Metaverse the failure we all predicted

[Harrison]

Mark Zuckerberg announced "his" vision of the future being the Metaverse. Except this wasn't his idea or anything new. In fact the idea is as old as video games.

We have had Secondlife for a long time, and that didn't go the way intended. Sony attempted their own take on the Metaverse with Playstation Home on the PS3. It came preloaded but hardly any owners ran it or even knew it was there.

Many multiplayer games have had their own take on the Metaverse idea. RPGs often have meeting places or hubs within their games where characters meet to chat, discuss, trade, form guilds or parties.

Authors such as William Gibson have explored the concept (and what could could wrong), and many have explored the idea of whole civilizations living in a virtual reality world (The Matrix, The 13th Floor, The Lawnmower man, Vanilla Sky, Tron, Inception, Existenz, Dark City etc. Even some are now considering Blade Runner might have actually been a concept in VR).

Back to the Metaverse. One conpany bought into his new Metaverse idea and having spent $1.2 Billion on their virtual world were shocked to discover only 38 people are online in 24 hours. Oh dear.

I've worked in the design world and IT for over 20 years. My main area being interactive electronic visual communication. Using technology and UI to create interactive environments for users to communicate with customers using technology as a visual language. Therefore I should be embracing the idea of the Metaverse. But I'm not.

If you are still confused. The concept of the Metaverse (MV). A VR where everyone can coexist to interact with store fronts, businesses, connect with people for business or pleasure. To access anything and everything in a single virtual space. If you didn't know what the Metaverse concept was before, well that's what it basically is.

And it wants to expand more into the ideas of Secondlife or something like Animal Crossing, where virtual currency in the MV can be exchanged to buy virtual realestate, decorate and furnish your virtual house or wardrobe. Or visit virtual bars and nightclubs, go to a location to play a game of VR chess or tennis with someone.

Why am I therefore not embracing it? It's just another VR virtual world "game". The world and avatars still look very much like they belong on the Wii. And what's the point? If you havecto try to convince people to use something then it's failed from the start. Most people don't want to wear axheavy restrictive VR headset all day, and either do doctors.

What's your view on the Metaverse? Did you even really know what it was?

But, everything does need to start somewhere and concepts like this from large companies that have the resources to create such things without the worry a small startup would face is a good thing. It means these ideas and concepts can be fully explored and tested. I just don't see a big market or success here.

[Harrison]

I've just been reading that because of the company name change to Meta, and his announcement about Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg's net worth has dropped $71 billion this year.

This means he now only worth a poultry $55 billion now. And it's dropped him down the rixhv list. Last year he was 3rd richest in the world. Now he's down to 7th. The biggest reason is that most of his worth is directly tied up in Meta shares. And Meta is losing users in droves at the moment. A, lot are leaving Instagram for Tik Tok. Personally I don't get why. I hate the way Tik Rok works, much preferring Instagrams way of working. But that's the reality.

[Kin Hell]

Interesting thought's H & don't want to sound like I'm pi$$ing on your parade, but.....

The reality is there is soon to be a massive World-wide recession along with famine. - We're heading there already. - Covid was just the kick-start.

Virtual Warfare. - Now that's an idea that could never be. - War's thin out the masses, get rid of the riff-raff etc. - War is an evil type of culling, where the few prosper for it whilst the majority suffer. It's been going on for hundreds of years.

There are some exciting prospects for VR in many fields, particularly Medicine & Engineering. But who wants a virtual wardrobe or a virtual holiday? - You don't get the taste or the smell of virtual environments which is a huge part of the experience for homo sapiens.

Get out in the high street at least once a week & go shopping. Meet people & interact. - It's part of being Human.

Behave Tick Tock....

I had this sent to me on What'sApp a while back....

IMG-20220104-WA0000.jpg

On the BBC News this morning, some whiney little four eyed tart is complaining about all Emojis having an option to wear Glasses...

Please... Per-lease.... STFU & F'k Off eh!

[Harrison]

You are not "raining on my parade" as that's my whole point. No one needs a VR life. Sorry if that didn't come across from my original post.

