The way the web3.0 content creation is approaching a new level, blender could be the best tool for sophisticated world creation - with advance details. Since computers are becoming more powerful continually, aesthetic virtual scenes with a lot of details could be made without compromise for performance. The BlenderVR is interesting, needing more and familiar exploration.
Creation of Artworks with VR could be the order of the day, just as GravitySketch provides. Since everything is shifting to interactivity (in content and social communication), web3 could make artists more intuitively driven in concepts that are social, and psychological - yet, not compromising with great details in creative dimension.
Perhaps thereâs an insightful sensation by the Blender Organisationâs Team that made them drop the Game Engine, but Iâm much interested in this UPBGE while focusing more on the frontier for virtual worlds, with Unreal Engine and Unity. (The time for direct gameplay with 2D screens is going extinct.) Likewise the creation of artworks with mouse, pen tablet and keyboard, while the need for procedurally-generated concepts using Augmented Intelligence and Generative Design is becoming the hottest trend. Perhaps also the time to shift and adapt is beyond response, with this revolution of web, content creation and creativity.
Sad to know that most of our artworks (as well - perhaps - games) are soon to become trashed, only leaving us with the experiences(decade or so) we gathered.
Last I checked, the Mona Lisa and friends did not end up in a landfill somewhere in Europe because people started dropping the physical canvas for a digital one. VR and the Metaverse will only be another medium that people will be creative with, and we know this because various virtual realms are already operational.
The only exception is if we end up in a dystopian future where world leaders (together with the transhumanist movement) forcefully move the entire human race to live full time in a full-dive digital universe referred to as The Matrix, but that is a pretty fanciful scenario at the moment even if technology gets to where we can in fact âleaveâ the physical world.
Itâs being mostly a simplification of commitments and life activities. For every transition, a major shift was experienced: Industrial Revolutions always shift the way we perform tasks and the way we perceive and response to life - First Revolution changed manual operations and input of human effective power to somewhat mechanised, the Second Revolution made huge contributions to mass production, assembly line and electrification, the Third (computer age) and the Fourth? Many interesting and mystery innovations - I mean the way they would impact on our lives.
But, well, meta varsities have being for many years with us (Blender is a tool thatâs pretty one of them). In some perceptions, most of our interactivity are meta and were somehow in the history conceived as âimpossibleâ. From the defunct communications we made (and make), the simulations we do in animations and games, all to the connectivity in virtual environments using online servers, making our life more easier and the world a global village.
Many science fictions before are science realities now. Thatâs why some handful novel scientists in history became wrong in their definitions upon many concepts (or fictions by them) when most of the âimpossiblesâ are now the commonplace. With the switch from agrarian economy to the office administration, the conventional retail in business to electronic commerce, I think the shift from conventional direct work input at offices or the need of power staff at manufacturing or warehouses or the conventional chart, video call, playing games and even conventional art and design to generative and procedurally driven is soon coming to effect.
Many works will shift to leisure (when thereâs no need for input), and most professionalisms would become obsolete. Itâs probably inevitable.
To be frank the âmetaverseâ is just bullshit.
We have had a 3-dimensional user crafted experience with online interaction before; Secondlife.
Now while Secondlife hasnât fundamentally gotten that much better in the 15 years it has existed, It still is the standard when it comes to this metaverse buzzword.
The only open equivalent of Secondlife currently feature parity is OpenSim, which is still ancient.
At the end of the day, literally nothing is really pushing the concept forward other than a handful passionate indie devs and a handful of massive corporations who desperately want to have a controllable walled garden.
Letâs put it this way.
The âmetaverseâ will utterly fail if it is not free, open(in both source and platform), and performant.
1.People play/use VR chat and secondlife because it lets them make their own avatar, without serious corporate or platform restrictions. People can be batman, or they can be any âOriginal Character do not stealâ without WB getting mad and taking them down, or facebook/google/microsoft/inserttechhere declaring that âyour character or âuser submissionâ is âinnappropriateâ thus we banned youâ.
The user generation of content must be almost completely unimpeded, or no one will want to use it.
2. The incentives for payment are realistically not there.
Secondlife is thus far the only platform that has a true user economy, where an artist can sell avatar components in a âstoreâ and have them buy it effectively. Facebook has no such item. Nor does
The big tech companies are massively incompetent, disliked, and utterly incompatible with the decentralized future of the Internet.
Facebook bought oculus and ultimately failed to deliver what was promised. A workable open-platform no-drm VR hardware package. Unreal has epic games store, which is so awful, I canât even begin to express.
Neither have free user content distribution. Neither have native linux support. Neither allow federeated services, nor allow community run servers of their own platform/products.
The only one to do all of these is Valve.
Valve has a mature digital distribution platform. Valve made the best VR headsets and provided the API and design for it to flourish on all OSes. Valve made compatibility layers for windows on linux and provided 1 click compatibility, plus native linux clients and servers.
Valve has the steam workshop for mods/User generated content and gives the server apps to run your own servers for the apps.
Epic still to date has yet to implement a shopping cart in their launcher. Something that litterally every grandma running a bare bones ecommerce site can do today.
Facebook steals information and manipulates people. No one wants to give their private info to a company like facebook.
Epic is owned partially by tencent, who is a chinese national company.
Everyone is sick of the centralized monolithic platforms censoring and manipulating people.
All of these would have to be solved, on top of internet connections getting way faster with unlimited bandwidth as a utility, Copyright being revised, DRM being strictly limited, Network clocks in all devices using atomic clocks for latency elimination, open financial platforms that do not block people sending debit transactions unless they have committed and been convicted of a crimeâŚ
And at the end of all this, there would still be the case of where Current VR/AR is very niche.
This is to say nothing of the âIndustrial/socialâ side of metaverse which is currently vastly ignorant of the realities of infrastructure and economics.
Which in short: AI is not even close as a replacement to most labor; Robots are not cheap, most of the planet canât keep the basic infrastructure for society to even function past barely industrialized, let alone stamp out institutional corruption and lack of freedoms.
To act as if âSecondlife 2.0â is going to solve these problems and create a utopia is as delusional as NFT shillers believing that NFTs are anything but a pump and dump scheme writ large.
We live in a world where massive corporations take away culture for an ever increasing period of time, governments can shut off power and internet when something they donât like happens, where most people donât have the infrastructure, knowledge, or culture to support these extremely delicate high end infrastructures, and where there are many incentives to screw people over for profits.
There are fundamental structural defects in the modern economy and Internet that no amount of dreams can fix.
Sorry for my long post. I have a lot of gripes.
SecondLife had issues, but I do not think it was because the concept didnât work and could not ever work. Linden Labs reportedly ignored user feedback and did not even put much effort into fixing bugs (in other words, the development itself was mismanaged and relegated to the bare minimum, devs are expensive and the software was making money anyway). The other issue at the time was the fact that a sizable chunk of internet users were still on dialup connections (as opposed to the rapid growth today in connections measured in gigabits). I would argue that as far as metaverses go it was not even the most successful one, Star Wars Galaxies meanwhile lasted quite a bit longer and managed to gain a cult following.
Fortunately, the sheer accessibility of VR and massive multiplayer capable engines mean almost anyone can try their hand at a metaverse if they have a team and a server (as the term itself does not imply you need millions of people milling about in your world). The technology that powers this concept behind the scenes (from hardware to engines) has changed significantly, and that also contributes to my belief that the mention of the 1980âs Virtual Boy to argue against the basic concept of VR (not that anyone here has done so but has actually been seen on gaming sites) is a tired old canard said by those who refuse to try something new.
The time for direct gameplay with 2D screens is going extinct.
I donât get this absolutist way of thinking. Let me tell you something, from less tired to more tired per hour of use:
1- drawing or reading in a paper
2- drawing or reading in a 2D screen
3- drawing or reading in a 3D world.
And as i get older the less time i want to spend behind a computer all day. I am doing gardening including using machine appliances and enjoying it.
Metaverse will only help and only for some work if it can replicate reality. Which it means huge amounts of power to deal for example with aerodynamics - for which there isnât even a universal rule for turbulence so it canât be predictedâŚ
None of that changes what I wrote.
At best the metaverse is a glitzy bullshit buzzword like âcloudâ for what we already have, just extended slightly with little significant differences.
Second. Secondlife is still alive and well. It has way more daily users (50,000) with their active user count at 1 million accounts.
âStarwars Galaxiesâ had 100,000 total users at its peak.
Secondlife worked. It still works. It hasnât stopped working since 2003. Idk where you are getting this idea that it is dead.
This entire statement is nonsense.
Very few people can afford the current crop of VR headsets at the performance level needed to make it compelling to get. Besides the hard realities that there are currently global shortages of the hardware necessary to use or implement these vr services, there is also the realities I just stated. We still do not have either the internet coverage and bandwidth, nor the distribution of high power modern edge computers.
And again all of this is for the idea of facebook in VR.
Which begs the question. Why?
Why bloviate on the prospects of a âtechnologyâ that is yet to demonstrate itâs desirability?
It would be one thing if we were talking a full dive system ala SwordArtOnline or the matrix, or a nearly perfect AR setup like dennou coil.
The current âmetaverseâ everyone is describing is either fiction from an ok series of dystopian scifi novelists, or âOZâ from Summerwars. In which case, Secondlife is still the only functional and open service.
Itâs all very well to speculate, but the hard realities are what they are.
At this point we are describing a barely functional series of software for devices that are still very much not fully implemented, run by either incompetent big tech or small groups.
And then it boils down to trust.
Do you trust Facebook? Do you trust a centralized service?
I for one will never, ever use a service owned by Facebook.
We still canât get a platform that does not eventually censor and push off those that made the site popular.
YouTube is censoring content creators it once profitted off of. Whatâs to say someone uses this âSecondlife on steroidsâ and is banned, ruining financial prospects?
In real life you are only âbannedâ for doing crimes. Despite âcancelingâ people, the real world still forgives and forgets better than the internet.
I am against the idea of centralized services and proprietary software.
Show me a free software stack that does all the things a âmetaverseâ does that is free and open-source, and up to date.
Unreal and Unity are not free. Godot is, but it is not built nor currently has the features for the purpose.
I will reiterate, only opensim has done any of the bare minimum basics, and it is still outdated.
If there is no open competition then it is a farce.
You would be bound by other peopleâs eulas and TOS, many of which require royalties. Which undercuts any notion of âanyone can run their ownâ. Sure they can. If they have the money and are not on anyones shitlist.
The current internet infrastructure is decades old and still suspect to attacks that cripple it. How would any of this solve any of the issues I raised?
This issue is horrific. Itâs kinda a long way to get fully integrated with the technology because of many technical huddles. Besides, regulations need to play a wide range of performance to make it something our lives could base faith upon, to avoid running into chaotic-driven and meaningless life.
If this happen (perhaps in the nearest future), one would most probably hold on and ask, âwhatâs the meaning of living a life?â
Life is best when we share mutual and concrete interaction with others in a physical state. But the transformations we keep on experiencing - from natural to artificial/virtual - makes most us become some kind (in almost every aspect of our lives).
After all, there must also much more interesting things that such will exert. It just requires us to iterate and adapt.