#metaverse (17 links)
- My Prodigal Brainchild - by Neal Stephenson nealstephenson.substack.com
It’s quite easy to get carried away thinking about how cool it would be to actually build a system that could, on an engineering level, do the things that the fictional technology is depicted as doing in the book or the movie. Having built it, though, you might discover that it’s just a lot of randos milling around waiting for something to happen.
- AI vs. Metaverse: Which Is the 5th Generation UI? uxtigers.com
My suggestion for separating the wheat from the chaff is to look at what works for customers in user testing. Does the hyped idea help real users perform useful tasks more efficiently or pleasantly? If so, real-world uptake is likely. Does it look fabulous in demos but fail to help people perform tasks? If so, it’s probably hype that will suffer a well-deserved death within the year.
Hint: it’s not metaverse
- Neal Stephenson's Most Stunning Prediction - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
About a year ago, I worked with a start-up that makes AI characters in video games. I found it rewarding and fascinating because of the hallucinations: I could see how new patterns emerged from the soup of inputs being fed to it. The same thing that I consider to be a feature is a bug in most applications.
Via Popular.
- Spatial computing: Why Apple’s headset is not the most important thing it announced this week | The Independent independent.co.uk
The most important thing that Apple announced this week was not actually that Vision Pro, even if it is what has grabbed the headlines and will decide Apple’s future. Instead, it is the software and operating system that underpins it, and which could be around for much longer than the headset itself.
If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cypberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns — it’s almost enough to make you wish for the metaverse.
Spicy.
- Apple Vision stratechery.com
What is more striking, though, is the extent to which Apple is leaning into a personal computing experience, whereas Meta, as you would expect, is focused on social. I do think that presence is a real thing, and incredibly compelling, but achieving presence depends on your network also having VR devices, which makes Meta’s goals that much more difficult to achieve. Apple, meanwhile, isn’t even bothering with presence: even its Facetime integration was with an avatar in a window, leaning into the fact you are apart, whereas Meta wants you to feel like you are together.
Let’s imagine the metaverse did exist. Are you tired of spending every waking hour on Zoom/Teams/Google looking at real people? Why not do the same but with virtual people! Imagine what you’ll do there…
- Adapting a design system to work for the Metaverse stackoverflow.blog
- What is the metaverse? (Interconnected) interconnected.org
- Microsoft and the Metaverse – Stratechery by Ben Thompson stratechery.com
What makes “The Metaverse” unique, then, is that it is the Internet best experienced in virtual reality. This, though, will take time; I expect that the first virtual reality experiences will be individual metaverses, tied together by the Internet as we experience it today.
It may very well be that Second Life is over-hyped or ill-conceived for business purposes. Even if so, however, it’s not due to the five provably bogus claims.
The crux of the piece is that despite the hype, real life businesses are closing down their Second Life outposts due to little to no interest in them.
Coke works hard to leverage their brand in the real world and are now opening up the options for their brand to be extended virtually - an importantly - by other people. In a way, this is user-generated NPD.
"A powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperabl