All that said, in the grand scheme of things, betting against VR has been a winning bet for the past 30 to 40 years, at least from an investment perspective. And, if you want to go beyond strictly VR into virtual worlds, the safe bet continues. People invest a lot of time, money, and effort into WoW, but Second Life… not so much. Back to VR, the graphics aren’t much better and the control schemes aren’t any better than they were 5 to 10 years ago. I kinda think it’s going to be the next 3D TVs, it’ll get hyped for a while longer but never really make much market penetration or much of a market impact among consumers. So, betting against VR hype has been a winning bet for years now, and I don’t expect that to change. I likewise continue to anticipate Facebook/Meta failing to survive the oncoming recession. Being so advertising dependent during a recession and not having the easy VC money to draw on anymore (like they did in 2008 when they were still in easy growth mode) sounds like a disaster for them, and acquiring the next billion users is gonna be a lot more expensive than acquiring the first billion users were (as usually happens with a blue ocean firm that goes hard red ocean).
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Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'I'm Not Really Sure the Average Person Can Tell You What the Metaverse Is'
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But it is the current meta graphics, regardless if it will improve or not.
Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the metaverse memes
Horizon Worlds is getting a graphics upgrade.
www.theverge.com
I think that's what I was trying to point out, with my examples of using VR so a surgeon can practice doing a procedure without needing a live person to practice on, or the obvious example of more immersive video games for entertainment.
I think the right niche uses could be very profitable for the companies providing those experiences.
What I take issue with is this larger vision of some sort of "metaverse" product that provides people with a complete virtual "world" to escape into with all of their expensive hardware they put on.
One of the technical issues people seem to be ignoring is that real, photo-realistic resolution for such a world is pretty much unworkable. People keep complaining the VR worlds have lousy block graphics, like a game of Minecraft. That's because bandwidth limitations are a real thing. The video games we're used to seeing that look amazing can only do so because the world was pre-designed and all of the data used resides locally on your computer or game console's drive. The Internet connected multi-player games only have to send data back and forth about coordinates. Where is so-and-so on the shared map content stored locally on all of the players' systems? What did they just manipulate and move around in that pre-constructed space?
An entire VR world is far more expansive. It's not going to be something you just install on your PC's drive like modern video games do. And even if you could? It would have hundreds of thousands or millions of simultaneous people moving around in it, to interact with. Current massively multiplayer online games handle those situations by restricting you to only seeing very small sub-sets of the people connected up. They pair you off into groups of maybe 64 or 128 players per game (a la BF2042), or even fewer for a game like Fallout 76 (limit of 24 people per server).
I think what people are astonished by is that Horizon Worlds looks just about as good as Second Life. Even twenty years ago, and even ignoring modern techniques (ML-based generated graphics, say), you could totally make an MMO that looks a lot better, by using higher-quality textures.
Yes, sharding continues to be a big issue.
I guess that makes one potentially good use of it - being able to attend a concert or sporting event without having to deal with the traffic, parking, crowds and obnoxious people. Bonus points for not having to stand in line for 20 minutes for a $15 hot dog and $18 beer at a game.
Well, they were used in both actually, (And many other wars) -just the vehicles and the general increased mobility due to technology during WW2 made them less relevant, mainly due to not having so much time to ‘dig in’. But nonetheless telling someone to ‘learn history’ when you yourself seem unaware of it is typical of the type of post you were deriding others for making just yesterday.
The only thing close to a virtual world I'd escape to is my virtual farm in Farming Simulator. That game runs offline so no privacy violation and it's just a de-stressing thing. I certainly don't want to live there or feel that's how humans should socialize from now on post-covid as some sort of 'new normal' where no one can even touch anyone anymore or hug or anything.
That's what worries me. COVID made folks afraid to be near each other, and this feeds on that fear. We might be seeing the normalization of only knowing each other via a screen vs. face to face and never knowing what real intimacy and love feels like ever again. It would be one sure fire way for the Schwab lovers to get their population control without drugs or a shot fired.
Wouldn't be surprised to see weddings taking place where they just place two tablets next to each other and we see their online avatars doing the vows.
That's what worries me. COVID made folks afraid to be near each other, and this feeds on that fear. We might be seeing the normalization of only knowing each other via a screen vs. face to face and never knowing what real intimacy and love feels like ever again. It would be one sure fire way for the Schwab lovers to get their population control without drugs or a shot fired.
