Metaverse the Next Big Thing? 288
CrashPanic writes to tell us TCS Daily has an article entitled "The Next Big Thing" which is about Multiverse. It does a good job of making the case for the evolution to a 3D web through the lens of the past history of Netscape. From the article: "Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing. Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic devise that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared."
Yes but ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Come on now
Also there is the production costs involved with making such things.
I am not sure if the industry will see this as the Next Big Thing (tm) soon.
--
Mike, the Anonymous Coward
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Embedded reporters and businesses are now entering the space.
Whilst having a fully immersive encounter suit might be the end game, currently your mouse and keyboard control your hands in the 'verse and your screen gives a window.
It looks fine to me, thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the interface is pleny rich, but of course it's going to get better.
And I'd be careful of thinking that the "fully immersive encounter suit might be the end game". There are those that thought that animated gifs would be the end game, too. "Someday, we will even have on-demand delivery of music on the internet. Maybe even video!". All whilst many of use are downloading The Departed via bittorrent, and the Goth-Rock boxed set, while watching The Daily Show via YouTube. Be very careful when thinking you can envision an "endgame".
Re:It looks fine to me, thanks (Score:5, Funny)
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Feh! The introduction of the blink tag signaled the downfall of the web to me!
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Animated GIFs? Bah! Young whippersnappers! The Internet went downhill with the introduction of gopher!
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If you can't interpret the packets yourselves, then you have no right even looking.
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No, it's not. Modern 3D interfaces are like a musical instrument, like a clarinet. To get really good takes a lot of dedication, and when you're done, all you can do is play the clarinet, or half-transfer your skills to a clarinet-like instrument. You still can't play a trombone, or a piano.
Sure, if all you want to do is point and shoot, go figure, a point-and-click-based interface is halfway decent, once you learn how to get around in
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Depends on who you ask. I for one would be wary of trusting whatever Linden Labs says on the matter, and note that last I checked they still weren't making any money off it. Aside from that, there are a lot of generally "net savvy" types there who are looking for the "next big thing", and there's a small population of rather creative and sometimes entrepenurial people, and a number of people who are there to do something to fulfill their own fantasies in a 3D online space (
Re:Yes but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell that to the MMORPG players. If you want to be able to go up and down rather than having gravity pulling you down to the ground, then think back to even early versions of UT - being able to zoom around the map in flying mode. Mouse - point. Aim. Whatever. WASD or arrow keys, go towards aim; this includes flying, flying backwards, going straight up or down, or looping round in a climbing spiral with a half twist at the top. That isn't "awkward". Any beginner user in any system has trouble; think of the expense of driving lessons. In a computerised 3D realm, you can zoom around and bump into things without harm, so the learning curve is easier, and the range of movement much higher.
Movement and navigation in a 3D realm is no barrier whatsoever.
Re:Yes but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed, I'm an old fart and have have taught quite a few other old farts to "appreciate" 3D games. I find it takes an hour or so to learn reasonably fluid motion in a 3D game (and thus start to experience the game), but once learned the skill will transfer to most other 3D games. I know it does because they keep on playing without the need to retrain every time they get a new game.
I think it is well worth the hour or two to learn the interface via practice, in the real 3D world most "noobs" can't even stand up for 10-15 months and many people never achive fluid motion even after a lifetime of practice!
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Following a hyperlink can be thought of as navigating along an extra dimension right?
Turn all the words on the web into hyperwords and navigate along as many dimensions as you like: see your selection of text in dimensions of entries in references, in searches, on maps, in blogs or tags and so on.
If you can see a database organized by any criteria, such as by date or alphabetically, why not see any text on a web page by listings in different reference
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There are some potential social possibilities in a 3d web site, but does it really help you get to the information any better?
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Anyone that has to support a user base that has difficulty navigating to a folder on a file server to find a document would appreciate this. Imaging telling your user, "go down the red hall to the third door on the left. Go in, and grab the box marked . Take it back to your desk and work on it. Put it back when you are done."
Re:Yes but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ticker-tape: One-dimensional (you read along).
