> why the heck am I driving a car around? I can fly, can't I?
By this logic nobody should play Gran Turismo because a Superman game exists.
> You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse?
By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you don't need a car to surf the web and you can't test the car by visiting the website.
The web is pretty analogous to the metaverse and the most plausible path to an actual metaverse may be an evolution of the web browser. It's the only platform with a sandbox strong enough to run completely untrusted code on your local device with no centralized gatekeeper manually enforcing rules, which I think is a hard requirement for a real metaverse. Any metaverse contender that doesn't start with that is doomed to eventual irrelevance.
But I don't think, as the author of the article seems to, that today's web is already the metaverse and nothing will change. What really drives platform change is input methods. The iPhone was a new platform because it used capacitive touch instead of mouse and keyboard, and the web evolved with it. The metaverse will be a new platform because it will use still different input methods (yet to be determined, probably not the VR controllers we use today) and the web will have to change again, perhaps more radically this time.
I'd say a sizable majority play Gran Turismo because it's a fun test of skill -- learning the controls of an intricate machine, the layout of the game's tracks, and achieving some form of mastery over it. And I'm also sure some people play it for the fantasy of doing car racing in a safe environment, which is a very dangerous, expensive, and inaccessible sport for a lot of people.
So, perhaps I misread Tim Sweeney's point of view, but it seems like it starts and ends with "put cool car in metaverse, drive it down Main St., everyone stops and stares, like that one scene from Snow Crash. Or Ready Player One."
If it's more specific than that, "put cool car in video game, in metaverse" product placement, well we already have that today. Mercedes Benz already did a whole Mario Kart thing [0], and countless other racing games like the Forza series have sponsorships from real car companies. So that's not really anything novel for the metaverse, it's just the same product placement marketing strategy that's already existed. Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years.
> By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you can't test the car by visiting the website.
Pretty much all of these websites have a call-to-action for "Schedule a test drive at your local dealership". Hell, I remember an entire campaign from a major car corporation that was to the tune of "anybody can watch a TV commercial, but driving it is believing"
I thought modeless was wrong and that you weren't discounting the experience of driving, but rather the experience of driving a mediocre car. However, with your followup comment, it seems you're discounting the experience of driving.
Suffice it to say that plenty of people genuinely love driving, both in video games and in the real world.
Flying won't make driving obsolete any more than mountain biking has made hiking and trail running obsolete in places that are accessible to mountain bikes.
I think they are discounting that there would be anything new at all in a "Metaverse" offering driving compared to what exists today in gaming. Of course you can have fun with virtual driving, there already exists a plethora of ways, from realistic-ish high speed racing in Gran Turismo to wacky racing in Mario Kart to realistic-ish long-form driving in Truck Simulator.
And there’s the newest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. People really love the vr mode and the videos I’ve seen (I’ve never played it) already look pretty darn realistic and engaging.
Sure, but still it's a niche product. It's not like they're going to sell the next XBox by getting Microsoft Flight Simulator as a platform exclusive.
This is not to cast any aspersions on the game - popularity is not everything - but things like MFS are perfect examples that even the best simulators are just niche products, not the future of the web.
Is that a criticism, or a reflection of the fact that 20 years ago it was already pretty much perfect except for graphics limitations of the tech of the time? (Genuine question as someone who tried it as a kid 20 years ago but doesn't remember much about it.)
Virtual reality can have all sorts of landscapes, and moving along a surface, whether it be hilly or flat like Tron, will be popular. Driving is one way to move along a surface, but there's also running, swimming, base jumping, skiing, snowboarding, skating, and others. I'm sure all will be common in the metaverse.
For an example of something where driving is exciting and totally unnecessary, see Rocket League.
Same with manual transmissions. But watching my gf obsess over yeast cultures, I would say same about baking bread. Some people love a challenge; other people don't get it.
Can second it, its properly effortless and becomes second nature. Gives much more control over the engine.
That being said, switched my old BMW 3 series (E46) with manual to newer 5 series with automatic steptronic transmission, and especially for longer drives, the cognitive and 'manual' load is measurably less. But you don't realize it until you migrate.
It moves to almost boring territory, luckily I am not a type of person who tends to fall asleep behind the wheel (unlike my wife).
It becomes second nature, but most people find it a bit of a challenge to learn - obviously not a particularly huge or impossible one considering how common it is for people to get the hang of it in tens of hours, but still a challenge compared to just learning to drive in an automatic.
>Tim Sweeney is basically saying "hey, look, this is the future, you can put your car in a video game" to Mercedes, who has already been doing this for years.
I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game.
The reason that giving you the real experience of being in a specific car is bullshit for marketing purposes is that you can see hardly anyone markets cars based on what it will actually be like to use them and of course because except for a few outliers using any specific car is the same as using pretty much every other car built in a similar time frame.
on edit: meaning every other car serving the same market segment of course.
I guess my main question here is: why will it be so close to the real experience?
Why wouldn't everyone make it the most engaging virtual car driving experience they can find, what incentive is there to make it "real" in this useful way?