Wouldn't be surprised to see weddings taking place where they just place two tablets next to each other and we see their online avatars doing the vows.
Yes Cupcake… deriding others is fun! Your exception is silly. You know nothing of war.
In other words, MMOs are a thick client and the metaverse is a thin client, but trying to use the metaverse is like trying to remotely edit a 4k file over DSL on a thin client.
That raises another interesting point no one ever asks about when it comes to the metaverse. What about the developing world? They don’t necessarily have the bandwidth, and they don’t have the money to buy VR headsets (or to buy flagship phones that can drive VR headsets). The smartphones they do have access to are their portals to the connected world. If everyone else was on the metaverse, the developing world would be un-networked again. Likewise, most of the Pacific just doesn’t have enough bandwidth on their submarine fiber connections for things like the metaverse. Heck, there are still people and locations where the most reliable communications are still HF broadcasting or amateur radio (“shortwave”), and, in a communications disaster like the Tongan eruption that damaged the submarine fiber cable earlier this year, HF broadcasting and two-way transmission is still the communications protocol of last resort. Even with Starlink*, it’s likely that there’s not enough bandwidth (at low enough latency) for a positive global experience with the metaverse.
* Remember, bandwidth is a lot like RAM or CPU capacity, we tend to saturate excess bandwidth quicker than we get more bandwidth. All of a sudden, we can do stuff that we couldn’t do before and stuff that we could do but was prohibitively expensive or time consuming becomes available, too. Developing world metaverse usage on Starlink would directly compete for bandwidth with more lucrative business uses like edge networking and edge sensors, more and more environmental IoT applications.
Trench warfare as I know the topic was a horrifying (at last in my reading!) thing, very specific to the WWI time frame. I definitely wouldn't want to play a VR game based on that. A lot of waiting, weather, infrequent charges, occasional bullets and artillery fire. Lots of Casualties.
Not the subject for a game or VR experience of any kind.
Well yeah, and that’s why games require some level of abstraction. There’s probably a way to make trench warfare into a fun game, but it wouldn’t really present it in a truly authentic way. Think Oregon Trail, in reality, the vast majority of traveling on the trail consisted of 8 to 12 hour days of walking next to the oxen pulling your wagon, or, if you were particularly poor, drawing a cart yourself. Sometimes that meant easy terrain, sometimes it meant using pulley systems to get your wagon up a steep hill. Miserable weather would mark much of the trip (too much sun or too much rain), and the risk of injury or disease was near constant. The Oregon Trail game we all know and love wisely abstracts a lot of that away into an hour or two of gameplay, hunting is abstracted away into a fun mini game.
On the other hand, Desert Bus. That’s the complete antithesis of The Oregon Trail, slavish simulation (well, except for the fact that no road, even out in the desert, is that perfectly straight). An 8 hour drive in real time. Too many of the ideas out there for VR experiences are more Desert Bus than Oregon Trail. (And a quick web search for Desert Bus indicates that there’s a VR version of it [granted, it’s meant to support charity through Desert Bus for Hope, and Desert Bus itself is something of a well known meme/joke in gaming, but still].)
You know nothing of me my friend, let alone my knowledge of anything. But it’s ok, you’re clearly here with your own agenda, I’m the one that’s biting and so that is that. Have a spiffing day.
I wasn't talking to you, I was replying to someone who said, "[they] don't want [Timmy's] AR/VR drug you're trying so hard to shove into our throats". Are you suggesting that, rather than somehow demanding or forcing the commenter to buy this AR/VR stuff, that, instead, Tim Cook is actually physically trying to shove something down their throats? Because that'd be even worse.
But I don't see any evidence of Apple, or Tim Cook personally, trying to shove anything down anyone's throat, either metaphorically or literally. Rather, I see Apple offering products that people can choose to buy or not buy, of their own volition. Heck, they don't even offer a specifically AR/VR-focused product yet - that's still at the rumor stage.
But by all mean, continue to have fun trying to stick labels all over everything, that seems to make you feel smug. And thanks for the worthless armchair diagnoses.
While I don't wear glasses currently (I'm on my way), could you imagine sending in your specific glass prescription to be integrated into your new Apple AR glasses whatever they call it? That would be cool.