That we, "the old folks", just don't get it, limited by having passed our "exploratory" phase and well into "exploitation" phase (something I read here in HN the other day).
And they may have a point: after all, "the old folks" 30 years ago were saying the same thing about the Internet, well into 2000s.
Oh come on. Usenet in the 1980s was full of people in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. Sure, some people didn't "get" the internet, but millions of demographically similar people were getting value out of it. That isn't happening, and won't happen, with this metaverse BS. And if it does, attentive people of all ages will see it coming many years in advance.
Eh, I think Facebook is really onto something, particularly if you see Oculus as the main tip of the spear. They’re playing a very long game.
My high school and college friends and I are spread across the continent. The pandemic and a mix of Discord and Tabletop simulator brought us back together to do regular board gaming. This is effectively a VR environment without the headset.
My 12 year old hangs out on VRchat or Minecraft , simultaneously watching YouTube or Twitch streams at the same time with his friends when he is home. Today this is a mix of FaceTime , Discord etc, but all-in-one will be used if it’s better.
My younger daughter likes to explore VR worlds, and interact with them.
We are seeing what’s coming years in advance, but many aren’t looking. Facebook is going to eat this space up completely at their current rate of success, if Apple , Microsoft or Valve don’t step up.
> The pandemic and a mix of Discord and Tabletop simulator brought us back together to do regular board gaming. This is effectively a VR environment without the headset.
This is the central problem for VR. The internet offers many experiences that are essentially "VR without the headset", from the Tabletop simulator you mentioned to World of Warcraft. What does the headset really add? You're still looking at a screen, except now you've got a damn thing on your head and are blind to the actual world around you. That virtual world better be really incredible to make up for it.
The quest 2 is surprisingly good at swapping between reality mode (via cameras) and VR mode, when needed. Augmented reality will make this sort of switching more important.
ultimately, people choose VR for the immersion. It’s why problem build home theatres or still go to the theatre, or visit amusement parks, etc., when they’d rather stay home. The headsets are getting far more convenient and comfortable. Still early.
I've read a lot of game reviews on VR and was surprised about demographics. Lots of older (40+) people there. Anyone has more reliable stats?
I personally feel that hardware need to be next-gen as I am nauseus but would be happy to have discord alternative to play in VR. Imagine drawing board, fake cinema, sharing games, arranging common space minecraft-like. I think this will work. You login after work and do creative shit with buddies.
This is how it works for me now but we have discord and own game that we work on. Happy to upgrade XP when new hardware comes.
That demographic makes sense. If you’re 40 you grew up with the birth of video games, you read the sci-fi and the early hype and failure of multiple VR products along get decades and you have a bunch of disposable income
Zuckerberg is 37 years old, so he’d probably be lumped into “the old folks” category. Why would he get it and not us?
I’m, a decade younger than Mark, so idk if I’m young enough by your standards to get it, but my sister and her friends are in college and think this is all a joke. None of them are interested in putting on VR goggles, let alone joining the “metaverse.” None of them had heard of it until Facebook’s name change.
The Metaverse is a top-down Wall Street sponsored hype cycle. It’s not a matter of “old folks” not getting it. It’s Zuckerberg’s attempt to distract Wall Street investors and consumers from Facebook’s growing problems.
> It’s Zuckerberg’s attempt to distract Wall Street investors and consumers from Facebook’s growing problems.
Those problems, at their recent peak, are that – recent.
Yet I know, for a fact, they have been working on the new concept for very long now. I spoke to a FB insider about a year ago already and he, in very diluted way, described what we know as metaverse now.
If you’re looking at the consumer gaming and social media space, then you’d get it.
People underestimate Zuckerberg’s ability to see socio-technical far in the future at their peril. He was ridiculed for making a MySpace competitor, for getting rid of Facebook Apps, for the look & feel changes, the ridiculous prices paid for Instagram and WhatsApp… and he was right each time (for growing his business and his customer base).
Where he has been wrong is in putting Facebook at the centre of his empire, when it’s increasingly a legacy platform for family members, old people and maladjusted conservatives. Metaverse corrects this by making Facebook just one of several properties.
Such hogwash. Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth (that has a long graveyard of unsuccessful services behind them) we're now "legacy" and "old people yelling at clouds"?
Disregarding Meta entirely, I would say it's completely normal for people on HN to be sceptical of new things. Most new things don't work out. Most new things are either vaporware or snake oil. It's hard to tell the good from the bad sometimes.
> Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth
No, the reason is because many new technologies are dismissed here not due to technical infeasibility, but because posters cannot understand the point or value proposition. When this is happening in response to technologies that many people are using and investing in as early adopters, which provides proof of some kind of value at a minimum, is generally speaking a sign of being out of touch to write it off entirely as doomed to fail, vaporware, etc, because you simply do not understand what people are investing their time and capital in.
For example this comes up continually with VR and AR and crypto, extremely rapidly growing technologies with tons of capital flooding into them. It's one thing to say we can't do something, it's another thing to see entire industries forming around you and tons of capital being allocated and saying it will all fail simply because you don't see the point.
Will you recognize that it doesn't actually have to be a point to it, though? As long as you can spellbind investors there doesn't actually need to be something useful that's build at the end of the day. "Crypto" is a good example of this. A lot of the products and services that were build using Blockchain could just have used a normal RDBMS.
