😬
I’m disappointed that virtual VR worlds never took off, but extremely relieved that Facebook didn’t do it.
I mean, VR Chat is still a thing. It’s not massive, but even 20k daily users isn’t nothing.
VRC is still a thing because they are all furries.
Source: …
Did you just use your masturbation habits as a source?
It’s called an expert opinion
Subject matter expert
Smeet smeet
Oh I’m an expert all right~
Look, if you had the opportunity to get railed by a foot+ of thick wolf dong (or the equivalent of whatever you’re into) in freakin’ VR, we all know you’d be registering and downloading it right now same as me :P
I don’t make the news, I just report it.
I need to get back in to VR. For completely… unrelated… reasons… yeah.
That sounds terribly awkward
Quite the contrary! On the internet, I’m a hung and aggressive frisky wolf, with other cuddly and like-minded furs in many forms and spaces. But irl, I’m a frisky but anxious, timid, chubby, disabled geek.
The wolf sona is a much easier sell to potential partners :P
I prefer to call it a highly productive hobby.
Well, yeah, furries have a strong online presence. It’s not surprising for furries to be early adopters of a virtual world.
Furries make the internets go
VRChat. VRChat. VRChat.
It’s the one platform no one talks about because it’s too gay/queer for corporate sensibilities. They want the queers and the gays to show up in June and then disappear again once July rolls around. VRChat is year-round, baby! They’ve got full-blown conventions in VRC and, unlike other platforms, they’re actually fairly well populated.
Nah it’s not because it’s too gay/queer, it’s just far too strange for most people.
The only person I ever knew IRL that regularly used VRChat was very… Uncomfortable to be around.
And the few times that I’ve used it, yeah there’s the people being normal and doing normal stuff, but there’s lots of people who regularly say and do very weird/inappropriate stuff.
It’s great that there is a large queer community in VRChat, and I understand that most people are prolly just normal ppl chilling, but I don’t think companies stay away from VRChat because of the queer community there tbh.
Hit the nail on the head. We all remember “Ugandan Knuckles”. The platform is populated by psychotic preteens. Of course it doesn’t have mainstream appeal.
I to this day can’t hold my laughter when remembering the Ungandan Knuckles guy who rode on a little tank playing the USSR Anthem on full blast.
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I think HBO had a documentary style thing about VR Chat. I recall sleepily scrolling through it anyway. There was a woman who taught belly dancing in VRC I believe.
Before that I thought it was just kind of silly and gimmicky, but it’s actually quite interesting. I’d like to give it a whirl myself.
You don’t need VR for it, you can try it out in desktop mode if you want. I’d suggest steering away from the popular “hang-out” worlds like the Black Cat, but it’s fun. I would suggest rebinding the default keyboard controls for facial expressions though. They’re a bit clumsy. Also, some worlds are designed with VR in mind and may be difficult or impossible to play without VR (you’ll probably be fine as long as you aren’t trying to join one of the simulator worlds though).
Edit: additionally, if you want to hang out with people who will be the most helpful and welcoming, look for furry worlds. Furries tend to be the power users of the VR world (and virtual worlds in general) for obvious reasons. That said, be prepared to mute, report and block users, because furry worlds also tend to get the highest concentration of assholes, crashers (people with avatars designed to crash games) and quest kiddies. They tend to join and start screaming slurs at furries until they get banned or realize everyone’s blocked them and move on.
I like how most depictions of it I’ve seen seem pretty wholesome compared to other casual online gaming communities. Idk how accurate those depictions are, but most of them just seem to be regular people goofing around and being silly.
Wait, how is it gay?
I think this is a valid question (just wanted to make that clear for others). In this context I’m using it to refer to anyone acting outside of social norms; so furries, egirls/eboys, weebs, Warhammer40k RPers, trans and enby men/women, men with female avatars, women with male avatars, packs of roving Ronald McDonalds, and yes, people who are gay in the normal sense.
The general populous leans gay
Yeah, I would like multiple social VR world systems to become viable, both so there isn’t a monopoly and so there can be bigger uptake of people getting into VR.
Do you mean like each their thing or some sort of fediVRse?
I was speaking more the former, but the latter would be awesome if it was technologically viable.