Paper: Two-dimensional (read along, skip down/up)
MMORPGs: Three-dimensional (move in three dimensions)
Hypertext: non-linear - you can jump from the middle of one document to the middle of a completely different document.
Hypertext is effectively omni-dimensional, limited only by the number of links the author chooses to put in the document (and, increasingly, by the number of browser extensions, AJAX goodies, javascript favelets/bookmarklets, etc) that use the current clipboard selection or source of the page you're reading and offer you even more navigatioal options.
The web is multi-dimensional, not just two or three.
This is why everyone predicting "the death of the web" in favour of some "better" 3D option has always been wrong. Every time. (Anyone remember VRML?)
3D games won't kill hypertext, because a clunky "spatially-based" interface to a three dimensional world (bonus points: realised on a two-dimensional interface device!) is already worse than the effectively infinitely-dimensional system we're currently using.
Re:Yes but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're flying a plane, in real life, you're mostly working with two dimensions as well: you can turn left and right, and you can climb and descend. A small subset of planes and pilots can roll without changing direction, but normally that's not done; partial rolls are just a part of turning. There is also a throttle control, but that just controls how fast you're moving in your chosen 2D direction.
My point isn't that planes can't be controlled in 3D, it's that most of the time they aren't. I think the reason for that is because we evolved on a large and basically two dimensional space, and 2D navigation is simply more natural for us. That makes 2D controls easier to understand and use, even for navigating 3D spaces.
If you want an example of true 3D controls, think of a helicopter: up/down, left/right, forward/back, and apparently very difficult to control safely.
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Planes are fundamentally two-dimensional. You have three things you can do, pitch, roll, and yaw [stoenworks.com]. This is technically three full degrees of freedom, but in navigational terms you have some redundency between roll and yaw, because roll is primary useful for changing your direction,
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Re:Yes but ... (Score:4, Funny)
That already happens today... (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.ohgizmo.com/2006/01/19/a-gatling-gun-t
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Word processing? No
Spreadsheets? Doubtful
Web browsing? Probably not.
Music and Video? No
But there are areas where 3d would be great. For example:
Virtual tour of a museum
Real estate (walkthroughs)
Shopping (3d models of products perhaps)
Scientific visualization
The problem is that many of these haven't been done ad
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I like:
virmel (Score:2)
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So basically... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You don't need to remember such trivia as how the Ford Model T's floorboards were recycled wooden crates from the parts suppliers, to then talk about how the hybrid engine may replace simple engines in the coming decade.
Bob? (Score:5, Funny)
My God! They have invented Microsoft Bob!
Patrick Cox should stick to making shoes.
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Yeah. 3D is great for games and visualisation. Why are they trying to shoehorn all this stuff which has no real-world analogue into a model of the world? How does a Gantt chart work in this crazy place? Is it like some set of blocks which represent tasks which when I throw up into the air twists around like a Transformer toy into a diagram representing a critical path analysis?
Why have we spent the last 50(?, 60?) years getting away from the physical limitiations of meatspace just to reimpose arbitrary cons
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You're right, there are areas where 3D doesn't make much sense. But as a file manager I think it might work reasonably well. Pic
Browse the internet ???? (Score:3, Funny)
The future is:
Connect to the new 3D virtua-net. Go to the nearest NetTube station next to your ISP building. Take the first Alphabetical Northbound metro on the COM line. Stop at station "I". Walk outside and take the NetBus to IBM Netplex. Ask politely the receptionist for the support area (Otherwise you will get kicked out by the security officer). Walk to the right departement (Hold SHIFT key to run), take the box with updated
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advantages of 3-D (Score:2)
There is the kitchen, the living room, the study, the bathroon, the bedroom, perhaps a cellar, maybe an attic, and the garage.
Now think of all the cupboards you have in each room ... from kitchen to garage, and then think of all the different objects you have somewhere in those cupboards. Say that you have perhaps 20-odd cupboards in total. Now I bet you have a fair idea of what's in each of those cupboards.
Now suppose I aske
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Bah. You're just using a set of mnemonics to organize your information. What I want to see is a system that automatically accumulates meta-information as I use it. So instead of "looking" for something, I just grab my Magic Frickin Wand (TM) and say "Presto! A broom-cutter!" and it appears before me in a puff of smoke.
