Definitely frightening. If you just look at the kind of culture we have, how could you think that more things like AR are even a good idea?

Indifferent at the moment: I think the extreme views (Black Mirror-type dystopia vs. a walled-garden Utopia) are amplified when a new technology is introduced, but that it's actually pretty difficult to gauge how the average person will use it, or whether it will ever gain traction outside of the high-tech cognoscenti: the value proposition for "the metaverse" has still not been proven.

Another thing to keep in mind is that with any new technology, there will always be folks who will tell you that it will either revolutionize the way we live or cause the downfall of culture/humanity/civilization, but that the technologies themselves (AR/VR/immersive computing) are fundamentally neutral.

IMO the concern around negative second and third-order effects that arise from a perverse incentive structure (cause by large centralized platforms "owning" the metaverse experience) is valid, but it's still way too early to tell what the competitive landscape will look like and, to my first point, I'm not sure whether the average person would even want to use something like this.

This will be an amplifier for just about everything we have in computing and the web: every type of interaction, every market and submarket etc.

So then you have to ask the questions. Do we want to amplify these things? Do we need to? What is the good of it?

These questions are not specifically about computing or related technologies, so any answers that allude to these are suspect.

I have thoughts, of course having worked in or adjacent to the metaverse space. But John Carmack explained how I feel in his keynote speech at Facebook Connect yesterday

https://twitter.com/hmltn/status/1453885021371183104

it's worth watching the entire keynote if you are interested in VR, btw

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=1264023127446649

FoC is peak architecture astronaut though, even though in practice most people are working on very pragmatic projects, so maybe thinking together is peak architecture astronaut (by design!) and share your work is the pragmatic side 😉

It will be interesting to see Zuckerberg attempt to build something semi-novel, as his company history has been Friendster-at-scale-cum-FriendFeed-at-scale and 3 acquisitions

I think his radar isn't terrible, obviously his creations and holdings haven't fallen on their face – just it seems like he's a magnet for neuroatypical (is that the polite term?) ideas which seem to amplify fictional qualities of life – no wonder he's attracted to the idea of the metaverse, an entire new-noosphere of nonsense

It all seems predestined to recapitulate Jan 6-like US Capitol stormings as hourly events – but maybe the facegear will also succeed in keeping the (rapidly multiplying) agents of chaos mostly confined to their padded indoor cells

Scott Anderson did you see the brutalist approach to end user programming thread?

Yes I contributed to it

Also I don't think Meta will be novel

I worked on Horizon Worlds, which is the most metaverse product they've built internally

Does Meta include the AR parts from the presentation? I think I might have been confused by that

What do you mean by include?

Meta isn't a product

The intro was all conceptual

But I guess the correct answer is eventually they plan on having a unified metaverse product that will work in VR,AR and on flat-screen devices (at least mobile, web and maybe PC/Mac native)

When I was working on Horizon World's scripting language I explicitly thought about AR use cases

sorry I meant the "metaverse" product

I keep forgetting they actually did a name change

Support for distributed objects that might appear and disappear be found or carried long distances

None of that actually exists though lol

Probably best to prevent more of our experienced realities being dictated by large organizations whose driving purpose is short term profits

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=311651317030689 is a decent high level overview of what the Horizon World's tools look like today. I haven't worked on this product for two years, and its come a long way (especially in UX/UI implementation), but the core is the same

perhaps we should make the antiverse …

Scott Anderson Did you guys look at/read about the original Croquet when you were working on Horizon World? Seems to have a lot of similar goals

Although I guess the core of it, TeaTime, is a peer-to-peer system for syncing realtime information and Facebook wouldn't really need that

I just waited for someone to bring in Snow Crash

I did

I looked at Croquet a lot

it was an inspiration for using message passing for object->object interactions

but you're right about Horizon Worlds not needing a teatime style system

EleVR\Art of Research were also an inspiration, although in practice their stuff was too weird to actually try to ship in a big corporate product https://theartofresearch.org/combination-physical-and-virtual-tools-for-spatial-computation/

the physical stuff was also irrelevant at the time

eh and still is afaik

EleVR is one of the more interesting things I've seen in recent years

EleVR is really interesting and I like a lot of what Vi Hart does. Scott Anderson do you know what’s happening over there these days?

I'm not sure, they haven't done a new blog post in over a year

AFAIK, Vi has been working on some more society-focused projects recently. She presented some stuff recently on a "Tech for Resilient Communities" track at the Microsoft Research summit. Haven't seen any VR stuff from her in a long while.

VR visions have a very difficult to pin down relationship with physical reality. The pitch seems to be simultaneously; "it's real", and "you can do anything", i.e. you are freed from the restrictions of physical reality, and also bound by them (as the story requires...)

I haven't read any of the books, but I watched the film of Ready Player One and all I could think was, if I was actually looking for a golden egg I wouldn't be physically walking on a treadmill, I'd be trawling through network packets, hexdumps etc.

This is how people looked for the jetpack in GTA5. To start off with they "played along" but pretty quickly, when they really wanted to know, they refused to engage with the interface the game was presenting. Ignoring what the game wanted made them more powerful.

I think this is what Carmack was getting at. If the Metaverse was possible, we could do it GTA style with Xbox controllers and LCD screens. The fact we have good cheap VR headsets now is an orthogonal issue.

The competition is reality-based entertainment; so as long as the prices and perceived costs (safety, effort, willpower) are lower than RL and content keeps flowing, it will be popular and a big pile of cash to split. I have a less faith that it would make me happier (more connected, more autonomous, more creative, having a positive impact on people). But if others can have rich, fullfilling lives while leaving home less, all power to them.

I found this nice thread give some perspective on this (Facebook meta move) https://twitter.com/mayazi/status/1454182295733248004

Also worth noting is that the community power will lie in the toolmakers (both hard and software). If you could bring creation to the people and build a real secondary economy, it'd unlock the ability to be the middleman, ala "app store"

Especially this tweet Fronten thread: https://twitter.com/mayazi/status/1454186250127224834