Consultant plays Metaverse MythBuster. Here's why they're wrong

Consulting giant McKinsey & Company has been playing a round of MythBusters: Metaverse Edition. Though its origins lie in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the metaverse has been heavily talked about in business circles as if it's a real thing over the last year or so, peaking with Facebook's Earth-shattering rebrand to Meta …

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Holodeck

Okay, I'll bite. You know the tech they're using to film TV shows these days - where they fill a room with LED screens and render the effects to that? "Virtual Production"?

The most likely way we'll get the metaverse is we end up with a room like that in our homes. Somebody will do it. Some more people will do. Manufacturers will realise there is a market. Prices will fall. And we'll all have a holoroom.

[Gordon 10]

Re: Holodeck

I look forward to the day I can push my mother in law in and shout "Computer Disable Holoroom safety protocols" whilst starting up Doom 2030.

[Anonymous Coward]

"where they fill a room with LED screens"

Fahrenheit 451?

[chivo243]

Re: "where they fill a room with LED screens"

A Clockwork Orange? Soylent Green?

[Anonymous Coward]

@chivo243 - Re: "where they fill a room with LED screens"

Soylent Green looks way more probable to me than any other scenario since we're actually working on making it our ultimate reality.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: "where they fill a room with LED screens"

The Machine Stops.

[Charlie van Becelaere]

Re: "where they fill a room with LED screens"

Well worth reading - especially if you haven't - and at this price it's doubly enticing.

https://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.html

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: "where they fill a room with LED screens"

The "Wall" was explicitly a central theme of Fahrenheit 451; in fact, Bradbury said the non-print media featured in the novel was more important to his thesis than the book-burning.

[localgeek]

Re: "where they fill a room with LED screens"

That was my first thought, too. What better way to keep the population docile and distracted than through living in an immersive, fictional world?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Holodeck

"the tech they're using to film TV shows these days - where they fill a room with LED screens and render the effects to that?"

They actually shoot the actors on green screen and use a computer to replace the green (color humans don't have) with whatever CG decor they want. And if you feed the real camera's moves to that same computer you can make it copy the exact same camera movements in your fake 3D decor space, making it look even more real (check any and all recent movies).

Anyway, this has nothing to do with the "Metaverse", as the point in TV/movies is to look good for the spectators, while the point of the "Metaverse" would be to feel real for the actors. Completely different and quite incompatible goals.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Holodeck

> They actually shoot the actors on green screen and use a computer to replace the green (color humans don't have) with whatever CG decor they want.

That's how they've been doing it, and I'm sure how a lot of people still do it. I think I remember seeing that the recent Dune at times used brown-screens, to get more accurate lighting.

But one can set up walls of bezel-less high-quality displays in the background of a scene, to show more or less what the audience will see. I think they used this for Star Wars 7-9. This means that actors can more easily and properly react to the CG monsters etc. charging at them, rather than having to imagine it, so it's a god-send for middling actors. Possibly why they used this for Star Wars 7-9.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Holodeck

> They actually shoot the actors on green screen and use a computer to replace the green (color humans don't have) with whatever CG decor they want.

Not anymore, at least in TV. Green screen takes a lot more acting skill and rehearsal time. If you have to look at the dinosaur in the background you either have to have a man with a tennis ball on a fishing rod and you have to do 30 takes so your eyes track the right position - or you have a dinosaur on the background.

It's also a lot quicker and cheaper in post - matting in background is 95% automated but the last hand tweaks when you have close-ups of hair or you need to do color tweaks is time consuming if you are doing a weekly show.

And the lighting is easier, if there is a light in the scene and it's on a high brightness background screen the real light of the right color falls on the actors face in the right way - you don't need to fix it in post.

The really cool bit is that the backgrounds are generated in a games engine and tied to the camera track, so when the camera moves the perspective view of the background moves with it.

[ThomH]

Re: Holodeck

> They actually shoot the actors on green screen and use a computer to replace the green (color humans don't have)

That's clearly not what the author is referring to; suggest you learn more about modern filming processes such as filling a room with LED screens and rendering the effects to that.

[NoneSuch]

Re: Holodeck

"They actually shoot the actors on green screen and use a computer to replace the green (color humans don't have) with whatever CG decor they want. And if you feed the real camera's moves to that same computer you can make it copy the exact same camera movements in your fake 3D decor space, making it look even more real (check any and all recent movies)."

Only local TV stations still do greenscreen for the weather report. Everyone else has moved on to background projection. The Mandalorian pioneered this. They project the actual world onto the background behind the actors to give natural lighting in whatever scene they want. Then a bit of CGI cleanup to get rid of the prop and harness wires.

https://youtu.be/gUnxzVOs3rk

[Anonymous Coward]

Less Holodeck and more the latest gen of adaptive lighting.

But yeah, projected lights, tv/light walls, and matte backgrounds like brown/green/blue screen all play a part in production now. There are large interactive art installations touring now, and you could certainly do something like them on a smaller scale. I suspect that there will be a fork in the road, where some of those toys stay in the live event/production/movie theater/Super rich a-hole home cinema tier, and others like vr/ar goggles and tablet/phone AR come to define the home space.

That's not the end of the world. While environmental AR is impressive when done well, it isn't suited to individual exploration or running around. With a cheap home setup you can wander the world from the couch. The big immersive environments are cool, but the world is only as big as the box, and can't be a separate space for each participant. The experience becomes about how cool the space is, not person's experience per se. And a REALLY good personal headset can generate a virtual PoV of the same kind of interactive environments.

The Metaverse won't be just one thing, or one technology. And like William Gibson said, it's already here, just a very few people recognized it at the time.

[juice]

Re: Holodeck

> They actually shoot the actors on green screen and use a computer to replace the green (color humans don't have) with whatever CG decor they want. And if you feed the real camera's moves to that same computer you can make it copy the exact same camera movements in your fake 3D decor space, making it look even more real (check any and all recent movies).

It's a mix of things. I suspect what the original author was referring to was the tech being pioneered by Lucasarts for The Mandalorian, where the actors are basically stood inside a giant ring of screens which project the background for the scene.

https://www.redsharknews.com/production/item/6963-the-mandalorian-is-totally-redefines-cgi-for-television

The problem there is that when all is said and done, it's still just a flat projection on a screen, with no 3D attributes at all; anything the actors needs to directly interact with has to be either a physical prop or given a placeholder in the shape of a man holding a tennis ball at the right height, who can then be replaced with some post-processed CGI.

Which works well enough for filming a TV show, but isn't quite as useful for interacting with a metaverse...

[phuzz]

Re: Holodeck

Part of the reason it was so necessary for The Mandalorian was that shiny armour he wears.

With a traditional green screen they'd have to CGI in all the correct reflections onto the reflected green. With screens all the way around, most of the reflections will be close enough to not need touching up.

[ShadowSystems]

Re: Holodeck

In order to drive all those monitors in a realistic fashion you will need a lot of data, especially if they are "4k" or higher resolution. The higher the resolution the fatter the data pipe you'll need to handle it all lest your pseudo-holodeck become a herky-jerky glitch-filled "flip book" level of craptastic animations. Bandwith that is so far from ubiquotous that it's not even remotely amusing. So until everyone everywhere can enjoy a gigabit of bandwidth anywhere, everywhere, every time, (at home, on the road, in the dead spots along your daily route to enjoy a pint, etc) then your experience will be "less than optimal".

And that's for the folks with perfect visual senses & the motor skills to manipulate all the kit required to enable such an environment. The blind (300+ million around the world at last count) might not be able to make much use of those VR goggles. The haptic gloves maybe, but even that isn't a given depending on how awkward & cumbersome they are to even put on much less use. Granted, the lack of a video feed cuts down drasticly on the bandwidth required, but still...

"The blind are a niche market" you say? A market segment of which you may become a part when your age-riddled eyes get all cataract glazed, myopic, astigmatism, blah blah blah. Those haptic gloves may prove difficult/impossible when your arthritic, palsied, spasmotic muscles refuse to let you even get the danged things on much less make use of them. A segment almost all of us will enter eventually (unless/until we die) that makes such technology a bit of a faff.

But, and this is the truely idiotic part of this article, a survey of a thousand people to estimate general sentiment on a topic is *not* enough of a survey to make a butterfly fart's difference. Perhaps a hundred thousand of a specific age group, but a mere thousand spanning "wet behind the ears to nearly dead" means you've got SFA as a slice of the pie in any individual catagory. If you survey 1K people across five different catagories, that implies two hundred people in each catagory. If you think asking a ten-score of folks is sufficient to generate any meaningful conclusion therefrom, I'm sure a few Statistic teachers would like to have a word with you.

TL;DR: Faulty surveys generate faulty conclusions. "GIGO" at it's finest.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Holodeck

You are rendering this locally - it's more like a games engine than watching a movie.