That’d actually be sweet. There’d be two issues though. The first is that you’d need some kind of SDK for users to upload their own worlds and make their own avatar, and the second is that the server costs would likely be significantly more expensive than hosting something like a Lemmy instance.
Mozilla has something like this working (mozilla hubs) and matrix is also working on a federated vr prototype which u can try out.
What about real VR worlds? Or virtual real reality worlds?
I have no idea where the $13 trillion valuation comes from but there’s no way that’s true. At it’s peak, cryptocurrency as a whole had a market cap of let’s say $3 trillion to be very generous, of which Bitcoin alone was about $1 trillion. Meta peaked at about $1 trillion. Even if the metaverse was 100% of those two sections fields (which it really isn’t and never was), it wouldn’t come close to $13 trillion. I assume this was a predicted value for 2040 or something.
Don’t believe everything you read online.
The valuation comes from a simple idea: in a Facebook-controlled virtual world, you can monetize everything. You can monetize every interaction someone has with other people, everything they do, even every breath they take (by paying for your time in there). It’s not based on actual value, only on the potential you can take from people.
That’s also why it’s such a horrible idea for everyone except the owners.
Who did the valuation and where? I’d just like to see where this 13 trillion came from because it seems insane
E: Found it
Companies’ rush to get into the game led Wall Street investors, consultants, and analysts to try to one up each other’s projections for the Metaverse’s growth. The consulting firm Gartner claimed that 25% of people would spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse by 2026. The Wall Street Journal said the Metaverse would change the way we work forever. The global consulting firm McKinsey predicted that the Metaverse could generate up to “$5 trillion in value,” adding that around 95% of business leaders expected the Metaverse to “positively impact their industry” within five to 10 years. Not to be outdone, Citi put out a massive report that declared the Metaverse would be a $13 trillion opportunity.
With a stream of big names revealing their intent to be a part of this upcoming digital world, the metaverse could be a $13 trillion industry by 2030, Citi Bank said in its report.
Well that sounds awful. How about you just make the headset electrocute me to death instead? That would be more fun.
There’s an anime about that, Sword Art Online.
If you die in the game you die in real life.
Just like Canada! If you die there, you die in real life too.
Hello Sokath! Our product development team loves your suggestions. We’ll be sure to implement your feature request in our next update!
Best regards,
Mark
You mean to tell me that I should have skepticism for a number in a picture of a tweet from some random guy?!?
The same place all speculative asset values come from: some rich guy’s ass.
The ONLY reason it was valued was because Facebook was doing it. They clearly did not look at the product designs or lack of progress to come up with it.
US GDP 2022 was $25.46 trillion.
This, my friends, is why the speculative stock market and company valuations is complete and utter bullshit.
It literally has 0 basis in reality. It has only to do with how good at marketing the company and its exec board is to shareholders and hedge funds.
almost like investors live in a virtual reality
The basis in reality is called hype. There are a lot of goods with low or no intrinsic value that are expensive anyways because of hype.
I’d swear I just read something on HackerNews about how real value only comes from marketing.
This is why it is called speculative.
I mean that’s why it’s called speculative. You’re looking at the future. Most times it will be dead wrong.
Anyone who read Ready Player One and actually believed that was the future deserves to lose $13 trillion.
I think it could be the future, it just isn’t the near future.
Exactly. We need breakthroughs that would allow for a full-dive system before that can ever happen. Technology that can individually interface with every neuron in the brain is a very, very long way off.
Let’s be real. Even if Facebook could do that right now, who the fuck is going to give Mark fucking Suckerberg full access to their brain? I don’t even trust their apps on my phone. I don’t even trust visiting their website on my computer. How fucking stupid would someone have to be to physically jack their brain into Facebook?
Unfortunately, if it was free or cheap, there are a lot of people out there who would do it without a second thought. It wouldn’t take any convincing beyond someone they trust telling them it’s safe and it works.
Technology is the window to opportunity. Once we have the tech, imagination becomes reality.
- Albert Einstein -
Have your tried turning your brain off, and back on again?
It doesn’t need to interact with every neuron and that kind of brain interface technology is coming along rapidly. We already have the ability to give people a 6th sensory perception by adding tech to their skull. Shit’s cool as hell and our lord and saviour, Gabe Newell, is currently working in that area.
Ads and paywalls directly transferred in my brain? No thanks.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been lucid dreaming for decades. Don’t even need a computer to do that, just a bed.