Sure, no doubt. But the arguments fielded on HN as to why these various technologies are dead ends and will implode once people become rational are weak. They're usually from people who literally have never used the technology (or, used it many years ago.) At best, they have, don't get it (which is fine) but then go on to make the leap that since they didn't get anything out of it, the whole thing is a house of cards. This is a similar error as thinking every new tech that comes along is going to be the next big thing.
The value prop of VR and AR is remote social presence on par with f2f and full sensory override. This is why Facebook is pivoting the entire company around it. This is not something to ignore and dismiss, unless you think Zuck is a complete idiot. The value prop of crypto is economic freedom. This is why VCs are pivoting their entire portfolios around it and why more than a trillion USD have rushed into it. This is not something to ignore and dismiss, unless you think the entire alternative Internet-based financial system being developed around crypto is a bunch of hot air. At a minimum, for those technologies, they deserve steelmanning given how far they've run without dying. The hubris it takes to dismiss things as big as these, which as much potential to radically alter society, isn't just unfounded, but foolish, given that being on the wrong side of this trade in the direction of dismissiveness is hugely risky if you are a technologist.
I want to make one thing clear from the outset - I want to get it. I want to get it because I want to restore my enthusiasm for tech. I want to understand how crypto and AR/VR are not a gimmick, a barren offshoot of human creativity that will lead nowhere.
> The value prop of VR and AR is remote social presence on par with f2f and full sensory override
Full sensory override how? VR (and VR-facilitated AR) can't even create an immersive visual experience at this point. It hasn't yet cracked the "3 dimensions" chestnut. You talk of "full sensory override" as if plugging into the brain stem was right around the corner (and was going to bring about that override).
If you did have full-sensory override, you might be onto something, but the way things are today, with the tech so inadequate, it seems like a non-starter. Full-sensory override, if it will come, will likely come from a completely different direction. Think lucid dreaming.
> The value prop of crypto is economic freedom
The kind of economic freedom where even your ability to get involved in crypto at all is fully dependent on centralized exchanges, and their approval of you as a client? That, or rummage around in your attic trying to find a spare power plant that has to be there somewhere, so that you can enter the game via mining.
I am sorry. I really would like to believe. But these hot technologies seem to come with insurmountable design flaws that have been there from day one, were still present at day one thousand, and will be there at day ten thousand. I think that is the reason for the broad skepticism.
What are you drawing your conclusions re: VR from? Have you followed the research and used the hardware? It seems pretty clear we will have VR goggles that feel effectively indistinguishable from real life in terms of fidelity and optics relatively soon.
Also there are already decentralized exchanges within crypto assets (eg uniswap), but you do need to find a counter party to get out of fiat. It’s being worked on and centralized exchanges aren’t your only option. It would be worth catching up on DeFi.
Edit: btw I meant visual and auditory sensory override - I agree it is a ways off before you have full proprioception etc, if ever. Not necessary to beat face to face social presence tho.
> It seems pretty clear we will have VR goggles that feel effectively indistinguishable from real life in terms of fidelity and optics relatively soon.
Just out of curiosity, what about other senses? Smell, touch, temperature, taste?
How close are we to fully experiencing a dinner / concert / mountain hike in VR?
Teslasuit has some of these features (temperature and touch). It’s pretty expensive, but so are trips to mountains, I guess.
The key point is effectively, imo. If not completely real, there may be a line of deepdive that once you cross it, real trips will still feel “better quality”, but not as in vs “staring at the monitor in your room”. VR doesn’t have to be REAL or even resemble reality, it just has to be convincing.
In my view, there is no point in “walking around” with your real legs in VR, or having the human shape at all. Think of it as a PAL/NTSC converter from human to VR-entity which may or may not be human in different situations. There is no human dinner, concert or even mountain of importance in there. You may be e.g. a spaceship flying in the heat of a quasar, or a building bot with 360 view of its surrondings that moves along the eye focus and feels nearby constructions with its ”skin”. That’s what I was talking about in the root comment (that’s still naive and narrow-minded compared to what is to come). Sorry for this analogy, but most of comments against vr are like “we don’t need modern cities because these are not built for horses”. Yes, no horses, no haystacks, no blacksmiths. It doesn’t mean people will not rush into the city once it’s built with all the infra.
I think people are just responding to how much hype there is. Yes it is cool, immersion feels fun and different. Lifting up that jar and looking at the alien in the first room in Alyx was very cool.
But its just a new way of looking at pixels on a screen. You can't actually "do" anything that you can't already do now.
You can pretend to fly the moon. You can simulate going on an adventure. Its all just entertainment.
I'm nearly 50, I think the Metaverse is a solution looking for a problem, but I don't hate all new tech.
I'm excited about Deno.
I really like the idea of serverless, cloud functions, and these new durable cloud objects that Cloudflare is talking about.
I'm super excited about the Steam Deck. A powerful, handheld PC running Linux, with real buttons I can click, not all just touch screens.
I can understand how Smart Watches will be cool eventually. When they are unteathered and running an open OS.
I will grudgingly admit that the stupid siri voice assist ball thing my wife bought is useful. We use it a lot for setting timers and alarms, playing music, and we are slowing finding more ways it can be useful. I can see that as Siri gets smarter, she will be more useful, so I can understand why everybody is going ape shit over AI.
I think e-bikes scooters are cool. I think EV cars will change the world significantly. I do a 15 minute commute on a scooter every day.
There is a lot of great new tech out there. VR is not one of them.