Caves (industry term) are more used for business and simulation. It's lot easier technically and socially, to have a half a dozen engineers stand in the same room and look at floor-ceiling 3D renders of a chemical plant and be able to have them point at things and discuss them face to face - than have people at their desks all meeting virtually with headsets

(even if that means they could all have cool avatars)

((they won't have cool avatars - the sort of people who use these systems in engineering all pick the same avatars))

[doublelayer]

Re: Holodeck

You are rendering this, but not from only local assets. Even if it was all local, you'd still need a lot of data (check the size of some modern games). However, if it was all local, you couldn't easily inhabit your virtual environment with people who weren't there. At some point, you've got to send the data to them so they can render it too. Even standing in a static environment and only sending the movements of your companions will require low latency if not a lot of bandwidth. If people are changing the environment as well, you'll need more.

This is to say nothing of the GPU power needed to render a virtual environment at high speed. Games display to one smallish screen and often require expensive chips to get to framerates considered acceptable by gamers. You can always choose to render your virtual environment in lower resolution or a slower framerate, but both will be immediately noticeable to reviewers who will comment on that.

[Richard 12]

Re: Holodeck

Nope, viewpoint is the problem.

Virtual production has to precisely track the position of the camera and update the rendered video so it all lines up.

That's relatively simple for a single camera, as you can bolt a tracking solution to it that feeds directly into the system.

It's a bit more complex for two cameras. You have to render at double-speed and sync all the shutters so that only one of them is looking at a time. Or (more common), just never have them both able to see the same bit of screen at the same time.

You can partially do it for a single human, by requiring an appropriate hat. The illusion will be poor because there's no parallax. Can be improved by using "3D glasses" and syncing shutters/polarised screens like 3D cinema.

Not feasible (perhaps not even possible) for two humans, even wearing 3D glasses.

[veti]

Re: Holodeck

A sample of 1000 is enough to give meaningful results. Opinion pollsters have been doing it this way for a century, and though they're not always right, their track record is way better than the people who try to collect much larger samples.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Holodeck

Statistical sampling of public opinion is a little more complicated than "asking a thousand people is good enough". I haven't bothered looking at this study to see what its methodology looks like, because based on the article the questions and the definitions and warrants underlying them are garbage.

[phuzz]

Re: Holodeck

For reference this is what it took a couple of years ago to generate the virtual sets for The Madalorian (although it's a bit light on the nitty gritty tech details so if anyone knows of a deeper dive I'd love to read it):

Bear in mind, the image isn't static, it's changed so that the parallax looks correct from the camera's PoV

It takes 11 interlinked computers to serve the images to the wall. Three processors are dedicated to real-time rendering and four servers provide three 4K images seamlessly side-by-side on the wall and one 4K image on the ceiling. That delivers an image size of 12,288 pixels wide by 2,160 high on the wall and 4,096 x 2,160 on the ceiling. With that kind of imagery, however, the full 270 degrees (plus movable back LED walls) and ceiling cannot be rendered high-resolution photo-real in real time. The compromise is to enter in the specific lens used on the camera into the system so that it renders a photo-real high-resolution image only for the camera's specific field of view at that given moment while the rest of the screen displays a lower-resolution image that is perfectly effective for interactive lighting and reflections on the talent, props and physical sets, but of a simpler polygon count for faster rendering times.

(src)

[Anonymous Coward]

My significant other spent her early days working for McKinsey

And most of her ex-coworkers eventually went to prison for insider trading & energy market manipulation.

Enough said.

[Gordon 10]

So basically

McKinsey have probably recieved a large bundle of cash from FaceTwat to talk up the Metaverse and are doing do by redefining it as "Gaming on the internet".

In particular failing to mention the well publicised kiddy risks - especially wrt Roblox. And that before we get to the flying penises of Second Life.

Bzzt FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So basically

So is there an argument here that isn't someone user a hammer to carve out a todger so hammers must be bad? These companies are trying to stake out mindshare of something much larger then they are. That's just one of the bad things, but it's still a case of bad people doing bad things with neutral tools.

I don't want to sound like one of those that wave their arms saying "there's no such thing and bad X only bad people". Some tools are bad, evil even. Look at slave collars or the breaking wheel.

AR and the "metaverse" aren't good or evil, though like all things in this age that involve media influence, bad and evil people will try to bend them to their own ends. There are a couple lessons there. We said the same about the internet, and failed to keep it free, open, and sane, so it got taken over by asshats, corporations, and trolls. The metaverse can be used for many things, what it will be an mean will either be staked out by those doing good things, or taken over by outfits like Google and people like Zuckerburg. The last is that in absence of the internet or metaverse, these scumbags would just look for another way to screw us all over(hello "gig" economy?).

So we really should devote more effort tracking these people and punishing them for screwing up and over civilization as we know it.

[Anonymous Coward]

"excited to engage in a digital experience with their favorite brands"

Yes, but probably they are only these ones: "Over half of people who attend virtual lifestyle and luxury events" - which may be a lot among the McKinsey people acquaintances, but far less in the general population, thanks to heaven not everyone lives to worship some brands.

It looks McKinsey thinks the metaverse is just a huge shopping centre for the brands-addicted people.

Yet people don't go outside to shop only. It will be hard, for example, to get your favourite food and beverages in the metaverse, and even if they may think about digital slaves on bicycles to deliver that, it's a far different experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

@LDS - Re: "excited to engage in a digital experience with their favorite brands"

No need to go outside at all. In your virtual world, your hunger will be taken care of by an assortment of virtual foods and beverages that will fulfill your vital needs. Virtually of course. You won't need a doctor or a nurse either since we all know holograms and virtual avatars can never get sick, unless of course they are programmed to do so.

[Roj Blake]

Specs

Why did 3DTV fail?

Why did Google abandon Glass?

Why do people spend money on contact lenses or laser eye surgery?

Could it be that most of us hate wearing glasses for extended periods of time?

If so, you can add VR headsets to the list of things that people won't rush towards.

[iron]

Re: Specs

Any time I see an article expounding on the virtues of Google Glass or similar spectacle based displays you can guarantee that the journalist waxing lyrical about them wears glasses. And, the whole R&D team developing them wear glasses. These people don't realise that the rest of us have no interest in wearing glasses if we don't need to.

Oh and btw Google are bringing Glass back. There was a very crap translator specs announcement at their recent IO conference.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Specs

I'm not sure the failure of Google Glass was due to objections of the users so much as everyone else.

They trialled it with Google employees in the very tech-savvy environment of SF. The main objection was that somebody working for the worlds biggest harvester of personal data was following you around with a camera. It also meant that anybody else wearing specs was immediately suspect

If I was followed by Fox News film crews 24x7 I don't think I would be mad at the manufacturer of the TV camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Specs

But try using an Oculus Quest headset if you wear glasses, it’s an unpleasant experience. You can’t see right and worry about scratching your glasses; when you take the headset off, your glasses may go flying onto the floor if you’re lucky. Sure, you can spend $80 to get prescription lenses that are a pain to fit and also may fall off when you take off the headset. Is all of this really worth the bother?

[that one in the corner]

Re: Specs

The only reason to wear glasses is to see things that you otherwise would not, and - aside from cost (ouch, my bifocals) - they really are not much of a burden.

If you want to see the AR or VR, wearing glasses (not huge 1980's headset) is hardly a burden. If it is to you, then just accept that you are not that interested in the AR/VR and quietly ignore it.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Specs

3-D photography, film, and TV has been failing religiously every twenty or thirty years since the 1843... seriously, you would not believe some of the technology the Victorians came up with!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like fax machines?

I feel like the part of that that is true is more about not living up to hype cycles.

It's not like 3d photography ever became a lost art, it just hasn't taken over the other methods. Why would it though? Why did people every believe it should? There was always a little PT Barnum somewhere behind each of these crazes.

In the end 3D isn't a more compelling way to tell most stories. It can be cool with big action scenes, or in landscape documentaries, but most people respond more strongly to high res footage than 3d footage. It's also more technically demanding and expensive. So big surprise the place where it has really taken off is in gaming. But those games have gotten good enough that the engines are rendering stuff for TV and movies as well what passes for cartoons these days.

The camera has also "failed" to end painting, water color, etc. etc. Did it live up to the hype? Or was that never the point? 3d/VR/AR is just another tool, to be used or misused depending on the project. Or not used as the case may be.

Also, I agree no one undersell the Victorians technical abilities. Shows the gains we make can when a group of people focus for a generation on something other than Nationalism, Imperialism, Trumpism, or Thatcherism. It also shows that society can manage to move forward and backward at the same time, as the Victorians were involved in quite alot of the second one at the time. Just that the empire crumbled but those technical achievements are still with us as the centuries click by.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite right

3DTV failed because 3D content production was limited/limiting and 3D cinema was just an industry excuse to juice ticket surcharges.

Glass wasn't designed to be a usable or useful device for the wearer.

3d has in fact succeeded spectacularly, it's just done it mostly in the arena of immersive 3d game environments.

And yeah, not everyone wants to wear one of today's clunky headsets, but the expensive ones are getting better every year, and people didn't quit playing video games because of 80'd era square controller pain and button thumb.

You are closer to the mark on your last point. Early adopters rush to technology, people as a whole rush to content. Release a game of thrones remake for the xbox with a persistent world and see how fast it fills up/empties out.