And I agree, VR has a lot of ginuinely good real world applications. Especially in science and medicine where it makes control of something, or the ability to view something, not possible otherwise. Such as remotely accessing somewhere humans can't survive (underwater, volcano, remote locations, outerspace, other planets), or performing medical procedures on the minute scale, or even using VR to train people.

But, and this is going to scare you, think about this. VR Tik Tok, VR Love Island. VR Big Bother. I expect like me you detest reality shows. But the truth is there are a lot of vacuous viewers with short attention spans that are addicted to this voyeurism. And if the Metaverse or another VR company suddenly tapped into this market there will be a lot of people going down the Existenz path and society would be doomed.

As for virtual warfare. Traditional wars like we are seeing i
Ukraine are pure evil. But like we are seeing in Ukraine they no longer work if the rest of the world collectively decide the aggressor is wrong. But this has had the knockon affect of creating a virtual war.

Virtual warfare is not about VR headsets and 3D. It's about the fact the world now functions in a virtual world. Money is no longer a physical thing you can quantify by the amount of gold a country has in a vault. Currancy and money is now virtual. When you take out a loan or mortage no physical money exchanges hands. The bank creates the money to pay for the house they are lending you to pay for it by inventing that money from thin air, because they are guaranteeing that loan against the equity in your house. They are basically saying they have the money locked into your house and so are writing themselves an IOU and hanging the money that creates ro the person your buy the house from. And this is how countries, governments and the world now operate. Take the bank of England. After the recent budget they sured up the pound by selling bonds to raise money. There was no real money. They wrote themselves an IOU with the guarantee that the government would pay it back. This is actually what the national debt is. Just a load of IOUs for extra money the government has spent. The only real money, if you can call it that, is the tax from us needed to pay the interest on those IOUs.

And globally now its all virtual we are seeing virtual wars on the finance markets. Look at the global knockon effect Ukraine has had. Years ago we didn't see this sudden reaction to the Gulf War or Afghanistan. Or when the world trade centre fell. But no everything is index linked together, so when acting happens the reaction is instant and it hits everyone.

But in physical terms of VR in war. This is a reality. Unmanned drones have been dlown for years by VR to deliver payloads or recon missions. The US has developed drone tanks, and there are reports of VR robot soldiers anyway in advanced development. Plus you have the iRobot like concept now revealed by Elon Musk. We could soon see Terminator style wars where it really would be man vs machine.

[J T]

a. Good
b. **** social media (even though I use it)
c. I thought the metaverse looked and sounded stupid anyway
c. **** Zuck too
d. Second life was fun for logging into and acting life a jerk to annoy people
e. The bulky tech is still too much of an obstacle, until everyone gets something like the CHIPs from Syndicate (deeply scary, actually, I don't want that)
z. yeah there's two point 'c' and then it skips to z


Kids won't want to be on a platform (FB, Insta) that their parents use, it's just not cool.

Virtual warfare is not about VR headsets and 3D. It's about the fact the world now functions in a virtual world

The press call that 'cyber warfare', I believe. Virtual warfare is a somewhat accurate but slightly misleading term. While the attacking is done on the computer, the knock on effects are very much real and felt in meatspace.

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a poultry $55 billion now.

Yep, chicken feed.

[Harrison]

Very funny. "paltry".

[Harrison]

I think the thing about not being on the same Social media platform as their parents is just a generational fad. Plus with forums and Facebook they are quite text heavy. That takes too much focus. They look for immediate content with minimum time needed to satisfy their short attention spans.

But I think that's shifting. Tom's generation (he's now 10) have seen a big effort to promote reading and take an interest in far more activities away from screens. And Tom does read whole books, and I'm not talking about small kids books. The last 2 books he read were amusing in terms of what they were. The was the first Diddly Squat Farm Clarkson book. I got it last Christnas and he is a big fan of the series. And Bob Mortimer's aurobiography, because he loves their fishing program with Bob and Paul Whitehouse. These were both full novel length and he read them both fairly quickly. And he loved them. Telling me facts and stories from them. I can't imagine many I know in their 20s these days reading those or anything. And Tom is always reading something which is great.