metaverse

From IndieWeb

comic with a airplane banner saying WELCOME TO OUR BRAND EXPERIENCE IN THE METAVERSE and two half people without lower torsos casting elliptical shadows on a 3D blue lines on gray grid with one looking at their watch saying I’M SURE CONSUMERS WILL SHOW UP *ANY* MINUTE NOW while the other gazes at the opposite horizon

The metaverse is a concept of a virtual 3D world introduced in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” book, later adopted by the Second Life startup/service, most recently an early 2020s tech hype cycle, and was a topic of discussion at the 2021-10-09 IndieWeb Create Day.

Early implementations on the internet so far (as of 2021) are either silos (e.g. Second Live, Roblox, Fortnite) or attempt to create scarcity in some other fashion (e.g. Decentraland). An "Indie" metaverse would instead be built like the web: anybody can set up their own space, and link it with other people's spaces, without a central entity or other form of scarcity.

IndieWeb Examples

Johannes Ernst

Johannes Ernst built a concept on 2021-10-09 for how a personal site might look and interact in a metaverse that's built like the web: from individual, linked sites

Other Indie Examples

3D homepage in CSS

An IndieWeb 3D navigable homepage example in pure CSS (no JS needed!)

Brainstorming

Website equivalent of VR

Marty McGuire: a VR equivalent of a website could be a virtual space/scene, or several such spaces/scenes connected by portals, all under your control. webmention and microformats are just plumbing. webmention in particular could be used to create connections or responses between spaces.

Criticism

Worse version of internet

  • 2021-10-29 PC Gamer: The metaverse is bullshit / You're not losing your mind: it really does just sound like a worse version of the internet.

Academic research without praxis

Leading with renaming

Facebook renamed itself based on vapor:

  • 2022-01-31 NYTimes: How Facebook Is Morphing Into Meta / Shifting a 68,000-person social networking company toward the theoretical metaverse has caused internal disruption and uncertainty.

    …one employee wrote: “Who is the elephant in the room who is going to ask how all of it works? Not it.”

Leading with monetization

Resemblance to a Black Mirror episode

In response to the infamous Torment Nexus tweet:

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Led by BigTech

Hyped and diluted to meaninglessness

"metaverse" has been hyped by journalists and media so much that it has become a synonym for "virtual reality" (VR), or in some cases, merely another word for a "virtual" experience of any kind. Thread: https://twitter.com/Sierra_OffLine/status/1488508625706487809

  • "In less than 4 months we've gone from the metaverse being a suss, dubious concept is to students now claiming "such and such game is a metaverse" and I would like to hold the entire journalistic establishment personally responsible for this" @Sierra_OffLine February 1, 2022

Articles

Tweets

Notable tweets about "metaverse":

Humor

See Also