And don't worry, if you hate glasses you could do most of this stuff on your phone these days. Until we have a working neural link that won't cause permanent brain damage I suspect people will want other choices. I hate the screen door pixelation from the earlier headsets more than the look/feel, but I am also happy to use one sitting down at a keyboard I can't see, which is clearly a minority taste choice.

[juice]

What about the biggest myth?

> If so, you can add VR headsets to the list of things that people won't rush towards.

To be honest, this is the key "myth" that this little puff-piece conspicuously failed to mention: how many people are willing to wear VR headsets for extended periods, in order to interact with this metaverse?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: What about the biggest myth?

How many people were willing to buy PCs that took up a corner of the living room to do this internet thing - home computers are just a fad like CB radio

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Specs

Could it be that most of us hate wearing glasses for extended periods of time?

Possibly – I've never seen a methodologically-sound study on the question.

Personally, I have no complaints about wearing glasses. I hate 3D TV and AR/VR, though.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Specs

I like wearing glasses, it makes me look inteligent.

And I can take them and toss my hair and suddenly be the hot girl.

If I had hair, and was a girl, and was in anyway 'hot'

[ThatOne]

One day my prince will come...

> there will be an explosion of creative, commercially viable ideas that will transform the way we work, play, connect, and engage

All right, so this apparently boils down to saying "something absolutely marvelous is bound to come (any time now!), and we will make so much money with it". And to reassure themselves (and their shareholders) they spend their time and money trying to detect the first signs of that coming.

If you wonder, non-marketing people use to call this "wishful thinking", but then again they aren't paid good salaries to believe in their own fantasies.

[Howard Sway]

Why this is bullshit

If something's great, it's immediately obvious why it's great. People see it and want it. It doesn't need a big consultancy to advance a set of spurious arguments about which market segments are perhaps interested in adopting particular bits of it.

Compare it to the first time you saw the web (if of course you're old enough for this to be a thing...). Instantly great. Could see the potential straight away. No brainer. Nobody needed to justify why it might be popular with a certain generation.

Next, take the example of shopping in the metaverse. If I want something I can easily buy it online after a simple search. See the thing in a list, click on it, pay for it. Done. In the real world, I push a trolley round a supermarket - I can get everything there and then, and make my choices as I go along. Plus it gets me out of the house and away from working on a screen, and I get a bit of exercise. What is the metaverse experience? Push a virtual trolley round a virtual 3D store, with a gimmicky graphic representation of the things flying into the cart in front of you? Much slower than just picking from a list, and you still have to wait just as long to have it delivered.

Games, sure. But 3D games have been around now for decades, so what's new? Meetings? Why do I want to see a jerky, rubbish graphic 3D version of people rather than actually see the real person (albeit in a jerky, pretty rubbish video stream...)?

If you're having to search hard for uses of the thing, and can only come up with stuff that already exists in a convenient form, it's not gonna be such a big thing at all, no matter how much money Zuckerberg wastes trying to push it.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Why this is bullshit

What is the metaverse experience?

Microsoft Bob, basically.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Why this is bullshit

Microsoft Bob in THREEEEE DEEEEEE!

[User McUser]

Re: Why this is bullshit

Arguably there are some possible advantages for shopping that VR/AR can provide. For example, you could look at a 3D model of something you are buying, check it out up close and from any angle. For something like furniture or clothes you could see how it might look in your actual room or on your own person.

But lets be honest, the same manufacturers that can barely take shitty photographs of their products for existing web pages are in NO WAY EVER going to produce good quality 3D models like that. Maybe the overpriced high-end/high-margin luxury brands will manage but the cheaper brands just won't have the skills or/and manpower.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: you could see how it might look in your actual room or on your own person

Some sites and/or apps already provide such a service. No Metaverse bollocks needed.

[doublelayer]

Re: Why this is bullshit

While I entirely agree with you about VR, it's not always true that the great inventions are obvious. Anecdotes about people failing to understand the benefits of technology are plentiful, going back (in my memory without looking up the thousands of earlier examples) to the people who couldn't understand that the telephone would bee anything more than a toy. Many didn't understand the point of the web when they first saw it (so your computer that can already talk to other computers to send messages is now publishing messages, but you still have to talk individually to see them). It caught on despite their skepticism. I remember the same thing with smartphones and PDAs (I have a mobile phone for talking and a desktop for browsing the internet, why do I need to combine them) as well as both of those precursors (I have a phone at home that can take messages, why do I need to carry one, I can get news from a newspaper and information by calling people, so a computer is an expensive game). I don't think VR has many benefits, but that doesn't prevent others from finding them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why this is bullshit

Right, as I said in another thread here, people follow content more than technology. The idea that great technologies are immediately apparent is the flip side of that coin. Until people can see a working and "good enough" version of an idea it will likely founder.