Everybody seems to want
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Yes and no, but you missed the point completely.
If you are looking for something by _functionality_ you can't use a conventional search engine bu you'll have to use your brain for that, in other words you'll have to search for it by going through an inventory of things that are likely to be of use and to decide if any of them can be used. The more you can narrow that down th
so you are leaning on the strength of the human (Score:2)
option 1- use a fuzzy skillset of mine to have an 'idea' of where something is
option 2- use a precise and complete strength of the machine (bit by bit searches)
I can likely use a 3d imagery as you suggest- to poke around where I left something (i think)
using my strengths and a 3d model
or I can arran
No it won't (Score:4, Insightful)
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As a programmer who really has built (in VRML) software bikes and raced them in the darkness of the electronic night (although it didn't scale past two racers on 28k dial-up!), I look forward to it.
As a Java contractor who is sick of driving for miles to work at client sites when I could do exactly the same work from home, but the clients like to see what they are paying for, I really really look forward t
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Besides the investment, there's just the issue of how efficient text is. Really, I would expect slashdotters, the people who are still using a CLI and text-only web browsers, to understand that flashy graphics that don't do anything aren't always going to work out.
Now, I'm not saying that 3D just won't ever catch on. Yes, I do expect that one of these days there will be a successful mix of a MMORPG and these social networking sites, perhaps resulting in a game with no game, so to speak. Just a big virtu
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This is nothing like making your desktop go 3D - which is one program, deployed many times. This is like rewriting every document you and everyone else has ever written using your "desktop".
My contention is that there will be no sudden leap to this new 3D web, because every website out there is already implemented. You've got to persuade an awful lot of people to remake their websit
Not for workstations (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be next to impossible to convince a non-technical person to virtually walk through a filing system to find their work when they could just browse to it normally without the 3D stuff.
But the desktop paradigm breaks down when we talk about portable devices. These devices are both much more limited (by being small) and much more powerful (because by their nature they have to be close to the user and their environment) that a totally new way of seeing the inside of your system may have traction.
William Gibson had this in Virtual Light. Neal Stephenson had it in Snow Crash. I think it will eventually come true.
One thing I am sure of. If I am going to have little LCD screens in my glasses I want to focus on infinity to look at them. Not sure how you do that without massive amounts of refractive material in the small space available.
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Re:Not for workstations (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what the Xerox Execs said about computers moving to color. And to be honest, they were right that there is very little reason for a business desktop to use color. Sure, it makes the pie charts pretty, but there are enough hash-mark patterns that do the same job.
As for a 3D filesystem being more difficult to navigate, a command-line is still a hell of a lot easier way to navigate our filesystems than point-and-click. I can get anywhere on my filesystem a lot easier and faster using "cd" (esp. with command-completion) than I can by clicking: "My Computer", "C:", "Program Files", "Adobe", etc. Just because a new GUI hurts productivity, doesn't mean that it won't be wildly popular. Yes this applies to the bottom-line-loving suits, too.
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Really? That it would be more difficult?
I think 3D is coming, but gradually, partially, and with more subtle mappings than older VR efforts have imagined. Console games are on the right track with 3D interfaces that more-or-less normal people can actually use.
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Agree and disagree. Agree because (7 times out of 10) it is faster. Disagree because it isn't always the most obvious/direct (or even fastest). If you need to go to /var/log/apache, then yep cd /var/log/apache is just about the quickest method I can think of. However, navigating to a directory that you haven't been to in a while or not exactly sure how to get there the cd ls cd ls cd ls cd ls method actual
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I'm not a windows person (for most things) and I too have installed unixutils [sourceforge.net] and couldn't imagine working without them.
The adobe example is probably the worst example of a GUI not doing it better. First, explorer makes all of the pdf's have a "pdf" icon and by just cli
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This reminds me of something else. I had been on a Tom Clancy spree, had read most of his big thick books, and I thought I'd pick up Net Force. (Big mistake. Avoid the Ops Center stuff as well.) The novel posited a fantastic virtual reality world of some sort for people to traverse the Net with. And what were people do
No Compelling Need (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like change for the sake of change.
Until there is a real NEED for this, I don't see it happening.
That said, I would think that true VR will come to game consoles long before it comes to any generic computer. In the Console market, this seems like a natural evolution and not just some NEAT-O idea being added on for the sake of change.
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Well, there are different levels of VR quality. Everyone currently thinks that the Wii is cool. I'll take a 3-5 year wait and see on that. If it turns out that's a new gaming niche that Nintendo grabs in the next 3-4 years, I can Nintendo working on scaling down the Wii for
The Metaverse is not like the web (Score:5, Insightful)
The Metaverse, if anyone manages to create one that is truly decentralised, will co-exist with the web. If it's going to replace anything, it's going to replace IRC - a fun place to wander around aimlessly and meet new people, or to form a small group of friends you have things in common with regardless of your physical location. The web is a resource for finding or publishing information. The Metaverse is a communications tool for hanging out with friends and meeting new people.
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Second Life (Score:2)
Yes, and probably it will be named something like Second Life. Oh wait...
Second Life is good, but it's not quite decentralised - one company has the monopoly on renting land to users. That's the equivalent of the W3C renting web sites to anyone who wants to write pages on one.
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ABnet (Score:2)
http://kimballsoftware.com/downloads.html [kimballsoftware.com]
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A decentralised equivalent of Second Life (Score:2)
If everyone was allowed to run their own sim, sl would have now many times more land :). But there would have to be some organisation responsible for sim placement.
Yes, that sounds like one of the major hurdles. How about something like everyone being able to put their virtual land in a big grid that covers the whole landscape, as long as the four landowners adjacent to them agree to this? Then everyone notes their adjacent four computers' IP addresses, and it should be almost seamless for an avatar to
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Come up with a multi-location (tabbed?) VR client, perhaps, with a slightly mor
House! (Score:5, Funny)
Buzzword rant (Score:2)
Okay, I'm confused. What's the antecedent for "this?" Which business? The business that caused this buzzword-laden FA to be forced onto the world?
Buzzwords are stupid, and they make no business run but marketing. All marketers should kill themselves. Really. They do nothing but pollute the universe and cause people to start using words like "utilize" instead of "use," "impact" instead of "affect." That's just plain
Flashback (Score:4, Insightful)
If 3D user interfaces were better then we'd be using 3D versions of desktop applications by now. Clearly Photoshop or Microsoft Word with a 3D interface doesn't make much sense, so why should it for online applications?
Agreed, you see it with games (Score:2)
Just because comp
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yes, I find it a real shame that people 2D games are thought to be inferior. We live in 3D space and yet all our classic games (chess, go, cards etc) are all essentially 2D. This suggests to me that 2D space is actually better than 3D space for many sorts of games - Worms and Lemmings are good examples.
(p.s. yes I will look at your web site - I'm sure you do some great 2D games!).
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They may lie on top of each other, but they are all in the same plain, there is no distance between the windows, i.e. the range of z is zero, so current desktops are 2D, not 3D.
Your examples suck (Score:2)
Probably not, when you are editing 2D images or text which is inherantly 2 dimensional. But think beyond making pictures and text and yeah, it is out there.
so why should it for online applications
Because a lot of us are interested in things that aren't pictures and text. Simple example, a DNA molecule marked up in VRML (although, I hope to God they come up with a better markup language, I learned VRML in high school and yea, it isn't pretty) with metadata (text, images) dr
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As for MMORPG, nothing is stopping you from using separate clients for that. Nothing says you need to do all your online activities in the browser - most of us don't.
No. (Score:3, Funny)
No.
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I guess this is their first demo version, to appease the investors, that will have to be rewritten from scratch once they manage to get their second run of VC capital. Writing the client in C# also means it's not portable to game consoles or non-x86 embedded devices that mostly run Linux, so they're on a dead end.
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What about Mono [mono-project.com]? I haven't played with it and understand that there are some features of .Net not yet implemented and others that are probably never going to work due to being stuff specific to Windows, but we've got a .Net environment and compiler for Linux.
Second Life (Score:5, Interesting)
To really gain traction though it would need to be as free (speech and beer) as the web is, and so long as it's run by a single company, it probably won't be.
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It's time VR returned (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember trying it out in arcades in the early 90s. This was a time when we'd see the first Ridge Racer coin op and be astonished by the texture mapped 3D.
The VR stuff was low res (whether due to the graphics cards used or the screen technology in the goggles), used flat shaded models with low poly counts. But that wasn't t
Open Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org/index.html (Score:4, Interesting)
It is stunning, biggest drawback is needing openGL which for the life of me I can't get going under Linux. Thus I have only tested on win2k where it is great. Download and try it, it is smalltalk based. It is built for decentralised use. It is very scaleable. It also does not like NATs so thats is a slowing point.
It is probably not going to change the world this week, but once more people are working on it and it gets around NAT and if openGL was not so critticle then I am sure lots linked up worlds would start happening.
Words can not describe it properly, you got to try it. Have a look at the demo videos of interactions. Technically it scores well mostly because so little bandwidth is required for people to share worlds, it does require half decent machines for the computations but anything in the last few years is good enough (ie in the GHz range)
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Re:Open Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org/index.h (Score:2)
Thanks for reminding me. I downloaded the sources once and tried to compile it. Its a pity that netbsd and ubuntu (the two platforms I use) don't have it in their package collections.
One question which I can't find an answer to on the web site is about the distinction between client and server in Croquet. Does every node have to have a UI? The reason I ask is that my server runs all the time which is desirable if you want to publish an environment. My workstations are laptops and tend to come and g
To commercially viable to happen (Score:2)
Too expensive to develop for free -> dead before it's even invented.
Been there done that, it failed (Score:2)
why dont these people get it in their heads that most of the public is not interested in reading morning news in a 3d manner, they want a nice smallish tablet that is easy to use, does not require charging every 20 minutes and is always on to view it in the form it is presented right now.
3d for conveying basic information is useless and cumbersome. It's great for medical, engineering and chemistry, but for regular joe it sucks.
VRML proved that.
You are only half right (Score:3, Informative)
Is this anything like Adobe Atmosphere? (Score:2)
metaverse (Score:2)
way off base (Score:5, Interesting)
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pretentious (Score:2)
Forces
coalescing
repercussions
transformation
cliched
virtual
cinematic
compelling
and lastly but not in the paragraph but the title
Metaverse
I was surprised we didn't see paradigm thrown in there as well!
Anyone remember VRML? (Score:2)
Also, he seems to ignore the fact that VR headsets have real usability issues that anyone with any common sense would immediately realize. For instance, are you going to go into your VW (Virtual World) while on a train or subway to work, or will you just use your laptop or cell phone to communicate.
Even more important, if the "Web 2.0" buzzword m
Toon Town? (Score:2)
Did anyone else read this and think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? [imdb.com] Let's hope that the kids never discover the secret of Dip!
The web is already multi-dimensional (Score:2)
As other readers have already commented, the web is already multi-dimensional. TFA is actually referring to the user interface, not the web itself. I already use a couple of 3-d interfaces, namely Google Earth and NASA World Wind. For the type of information they display, the 3-d interface is wonderful. In fact when using plain old Google Maps I often attempt to treat it as a 3-d interface and am frustrated when I realize my mistake. D
God damn 3D (Score:2)
And from what I've read, this is a common problem for women. Probably related to the fact that women see more detail than men do, on average - we can differentiate between more colors, we notice more of the objects surrounding us. It's
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What
Heard it already. Still don't believe it. (Score:2)
I have heard this assertion before and I still don't see any validity to it. Maybe I'm missing the vision. Maybe in 10 years I'll look back at comments like this one I'm writing and say, "What was I thinking?!" Maybe, so, but I just don't understand how a 3D desktop experience will offer me any improvement to p
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Flash - the online equiv. of a Big Mac and Fries (Score:2)
Actually, the first thing I thought of was Flash. It is the single most annoying thing a web developer can do to a page. Anything with flash is likely to be very short on content. I can imagine that anything in 3D will be even longer on eye candy and shorter on substance.