I’m sure there’s heuristics and reductions that can leverage the dreaming capabilities of the brain to create that experience while awake. Hell - certain hallucinogenic compounds do exactly that.
Give it Internet connectivity and well - what is that if not deep dive?
The absence of creativity is breathtaking. Zuck pitched ‘Second Life but with horny police and even more fees,’ adding absolutely - fucking - nothing - beyond that. Somehow this failed. Somehow! It is a mystery!
He tried to appeal to normies. The people who use these virtual spaces isn’t your everyday people. Also what company is going to pay, let alone enforce vr meeting spaces. “Ok team, we’re about to go over today’s TPS reports. Put on this motorcycle helmet and awkward gloves for the next two hours.” The only meetings I’ve ever held in those types of virtual spaces is about those virtual spaces.
It’s worse: he’s chasing a joke he didn’t get. Neal Stephenson turning the Lawnmower Man / Johnny Mnemonic floating-equations cyberspace fantasy into a mall was a vicious jab. See “torment nexus” tweet.
There’s ample room for normies in VR. Seated 6DOF is wildly different from using a screen. But there’s no goddamn reason that work would take place in those circumstances. Zuck’s vision is a solution in search of a problem. Dense motherfucker ruined Oculus just to slavishly recreate the restrictions of the physical realm as a boring fake theme park where everything costs real money.
How you look in a video game… should not cost money.
Jesus Christ, even if you were trying to make virtual workplaces happen, the sane approach is to let people build private gardens and invite their friends. Forcing it will stop it from happening. But give people a personal holodeck to decorate and they’ll build a whole goddamn mansion as their glorified Zoom backdrop.
Because, as it turns out, nobody wants to be in meetings all day, and even less people want to strap a headset to their faces when they are in meetings all day.
VR is pretty fun for racing games though.
No legit metaverse project have ever existed, since there’s no technology to do it yet.
If you count Horizon Worlds as Metaverse, you might as well count VRChat or even Second Life and they were much more successful .
I feel that ‘metaverse’ and ‘cyberspace’ are related concepts, in that they exist to give authors a way to portray digital processes and events in a way familiar to the average viewer. And that’s why there’s not been a legit project. Because in the real world, the metaverse lacks a reason to exist. Want to interact with people across the world? There’s already tools for that (VRChat, Zoom). Want to play a game? Why not make the game independent of the metaverse?
Agreed. When I first heard about this it seemed exactly like a rehash of 90s era websites that tried to imitate a real place… Like you would click on the doors to go into the book store or click on the mailbox to send an email… It was lame then and its still lame now.
How the hell did it have such an insane valuation?
Because the stock market is not based on logic and reason, but vibes. Sure hope we don’t base the productivity of our entire society around that.
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Nah, VR’s still cool. It’s just that everyone uses it for VRChat aka “we don’t talk about the gay trans furry egirl who ERPs Warhammer 40k in the corner”.
Edit: turns out whenever you give a human the option between being a soulless, pantsless avatar and whatever the fuck they want, the human will always choose the gay trans furry egirl over being only rendered from the waist up. Corporations like brand safety. Humans, do not. That’s why vrchat is so successful. You can be as gay, trans, furry and/or egirl/boy as your heart desires. You can be you.
Edit 2: because sometimes I think I’m done and then I’m not: the most frustrating thing is how everyone pretends VRChat doesn’t exist, despite being one of the the most, if not the most successful VR social platform. The only conclusion I can come to is that people disregard it because either it’s A) too gay/queer, or B) it’s not “”“serious”“”.
You don’t hear about brand deals with VRChat. You don’t hear about how Balenciaga or Louis Vuitton are opening VRC worlds. You don’t hear about how IBM or Microsoft are holding virtual meetings in VRC. Why? Because VRC caters to the user first. If Microsoft wants to make a corporate VRC world or network of worlds, I’m sure VRC would let them. However if Microsoft were to tell VRC to reign in the gays, I’m pretty sure VRC would tell them to get fucked. That’s a big chunk of their community they’re about to piss off.