The Meta inc version of the Metaverse is a 3 year old's Duplo set. It's not even a good toy. Trying to recreate shopping in a store aisle by aisle fails because it's a bad idea, not a badly execute idea. Look at all the pointless skeuomorphism in early mobile phones?

No one is saying that about Halo though.

I can't blame people who have only seen Facebitches uncanny valley dystopia or second life for thinking this is all crap. They are terrible, and most people lack the vision to build or imagine something beyond what they have been shown. So it's up to us happy few to show people a better version of that possible world before they fix people's mind share and lower the horizon on another generation.

[veti]

Re: Why this is bullshit

I remember early cellphones. Take it from me, not everyone who saw the car-powered bricks that some people spoke into into in the early 90s thought immediately "I've gotta have one of those".

Or roof-mounted solar panels. Believe it or not, there are still people who sneer at those, even after all the progress of the past 20 years.

Or electric cars. Or heat pumps - heck, I wanted one of those from the moment I heard about them in first-year thermodynamics, but some people still don't believe in them. Or digital cameras. Our world is full of innovations that took years or decades after invention to gain market share and take over their sector.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: heat pumps and electric cars ... some people still don't believe in them

I think you'll find it's the practicalities and/or cost that many people struggle with. Also that these things put ever increasing strain on power generation and grids that will rapidly become inadequte without massive infrastructure investment.

Like most things, one size does not fit all.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Why this is bullshit

If something's great, it's immediately obvious why it's great.

I'm pretty sure there are a vast number of counterexamples. Like, oh, hand-washing for surgeons, which is a pretty terrific idea, but took rather a while to catch on.

There are plenty of things I think are great – even objectively great – which have yet to be recognized as obviously so by many, perhaps most, people. Critical thinking, for example.

Oh, and the first time I saw the web was in late 1993 (CERN www and httpd, and NCSA Mosaic running on AIX). I could see why it was useful for me – I was a computer scientist and software developer with extensive experience with other Internet and online services, and an academic and practitioner, so it was immediately useful. There wasn't any reason at the time to suspect that it would ever be useful for most people other than perhaps certain niche uses – the kind of thing WAIS and other services would already have satisfied.

Note that at that time NSFNet had only been broadly permitted to carry commercial traffic for a year. (There were limited commercial interconnects with NSFNet for a few years prior; Wikipedia has a decent history.) So a good chunk of the US Internet had only just been opened to commercial activity at that point.

I think Meta's "metaverse" nonsense is a huge waste of time, myself. But I don't think that's generally an attribute that can be identified ab initio.

[chivo243]

only 1000?

+ a few others? That's a great pool to sample from... As stated in the comments, it's a solution that needs a reason to live...

[Funongable]

Derealization and dissociation

As climate change turns human society into even more of a crap shoot, the appeal of any form of escape or relief will be sought with greater urgency.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Derealization and dissociation

Yes but people already did that with analog TV, and radio before it, and books and newspapers before that.

Nothing in this that's new, or even more dangerous, than the idiot box we already know and love. Escapism has been part of the human condition, and it isn't going anywhere as long as we aren't. Our current problems seem dire, and they are, but so was the black death, the mongol horde, the rise and fall of roman empire, the arrival of westerners in the new world, (and the arrival of easterners in the new world if you were an north american camelid).

While this marks another incremental change that CAN allow yet greater numbers of humans to be packed into smaller sardine cans, that consequence is a side effect of how we use it, not intrinsic to it. We may yet find that people are less likely to let the world burn when they can actually see it happening in real time, all over the world. Part of why this has been push to the forefront as an issue is the ability of most of the people in the world to see the real impacts this is having on most of the world on a daily basis.

We as a species tend to find that more motivating.

[Queeg]

Metaverse

I've said it before and will probably be muttering it when I croak.

Create "The Oasis" an actual Metaverse which I would be happy to dive into

or stop pestering me with your Corporate speak Bullshit.

[thejoelr]

Ohhh..... that is what the metaverse is.

Well now that I know the metaverse is Fortnite...

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Ohhh..... that is what the metaverse is.

The metaverse is the internet in the good old days when you never left AOL Facebook, and spent all your money there

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Ohhh..... that is what the metaverse is.

And Roblox? I admit I have only passing familiarity with Roblox, but I've watched Granddaughter Major playing it (using it? robloxing?) a few times on a tablet or phone, and it didn't seem particularly meta nor versical. It seemed ... kind of like Minecraft, say. Or Second Life. Or MOOs, except for having graphics.

I'd like to see some justification from this report for labeling all of these things "metaverse platforms".

