ago. Facial and eye tracking will almost certainly be in the next meta headset.
Motion sickness goes down with each generation and is also largely a function of software design anyway. You’re very behind the curve.
I agree Facebook is kinda taking their eye off the prize by focusing on the metaverse concepts. But they’re not dumb, they understand what I wrote above, so there might be a reason this is being done towards that end.
No, they are not dumb at all. That's why they are rebranding "social media" as "metaverse" and trying to own the whole stack (hardware + software) this time around. They are not taking their eye off the prize. The VR tech they build is objectively amazing, and if they continue like this they will own the biggest VR social network, at least initially.
Edit: All I'm saying is that the metaverse is not some new concept. It's bascially social media enabled by the internet, but for some reason we start calling it metaverse when access through the medium of VR.
> It’s simple really, and most commenters don’t “get” what is going on with all this.
> That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if.
Sure, but the "when" is trying to be forced down our throats. The media is perplexed by it in the same way they are about autonomous vehicles. We know its the future but tech oligarchs are trying to slam something down our throat with marketing/pr BS because they're scared shitless they'll lose their position on top of the throne. Most revolutionary tech has come from underdogs (Apple's iPod and iPhone come to mind, Zoom for video conferencing) and not from already established firms saying "this is the future, take this now".
I have a feeling that part of social presence will require absolute privacy among participants. Once we see permanently recorded leaks of these social conversations, there will be a halt of adoption.
Yep this is part of the goals of one of the projects I worked on, Mozilla Hubs: ensuring that there is always a self hosted privacy preserving open source option for this basic use case of VR avatar based communication.
I'll believe it when I see it. I think most people will find the cost of strapping on headsets to be greater than benefits of the social presence it provides
For a given headset there is an activation cost and presumed benefit that gets someone to use it. The activation costs will continue to trend downward as passthrough AR gets deployed and size/weight goes down, among other things, and the presumed benefits will go up as cultural norms start to interface with this technology and more and more applications come online.
I agree this is one facet, but other is we now have a trustless ownership protocol (ie. cryto + NFTs) that will lay the foundation for people "caring" about the stuff and status you have in the metaverse.
The virtual stuff you "own" in virtual environments are going to be siloed in individual companies' ecosystems. Just like GTA Online is never going to give me any sort of benefit from the fancy sword I have in World of Warcraft, neither is Facebook/Meta going give me any benefit from the couch I have in whatever system Microsoft or Valve puts out. NFTs are never going to materialize into that sort of cross-ecosystem unified ownership because no large company benefits from honoring assets obtained in another company's ecosystem.
This is already happening. You're thinking about this in reverse.
The web 1.0 and 2.0 way of thinking if we build the product, then we own the community.
The web 3.0 way of thinking is there are existing communities out there (BAYC, Punks, etc.) that we can enable to use our product and come into our space.
Okay, but these people are already on Twitter and Twitter doesn't do any work to verify that they "own" the NFT for their BAYC avatar or whatever. But they like Twitter, so they hang out there anyway even though anyone could "rip off" their NFT and tweet it or use it as their avatar.
It seems to me that they need Twitter (and Discord, etc) way more than the other way around. No enabling required.
BAYC is light years beyond everything else in the NFT space. The way they've built a community and played up their cool factor to make you want to be a part of it all is impressive.
Their parties this last week in NYC for NFT week pretty much locked them as the model to strive for. I don't know if others can do it, but they've set the standard.
C'mon. This is very "rich nerds desperately trying to be cool", it's not an actual thing that normal people will ever care about. We already have status symbols that you can show off in the real world.
At every cryptocurrency party I've been to, the people (i.e., the normal ones, not the true believers) stop coming when the free drinks and food stop flowing. I wouldn't confuse that with a "cool factor."
Never say never. A “stuff” import seems like the kind of feature that would have to be copied by other platforms as soon as one does it, but there’s a chicken and egg aspect.
I disagree with the whole “value of ownership” thing. Making knock off nfts is trivial, so this relies on people caring enough about provenance to police this and shame people that have knock offs in their virtual environment.
Digital goods can be copied for free. It’s the killer feature of digital. No more scarcity!! Any system that fails to embrace this will be outcompeted long term. See the music industry.
What stops me from minting an NFT that says I own anything I want? If platforms are only honoring NFTs minted by other platforms then they might as well just share that information in a database.
Same way you can't just print out a copy of the mona lisa?
People care about status and authenticity.
Imagine a virtual world where
1. You have the validate you are an avatar you own
2. You can be anything you want
The virtual world 1 is way more interesting because it's authentic and the people of status will want to use it and people of less status will build towards being higher status.
