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Metaverse the Next Big Thing?
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."
Is it practical?
... 3D web is very appealing, and we are starting to get the tools to work with these, but as long as we have the trusty mouse and keyboard, navigation in a 3D realm will always be awkward.
;)
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.
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Mike, the Anonymous Coward
This man uses several pages to talk about the origins of the web and how revolutionary netscape navigator was, but he doesn't even remember it's immediate predecessor NCSA Mosaic, or the predecessor of the web: gopher? And you expect me to think this person is more qualified to predict the future of the web, than someone else, such as my grandmother?
The current web represents a huge investment in time, effort and money. It's not going anywhere for a long time.
Carpe Daemon
The computers most of us use give us a virtual desktop complete with files and crap scattered around. Minus spilled coffee I suppose.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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.
Seems to be taking off. 3D environments have their place (gaming, social interaction, data visualisation even), but I don't see it replacing the web for the bulk of what's already out there any time soon.
I remember going to a presentation at SGI UK in about 1997, which titled something like "Web 2.0 - the coming 3D web space". It was about how the next generation of the web would all be in 3D. I thought it was bollocks then, and I think it's bollocks today.
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?
The reason VR (by which I mean the illusion of reality through 3D googles and motion sensing) was such a flash in the pan was that the concept was sound but the technology wasn't ready.
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 the problem, the problem was the low frame rate combined with the slow response time of position detector in the helmet. You got an adequate sensation of seeing a 3D world, but if you turned your head it would take 0.25 seconds for your view to catch up. It was unconvincing, disorienting and nauseous.
So most of us wrote off VR, and the world moved on.
I'd argue that, largely due to the gaming industry, we're now long past the technological barriers that broke VR back then. Hardcore PC gamers insist on crazy framerates for games like Quake, so you can now buy commodity hardware that could present beautiful 3D worlds as a stereo pair on two displays as 120FPS without breaking a sweat.
Nintendo has demonstrated that it can deliver an affordable, small, 3D (or 6D if you agree with Sony that pitch/yaw/roll are extra) position sensor, with a gamer-friendly response time (I don't know how fast, but the point of the sensor bar rather than using lightgun technology is to get a response time of 1/60 s)
And finally, LCD colour screens have come of age.
I have doubts about this article - most people prefer to sketch on a 2D piece of paper than make 3D clay models. But I do think it's about time VR got a second chance.
Of course, it's nonsense to say "the interface is too clumsy" or "it's impractical". The early adopters and a whole bunch of their friends are already there and doing just fine. If you think a keyboard can't handle graceful movements, you've never been aced in Unreal or Tribes by somebody who's shooting you from over there one second and kicking you ass from over there, the next. All while doing a victory dance and providing a running commentary on your p0wnage.
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".
You are welcome on my lawn.
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 constraints on the much more useful abstract environment which we have created?
How do I tab-browse this world? How do I have multiple world-windows open at once? Won't my legs get tired from running around all day? What happens when I break stuff in my room from crashing into it whilst gesticulating?