[TeeCee]

Hmm, the little picture on the left of the article neatly illustrates why Zuckerbitch has gone all in on this.

"In VR nobody can tell you're a sad dork.".

[Anonymous Coward]

"In VR nobody can tell you're a sad dork.".

Yes, actually we can.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "In VR nobody can tell you're a sad dork.".

but much more easily if you speak...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "In VR nobody can tell you're a sad dork.".

That fact someone is in VR pretty much clinches it anyway

[Bruce Ordway]

MetaVerse

Snow Crash? Yes what a fun book! Thanks Neal Stephenson.

But a MetaVerse in real life?

ugh... I've never been very interested.

( although... that might change if I could access to a HoloDeck ).

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: MetaVerse

Personally I'm rather baffled by the author's claim that "its origins lie in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash". SC is fun, if a bit under-cooked, and it nicely decimates some of the worst excesses of cyberpunk. But it certainly didn't invent the idea of a VR community. The Eden Cycle was published two decades earlier, for example.

It's true that a lot of early VR in SF didn't have much of community or virtual-world elements – IIRC, the VR stuff in Neuromancer is mostly solo heroics, for example. (And, in my opinion, pretty tiresome, but that's beside the point.) The memory-world of "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966) isn't multi-participant-interactive, but it has the appearance of it, so it's close.

Growing Up Weightless depicts a shared RPG VR environment which is closer to "metaverse gaming" than anything shown directly in SC, and it came out only a year later, so it's not likely Ford was hugely influenced by Stephenson.

Basically, while it might be fair to say SC was highly influential in presenting a collection of ideas around shared VR community, I don't think you could make the case that they were sui generis.

[Excellentsword]

Re: Re: MetaVerse

Snow Crash seems to have coined the term, though I agree it's been a trope for longer.

[Rog in NZ]

Re: MetaVerse

Thank you for reminding me of Philip K Dick's dystopian view of this particular fantasy world.

If we're considering "We Can Remember it ..." and looking for multi-player options then I'd also offer up PKD's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (1965). Settlers on a barren and unpleasant Mars setup "layouts" for Barbie and Ken style dolls then took drugs that allowed them to communally assume Ken and Barbie identities and live Ken and Barbie lifestyles inside the layout (experiencing it as if it were real life). Multiple participants - although they were physically co-located and all the men together were Ken and all the women were Barbie. Basically, PKD found his daughters' Barbie dolls freaky and weird and so put them in one of his freakiest and weirdest novels :) Also the Empathy Box in "Do Androids Dream...".

A long way from modern VR, but in-line with the proposed trope (and probably more so than "We Can Remember It"). As-per other comments, the point about Snow Crash was it coined the specific term "Metaverse" even if not inventing the general idea of an artificially created, consistent, shared and fully immersive hallucination.

[Forrest Gump]

Klaus warned us...

Klaus Schwab of the WEF has famously stated that "we will own nothing and be happy.." which is pretty much the scenario from Snowcrash ( one of my all time favorite books). Hiro Protagonist lives with a roommate in a storage shed, delivers pizza for a living (which requires a college degree), and describes the dystopian future of 'burbclaves' with frightening accuracy when compared to present day "subdivisions" with private security.

I have to wonder if the current audience of "meta" understands their future role...

I'd like my pizza with pepperoni, pineapple, black olives and jalapeños, please.

[Diogenes]

Re: Klaus warned us...

downvote for the pineapple on pizza, not the argument you are making.

[DS999]

Making money in the metaverse

No problem, except that "pop up ads" will have a whole new meaning. Just don't hit your head against the wall trying to dodge the Ford Mustang ad!

[that one in the corner]

Re: Making money in the metaverse

R&D have determined that we can fill upto 49% of the viewers' vision with ads and still keep the seizure rate below 5%, which Corporate says is an acceptable level.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully I’m already too old in my mid-fifties to give a ****, but it does sound like a load of nonsense.

I’ve removed myself from pretty much every online social network, only read paper books, don’t wander around glued to my phone screen and a lot happier for it.

[imanidiot]

Uhhhm what

"Gen Z and millennials are pretty much the same"

There's overlap, certainly, but the same??

[Diogenes]

Power ?

And I mean that elektrikkery stuff. Given the UK ,Aus (less WA), big bits of the US, and big bits of Europe and massive bits of the 3rd world are currently or will shortly be experiencing electricity shortages what is going to power the high horsepower hardware to run this stuff?

On a related note it also assumes everybody has access to lotsa bandwidth and judging by comments on EL Reg, and personal experience large swathes of the UK , US and Aus are still literally on dial up speeds.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: Power ?