Hell, based on some of the most recent updates, it appears VRC is moving towards further relaxing their already fairly relaxed content TOS as they’re starting to add ways of age-gating instances (currently vrc has rules against nudity and erp, but they honestly don’t care and only bother enforcing it if someone reports it). That’s not to say that the VRC team is good and holy, they’ve made some seriously controversial changes (like implementing EAC to stop people from modding the game without first making sure they had official support for the popular modded features). However, unlike Meta’s Horizon Worlds or Linden Labs’ Project Sansar (VR second life) they seem to give a fuck about the community and embrace the weirdness.
Tangentially, the fact that Linden Labs didn’t learn from Second Life and decided to sanitize its VR successor is such a bizarre decision. They could have run away with VR, but all the second life users looking to upgrade to VR saw that Sansar was going to be sanitized, said “hell no” and went to VRChat.
Nah, VR’s still cool. It’s just that everyone uses it for VRChat
hey some of us use it for racing / flight simulation!
Lol “everyone” being a bunch of dumfounded dipshits that didn’t understand the technology nor did they understand the target audience nor the actual sliver of market share that VR contains due to the technical and financial restrictions of said technology… Muppets in a box
Yeah they could have literally just asked any gamer. Most people I know with vr headsets don’t use them, they’re currently an expensive gimmick to play beatsaber on occasion until you get motion sick.
I mean, gamers were the ones to hype it up in the first place. When Oculus had a puking machine with wires sticking out of it, the people hyping it up were the Carmacks of the world, and by proxy all the gamers saying “maybe this time they’ll figure it out”.
In fairness, they got it pretty far along, but it was never going to be a primary way of interacting with computers or anything else.
It’s funny because that statement could also have been said about 1997. VR was gonna be such a big deal.
It’s just way too expensive and hard to run for the average person. It’s crazy how short sighted they had to have been to let that happen. Ha
It’s not that expensive, people buy TVs for 5000+, it’s just very inconvenient for pretty much everything except games that are made for it.
To be fair, while that statement is still largely true, at has at least gotten somewhat better; the lower end of VR headsets can be gotten for $3-500 instead of $1000 last I looked into them (bought one a few months ago as my first while cool was a bit too uncomfortable and limited in capability for what I wanted), and have improved in quality over the first couple generations of the hardware. Still not cheap, especially for an entertainment device with somewhat limited catalog of games/media, and still kinda annoying to get set up each time I want to use it (though some of that comes from using mine wired to my PC instead of it’s onboard processor, which adds some steps to connect it properly)
Anything can be valued at any figures. The people selling something will make up the biggest number they can.
Very few people ever sincerely believed it, and now nobody.
The pandemic gave them the stupid idea that we would willingly isolate ourselves in a profitable virtual world.
Let me say it again, slower. Ho-lo-de-ck. I don’t want to hear about anything else until it’s done.
I’m sure the porn industry is working on that now.
The article that’s linked (that some kind soul posted in the comments) mixes the platforms up. In one of their source articles it says Decentraland was the one with 38 daily users, and Horizon Worlds had about 200,000 monthly active users. Still pitiful in terms of social media, but far from 38.
P.s. the article was by Business Insider
The article doesn’t mix them up, OPs title does.
How many kick-ass VR-able MMOs could have been made with the money they sunk into this second life II?
Lol. Lmao even
Rofl
VR has been “THE next BIG thing” for more than 25 years now. VRML and now X3D were supposed to make it happen.
The only metaverse that had really endured is Second Life.
VR is here, dude. It’s legit. They actually got it right this time and it’s amazing, mind-blowing, and tons of fun. That has nothing to do with people not wanting to stand around with Facebook users and listen to rants about Biden or whatever the fuck goes on in there. Most people want nothing to do with a world created by stupid-ass, thieving, Fuckerberg.
Jesus, Second Life still exists? It was a joke in 2009.
Yes. I want to try it one of these days.
That’s how it starts, then suddenly you find yourself doing second heroin and getting second divorced.
If you die from second heroin, you die in real life.
maybe if it wasn’t sold as a way to “work” in VR and go shopping in VR people might have given a shit
This, my friends, is why the speculative stock market and company valuations is complete and utter bullshit.
It literally has 0 basis in reality. It has only to do with how good at marketing the company and its exec board is to shareholders and hedge funds.
Stocks prices are forward looking. If you can see the future more clearly than others, you can make a fortune. They thought the metaverse was the future. They were hilariously wrong.