Who arbitrates which NFTs-based claims are respected versus not? How does one decide authenticity? And once you have an answer to such a question (relying on some preexisting system of ownership in the real world), then why should we care about tokens?
E.g. if someone _does_ try to create an NFT for the Mona Lisa, our ability to refute / accept its authenticity is premised on the knowledge that in the real world, the French Republic itself owns the work. How would we trust that the keys associated with minting the NFT were controlled by the French Republic? Presumably we'd need some public statement of attestation from an official French government body, and perhaps with the concurrence of others, to have confidence that this wasn't a rogue intern at the Ministry of Culture, or a hacker that got control to some official accounts or pages.
But applying this logic to "avatars" seems to be either broken or creepy. Who has the authority to say that you are or aren't you?
Right, it's just shoving some arbitrary data in a decentralized database. People will still need to get together and agree on which bits of data to care about, and at that point the blockchain is adding very little value besides a cumbersome way to transfer ownership.
The value is that the blockchains (or analogous tech) maximize durability and odds of societal consensus across time and space. For example, I would put higher odds on the Ethereum blockchain still existing and being citable in a century or two than most centralized authorities today. (These may be low odds in absolute terms, but in relative terms I think the Ethereum chain wins.)
I can only speak for myself, but I do not feel any particular predilection towards "social consensus" when I'm told that a think has cryptocurrencies mixed into it. If anything, it's a negative signal that tells me that someone has undisclosed financial interests in whatever they're trying to tell me about.
Sure, the argument made by crypto people is that is a transitional condition and in a few decades society at large will in general consider information on blockchains (or their descendants) as authoritative in many situations.
Sure, I can understand the vision. I guess the more salient "why?" question is the one that still feels lacking to me. Current easy money aside, it's not clear why society as a whole would be willing to cast aside the last 250 years of physical ownership and financial infrastructure in exchange for digital ownership(?) and immutable ledgers with irrecoverable error conditions.
Sounds like the same fallacy as preppers getting ripped off buying Krugerrands at a premium to keep value safe after a complete collapse of all civilization. When it is like putting platforms on the boughs of a tree to stay safe when the trunk is cut and felled. It fundamentally misunderstands the order of dependencies.
I think that’s actually it’s own fallacy: presuming that one can predict the dependencies and survivorship of various elements of society in a scenario where one or two larger ones go through a disruptive transition. This is a contradiction in many cases, because if you could know how such a disruption was actually going to play out, it would be unlikely to actually happen. If our kids are growing up in a world that is fundamentally different than ours in terms of sovereignty, it is very hard to know what the side effects of that transition will be.
You’re presuming a scenario where the structure of government changes is the same as a civilizational collapse. That’s not a given.
Okay, Ethereum is still around, but all it says is that in 2023 you bought a string of digits that referred to a special hat in Fortnite. But it's 2040 now and the special hat has linkrotted away because Fortnite got taken over by Zuckerberg.
It’s hard to say if the link rot will be a problem. Not to mention, many of these ownership transactions won’t be links. The point is being able to agree on something, not have access to the underlying. The latter is a somewhat orthogonal concern. No matter what Zuck does, it won’t be possible for people to deny who owned the hat, regardless of if the underlying bits of the hat have gone away. And of course, for the things that people actually care about, these bits will be preserved, or over time the ownership will be understood to relate to new, probably better bits.
Who arbitrates which NFTs-based claims are respected versus not?
> Future metaverse platforms will partner with high quality communities
How does one decide authenticity?
> That's the whole innovation behind the blockchain. Decentralized ownership claims.
And once you have an answer to such a question (relying on some preexisting system of ownership in the real world), then why should we care about tokens?
> For example, you could care about the token for the specific "metaverse" you're playing in
Who has the authority to say that you are or aren't you?
> I think you're touching on a very philosophically deep question of who you are. You think that the things you are and that you own are inherently yours, but I would argue your stuff and even your identity is all a social construct.
> For example, if you woke up tomorrow and everyone around you collectively agreed to say that you're insane and that you're an alien. Are you going to trust your own memories or are you going to trust the people around you.
> But I think you're missing out on the core innovation of blockchain which mimics the same way we determine who owns anything, which is completely a social construct.
The people who decide which NFTs matter are the communities and cultures you participate in, and entities who have sovereignty over you. Which is no different than anything else.
Right but the point the grandparent I was adding to, and also what I understand delecti is saying is roughly: Meta or a similar platform is an "entity who has sovereignty". For users to have a coherent experience in the platform, it may essentially be required that the platform exercises some decision-making power on what NFTs to respect and which not to. Do I get to bring in and use item X just because I say I own it, or not? Once the platform is exercising a choice on how/when to recognize ownership or not, the ownership system is no longer "trustless" and why should we bother with the complexity?
I would agree a centralized authority like Facebook basically “owning” what gets blessed is a world where the promise of these technologies has not been met. The hope is that we can have a more egalitarian outcome where there are a variety of actors who align based on shared interests to agree on what contracts to recognize and confer benefits based on. Of course, one challenge with realizing this can be seen elsewhere in this thread, where people are dismissive of the entire concept (and ironically have boxed it in as a Facebook thing now, effectively ceding the entire territory before the first battle.) It’s important that technologists get sped up on what is at stake and the likelihood that correcting a misstep will be hard or impossible for future generations if a singular entity “wins” this emerging space in the next several years. There really won’t be another platform turnover to try to correct the error and disrupt the existing players as there has been for the last several computing platform changes.
We're perhaps escaping the reasonable scope for a thread like this, but can you point to something that describes a potential version of "the metaverse" where no such authority exists in any form?
To my layperson's view (this is def not my wheelhouse), either such an authority exists (even if it's a foundation backed by several "actors who align based on shared interests"), in which case we're going to be required to trust it so we may as well drop the overhead of the blockchain, or no such authority exists, and there's a potentially high degree of fragmentation among platforms recognizing different subsets of ownership (or identity, or canonicity of speech or whatever), in which case ... is it a metaverse or just a bunch of distinct rooms?
> There really won’t be another platform turnover to try to correct the error and disrupt the existing players as there has been for the last several computing platform changes.
What makes you say that with such apparent confidence?
I think the web and Internet have some centralization obviously but they are good counterexamples to a theoretical corporate monopoly or duopoly over a computing medium.
As far as “the final platform” bit, it’s an opinion but if you presume we get to a point where most humans are having their auditory and visual systems being overridden by a hardware/software computing stack, it’s hard to think of a breakout event from that that is analogous to eg PC -> mobile. There will be competition and iteration, but overall the inputs and outputs to that system are (body state) -> (photons, sound) and that seems like it won’t really change for a long time, if ever, so harder to disrupt at the root.
It's unlikely there will be one "world" with overseers and moderators, just like the internet is not one website.
The "metaverse" (not Facebook's) can be an open source platform where anyone can create their own worlds which accept the items they've added support for. This is the direction Decentraland is going in.
The core libraries to build your world will be open source and standardized, like a game engine, but the actual content will be up to the creators.
What use are NFTs in such a world? If it's permissioned anyway, and there's only a few approved vendors, you can do this with a database. Suppose you already developed a Roblox/Fortnite/Minecraft metaverse, why do you want NFTs on top of that?
It's pretty easy to setup your own private WoW server where you can give yourself all the best items. Why do people then spend hundreds of hours grinding for them on official servers?
Sure, but WoW doesn't use NFTs to enforce scarcity.
What does a Google/Facebook/Microsoft metaverse want NFTs for? Once you start enforcing permissions on which issuers the metaverse honors, the metaverse might as well skip the whole NFT thing and use a database.
Well yea, if one company runs the Metaverse they don't need NFT's. NFT's are for places like Decentraland and other Metaverses running on Ethereum where there is no centralized manager of the world.
It's unlikely there will be one decentralized world (maybe a lobby of some sort, akin to a website directory on the early internet), but instead an Engine + SDK that allows anyone to build their own worlds and choose what NFT's are useable inside it. These worlds can be registered to Ethereum and then users can easily explore and congregate in whatever worlds they wish.
The ultimate scarcity is human attention and creativity - so in the limit that will always be a thing that is a form of wealth. The ownership of digital assets (NFTs or not) is fundamentally an output of a system where someone chooses to expend creative energy into making the asset, and traded that opportunity cost off based on the expected outcome. A scenario where that work would not be something they could capture value from by enforcement mechanisms of scarcity would lead to some of these efforts not happening. (Not all of course, many people do amazing CC licensed work. But it doesn’t pay the bills.)
But digital is a realm of infinite copying, and where true ownership of bits means that you can never show them off (like Shkreli and that A Tribe Called Quest album). NFT 'ownership' is an additional layer on top of the data that can easily be stripped away, as the exclusivity only exists in the minds of those gullible enough to actually value it.
I am very tired of watching humans constantly try to impose real-world economic scarcity into a digital land of infinite plenty. Rather than fight the nature of a digital economy, why not embrace it?
People who want to create works that can be infinitely copied, will. People who want to create works that have various kinds of cultural norms imposing scarcity, will. There is no “fight”, it’s just saying that you’d prefer less options for people to choose how to expend their creative energy. Nobody is stopping a person from turning the knob all the way to “infinite free copies,” but the idea here is to make a knob that is granular, multidimensional, and under their control, as opposed to under the control of a few centralized actors.
Besides, NFTs actually embrace your philosophy: allow copies, and shift scarcity elsewhere to things like social status. It is not DRM, obviously. You should be a fan.
While they permit infinite copies, the ownership bit strips away potential egalitarianism. Scarcity needs to be stripped and not an option. There shouldn't be a knob that allows one to select 'infinite copies', that should be the default. And ownership should either be collective or none at all.
Permitting ownership enables an unnecessary layer of stratification that humanity is best without, in a rare environment that actually allows for the lack of it.
You don't get to decide that. Your prejudices and carefully bonsaie gardened imperatives about how you think the world should work be do not change that fact any more than the tantrums in congresses and parliaments demanding encryption that doesn't work for "bad guys". It is fundamentally about information and its shapes.
Such is the nature of idealism. It is a shame we allow a world of plenty to artificially lock up value so a few people can feel better than others
Alternatively, why is a piece of data not allowed to just be? You can see this everywhere, even outside the digital world and in the realm of the mind. An idea is never allowed to stand on its own merits, we always have to attach our bullshit culture to it
You have a fundamental misunderstanding. The point is you simply will not get certain creative works in this model. They will not be worth the opportunity cost. There is no reality where you get “no scarcity” as well as “all the creative works you would have gotten with scarcity.” (Ie, probably most of those which have led to our present day wealth.)
Your proposed world is to say we ought to just not have people create lots of stuff they would have otherwise, in the name upholding a philosophical principle. Which is fine, but own that, and don’t act as though its the just the deficiencies of others leading to a world where you do not get a endless stream of value from them.
I'm willing to lose "some" creative works because of a lack of scarcity. Speaking from experience, artists will always want to create. That is the creative drive. There is no reason that work should not be accessible to all if the technology allows for it.
If it would mean less profiteers, less fakers, less pretenders, less sharks, less debutantes, less tourists... I'm all for it.
There are plenty of ways to profit as an artist without locking up one's work to a privileged few
Will the artistic landscape be different? Sure. But it would be a worthy change.
What you’re saying is that the artists who are currently paid for their work either will create it gratis or we can live without it. A fairly bold claim to make that this would be a worthy change, given the loss of creative work and loss of quality of life to those who create it that it would yield. Particularly when the counter argument is just to let artists produce work on their own terms, which will arguably be a better local maximum of the version of the world you advocate for and the one we have today.
Like the answer to all of the juvenile notions of "the rich" - because they are the ones making, running, and maintaining the goddamned servers in question!
NFTs are dumb but so is the concept of no ownership in a way that conflates definitions so.
If it is popular to have say a World Tree in a pool as your spawn point and said map is a popular one you would still have instance ownership even if the map itself is free software. Having your own instance would be found preferrable to most compared to a common flooded one with millions clipping through each other and trolls rampant.
> If it is popular to have say a World Tree in a pool as your spawn point and said map is a popular one you would still have instance ownership even if the map itself is free software. Having your own instance would be found preferrable to most compared to a common flooded one with millions clipping through each other and trolls rampant.
I don't really understand how lack of ownership strips the ability to shard instances.
> because they are the ones making, running, and maintaining the goddamned servers in question!
They are, because they are most capable. But do not underestimate that others do so as well, often in a much more just and equitable fashion. (See: The Pirate Bay/private trackers vs Spotify or Youtube)
And watch what you call juvenile, that perspective explains the world so much more clearly than any explanation that the guilty might offer
Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication. VR and AR have the necessary capabilities to do so, and deliver social presence on par with face to face. With a fully immersive experience, you can feel like you are standing next to a person talking to them, regardless of their physical location. Body language, eye contact, etc all come through.
That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if. The current hardware clearly is not hitting the mark for sudden mass adoption. The hardware will eventually, even if we have to wait until it becomes something like sunglasses or even contact lenses.
From first principles, having computers override what photons you see will have huge effects, but don’t focus so much on the shiny video game world aspects: it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence. This is why Zuck bought Oculus, and why he has pivoted his company around the entire thing. It’s not because of “Ready Player One”, but because he feels that hardware/software will modulate most person to person communication soon, and he wants it to be his stack.