The metaverse will need to be jailbroken to be usable at all
Conversation
Replying to
The longer I let the FB+Microsoft versions of the idea simmer the more hopelessly lame it seems. It’s like Q demonstrating cool hardware to James Bond before Bond himself puts it through its paces.
5
3
74
There’s got to be a better entry point.
1
1
15
Ben Thompson seems to think immersive workplaces are the killer app and Microsoft will win this on the strength of Teams. stratechery.com/2021/microsoft
3
19
He also seems to discount AR-first approaches like Apple and Niantic in the medium term. But I keep thinking Pokémon Go remains the only large scale demonstration of anything “meta” actually working.
2
3
60
I’m going to bet the killer app of metaverse will look more like Pokémon Go than like Horizon Workrooms or Microsoft teams. The business logic will look more like NFTs and memes than VisiCalc/Excel. It will work out in consumer stuff first and business stuff possibly never.
1
4
46
Outside of narrow things like blue-collar AR X-Ray vision for repairs, business uses will be like pushing on a string.
Business comms tend to go to the lowest fidelity, most asynchronous mode available, absent coercive management. Email disrupted phone. Slack disrupted email.
3
1
35
I actually think the thing will begin in sorry of the opposite of offices or homes or designed destination fantasy worlds. Those are plazas. You want warrens. Back alleys, corners, interstices.
1
2
17
Nakatomi space basically. Smooth over striated. The metaverse will belong to those who can see with burglar eyes.
2
2
25
Ben is correctly worried about where a chicken-and-egg dynamic can come from. His case for the office is basically that it is a captive chicken that can perhaps be forced to lay eggs, kicking off a virtuous cycle. I don’t think the captive chickens will cooperate.
2
18
The whole “meta” frame seems doomed to me. Shades of “fifth generation computing” or “information superhighway” … a top down conceit.
I think what emerges will be better described as a paraverse. As in paranormal and parallel universe.
1
9
49
Essence of the medium will be what’s in peripheral vision, not front and center. Front and center can be pass-through regular reality. Periphery can be adjacent possible weirdness. Ghosts, gremlins, hobgoblins, shadows. Dungeon dimensions stuff.
2
3
29
Paraverse = extra dungeon dimensions for reality. It will be able to drive you paranoid in the wrong hands. More like a hallucinogenic than a gadget.
3
2
25
People are focusing too much on the potential sensory experience. I think the more important experience might be your experience of luck and risk. The paraverse will reshape your luck by reshaping *what* you sense.
2
2
21
Example: in driving, accidents shape our behaviors strongly but near misses don’t. It’s known that cueing drivers on near misses reshapes their driving (see Tom Vanderbilt’s book Traffic).
3
2
15
Example 2: Christmas Carol stuff, Ghosts of past/present/future. You enter a meeting room and calendar history of what’s gone down there historically kinda flashes past your eyes as you sit down.
3
12
I think the two poles of skeuomorphic reference and fantasy gaming both mislead. The power here lies in destabilized unmediated realities not in escaped alternate realities.
2
1
13
Besides the shadow power, it’s got a more prosaic advantage. Doing weird mind-hacking on the edges of ordinary perceptions is a differential problem. You don’t have to manufacture a vat for a brain out of whole cloth or just “augment” reality. You can distort it.
1
8
Two familiar examples:
Rose-tinted glasses: tint everything pink.
Beer goggles: get someone drink.
That should be the starting point. Not games with fantasy larping or virtual offices with stock-marionette avatars.
1
11
Precisely. Reality distortion fields for all. Serendipity modulation at sensory level. And zemblanity too. Can’t have one without the other. If you get cut out of the right reality distortions, you’ll be doomed.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
a serendipity engine. What’s around the corner or across the city that you might go and experience.
Quest givers and missions, with a side of make believe and commerce.
Clan TaskRabbit, reporting for duty.
2
1
19
One reason I’m thinking about this is: it’s been clear there’s no endgame for Web3 without some version of metaverse. But I’m realizing the converse is also true. Metaverse doesn’t work without Web3 because it has no other opening gambit.
4
4
20
Another way to look at it: forget AR and VR. The real distinction is between reality distortions that change your alpha and those that don’t. Skeuomorphic and fantasy distortions add/subtract no alpha.
Alpha as in new info not visual field transparency.
3
2
27
Finally watching John Carmack's talk. I'd been saving that for when I had time to pay more careful attention. It's kinda interesting how his vision is distinctly different from Zuck's, and this is clearly a sort of marriage of convenience for now. youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0
1
1
13
"we have lapsed VR users, but there are no lapsed mobile phone users"
most insightful point so far... he's made a lot of good "engineer's engineer" points but this is the big strategy point he's made... if you can't solve the lapsing problem, metaverses are done
1
5
31
This talk was very infinite-game. Carmack is clearly committed to the future of the technology itself, and dedicated to keeping the tech advancing and protecting it from mere business-interest decisions and strategies, while being pragmatic about it.
1
6
He's kinda CTO to the whole sector rather than just Facebook's VR effort.
1
7
Trying out roblox finally. I never did try minecraft. Feels like a platform of small games?
1
3
Re jailbreaking, interesting thing in the Carmack talk was his sidebar on allowing root access to Oculus Go now that it's basically been end-of-lifed, and his passing comments on openness.
1
4
All his technical points were very astute as expected. Especially liked the point about how local+cloud rendering would have to be application specific and is not really a general problem. Sounds true, and if so, it suggests initial grain of metaverse will be pretty vertical
1
4
He clearly has a strong bias against horizontally organized stacks, and the swipe at "architecture astronauts" is also a shot across the bows at horizontal efforts, and more generally, federated efforts in general (sdks, toolkits etc). Solid reasoning, but revealing too.
1
5
Though he clearly appreciates the low-fi janky stuff, his sympathies are clearly with the high-performance, hi-fi optimization end of tech evolution. Possibly a mix of engineering tastes and history as a game builder, where squeezing out more performance is key.
1
5
Show replies