You didn't get it : the Metaverse is going to be all holograms. All that hardware stuff is completely ignored since El Zuck specifically said that "Your TV, your perfect work setup with multiple monitors, your board games and more – instead of physical things assembled in factories, they'll be holograms designed by creators around the world".

So, see ? You won't need any of that, they'll be holograms.

Oh, wait . . .

[Sampler]

Elephant in the Room

I like how the article doesn't seem to address the big problem going to work in VR, and that's the very high number of people who feel sick after even a short period of time with a headset on, never mind an eight hour work day..

There's a fair bit of "innovation" required before you'll have everyone happily sat a virtual desk all day with a screen strapped cm's from their eyeballs..

[Rob Crawford]

Re: Elephant in the Room

Obviously they will be relegated to the food vats

[seldom]

Meta is dead

McKinsey helped Swiss Air, Enron and Jacob Zuma to where they are today. I hope Meta joins the proud tradition

[Anonymous Coward]

McKinsey

Like Gartner and their fucking magic quadrant

[Rob Crawford]

Oh dear god, somebody got paid for this

When I saw Earth 2 being listed as anything valid I knew I was having smoke blown up my arse.

From what I can see it's the usual NFC con.

Also the metaverse to attend concerts, that is something along of what a hater of live music would come out with.

[YetAnotherJoeBlow]

To paraphrase...

It is clear that we are only at the beginning of the hype cycle as we know it today. As experimentation broadens, there will be an explosion of hype that will transform the way we work, play, connect, and engage. Brands will need to define their hype strategy – and the decision on which path to take will depend on what they believe about their own hype and the investment required.

[that one in the corner]

Each piece of hardware tied to its single use/single content company

With the AR sets in particular, each piece of equipment seems to have been dependent upon one company for both the hardware and the (limited) software, the latter in particular being locked-down and limited in use. When that one company loses interest in the device both hardware and application become defunct. The hardware wasn't compatible with any other manufacturer's, assuming that at that time there actually is another manufacturer making anything similar enough to be usable.

Since the 1990s I tried to find (what we now call) AR displays. After all, a working one had been shown on Tomorrow's World (IIRC basically an endoscope cable attached to one arm of the glasses, reflecting off a semi-silvered patch on the inside of the lens; mostly analogue), an affordable product must be available soon!

My niche use-case was simple enough: I always wanted to be able to VNC into my desktop so that I could use the s/w tools I'd setup just the way I like whenever I was watching over a colleague's shoulder; I'd even got a funky one-handed chording keyboard to learn. No more "just search for alpha charlie - no, just type a then c, no, I didn't say put a space between them, here, let me type - gaah, why do you have that key mapped to delete paragraph? What do you mean, you don't have grep, there is a Windows exe on the share you were told to add into PATH". Or during a meeting, discreetly look up the email (I know where *my* copy of it was stashed) without crouching over a laptop (when they actually became usable as a desktop replacement) or, these days, squinting at a 'phone, but instead at least looking like I was paying attention to the presentation.

Over the years, there have been plenty of products that could have made that possible (there is a list somewhere in my notes, now mainly a list of defunct URLs) but either they were pricey-but-I-could-manage-it gadgets whose maker vanished almost as soon as someone could publish a review or they were insanely priced along with the only software package that could drive them, usually medical or military. And those never seemed to last much more than a year either (the URLs certainly didn't), no idea if they ever made any sales.

More recently, we had Google Glass (sneaky camera, data slurping and stop making the damn display run an entire Android stack with Alexa/Siri/Cortana/whatever added in, I just want a peripheral display) or Hololens (yes, lovely AI driven API or whatever, not interested, gimme a basic peripheral) or even a slew of Kickstarters (only talks to their iPhone app and/or focussed to appear 10 inches in front of you).

Fantasy time: how about a few manufacturers making wearable display peripherals with a common interface and a variety of form factors (semi-silvered specs or dangling mirror on a headset - Ketracel White optional - or Virtual Light for the adventurous). Then have Google strap a camera to it, MS can flog you a subscription to their cloud API for the Holoadaptor, Gucci et al can put a logo on it, Swarovski can bejewel it. People with their own niche ideas can try them out whilst others just avoid tired arms from holding their phones up all day long.

Maybe then there is a chance for economies of scale to kick in for the displays, technical competition and improvements in resolution without chucking everything out and starting from scratch again.

And I can connect it to a minimalist VNC client and be quite happy in my own little world (except that I've forgotten the keyboard chords, dang).

[snow20191102]

Consulting giant McKinsey & Company has been

paid to produce what the client wants to hear.

And 1,000 people across the whole age spectrum sounds like they interviewed people in the company.

"Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts".

Trojan Horses to you.