I mean, I get that it's necessary for this to happen for the whole pitch to make sense, but it's just nonsense. Why these weird religious beliefs about 3D stuff, including product placement, which seem to magically behave differently than the 2D versions we've been living with for decades now.
I am just incredibly confused by this. Is it like NFTs where we aren't supposed to believe the cover story and the wink-wink acknowledgement of the grift is a in-joke/cultural thing?
> I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible...
The experience of driving a real car is heavily influenced by the real world. Take those little flap things cars sometimes have to shield your eyes from the sun - the metaverse will first have to simulate an annoyance (possibly with harmful eye-melting ultraviolet light?) then let you mitigate it with the flap. It isn't obvious why people will want that or pay money for it. If they don't simulate glare, then what is the flap for?
Cars aren't independent of reality, they exist as well designed tools that allow us to do and experience things that we otherwise couldn't. When that gets translated to some sort of virtual space all the design decisions start to fall apart. The only thing that really carries over is to get the branding in front of a person to make them think of the name - which rather undermines the original "isn't going to run ads" thesis.
If it's either a selling point of the car enough that the manufacturer wants to demonstrate it accurately, or if it's something enough people care about and want to see which car suits them better, then a third party could create a simulation tool that let's you quickly go through dozens of different sun positions, weather conditions etc. and see how your personalised body shape will be positioned in each car including being able to adjust the virtual seat position, sun flaps, etc. to compare how you'll be affected by light in a different range of cars... it could be a useful feature? Hell, maybe it even extends to being able to choose the perfect custom flap size and positioning, to either get it added into a new car sale, or ordered as an after-market minor swap to improve your driving experience.
>I think the idea is that the Metaverse will give you as close to the real experience of being in that specific car as possible, a video game won't do that because any car placed in a video game must be subservient to the goals and mechanics of the game.
Why do you think the metaverse will do a better job than the developers at assetto corsa for whom it is their primary mission?
It's all just marketing wank to get advertisers excited to put product placement in facebook's new second life metagame.
yes it's marketing wank, but how is marketing wank made - probably by a bunch of idiots (of which I am sometimes one) - sitting around a table brainstorming what they can do to sell this tech to others. And then someone says an idea and everyone says hey that's great even though it is sort of crap, and that becomes the marketing wank they're releasing.
I don't really care how marketing wank is made especially when its obviously lying marketing wank. Calling it the metaverse doesn't make it any more appealing.
I have two cars - a 1980 Datsun and a Fiat Spider. They're both a "test of skill". There's no reason it wouldn't be massively fun to play with lots of other cars on tracks or in all kinds of conditions in VR. "Fun test of skill" is the whole point. The original, like, Stephenson-ish "metaverse" was somewhere people fought with swords. This was getting directly at the idea that skill and challenge were more valuable than raw code. [edit: "entertainment"]
Stephenson has a passage in that where he talks about Hiro Protagonist and his friends being coders who would race infinite-speed Tron style "cars" around an endless black plane, before the city of the Metaverse was built. And this was of course, pretty boring in the end. Because infinite speed isn't very interesting. What makes driving fast cars interesting is the limitations -- and knowing them. Then what makes a metaverse interesting is the same type of puzzle. People play "Flight Simulator" for a couple reasons, but a primary one is to figure out how to recover from a catastrophic engine failure. So... how would that not be a great way to sell a car?
Well, yeah. Honestly, a massively multiplayer GTA V or Red Dead 2 would basically be the whole Metaverse concept. The only differences would be:
(1) You aren't there to complete missions; there's no storylines and it's totally open-ended. There are no writers, and
(2) The spaces and content are created by anyone, not a central company, and
(3) You can go from GTA world to Red Dead world to tons of other worlds without changing missions or skins or avatars or whatever; they're part of the same huge space you can traverse without leaving VR.
(4) You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities.
So, like, yes Stephenson's metaverse is similar to a lot of video games we have now, but it's critically different because his characters are "heroes" in that universe specifically because they coded their own avatars and their own environments.
Which is another way of saying that it rewards thought, code, and creativity -- exactly the things that video games steal people away from.
We already have games almost entirely like this, and the market is clear: no one plays them, to a good approximation. People play games to compete or cooperate on specific goals. This idea of sandbox multi-player interaction is only a gimmick that's interesting a few weeks tops, then the vast majority leave to play Candy Crush or Fortnite where they have clear goals.
If they want to meet with friends and hang around, real life contact just can't be beat. That's the reason why virtual persistent worlds are ultimately bullshit (as opposed to game worlds where you have an actual game to play, be that chess or matching colored gems or killing other players).
I don't know, that just sounds like pitching a TV show without writers. Even a reality TV show or a cooking show needs writers to keep things entertaining. Otherwise, you sort of just have nothing to look at.
> You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities
I ask again: why can't I code my avatar to be the most OP avatar that ever exists? I will create a weapon that kills people if they look at me. What's the incentive to purchase new things if everyone can just code the most OP version and undercut the person next door? I will have the best cars, the funniest T-shirts, and the strongest potions, and you cannot stop me. Because I write Lua scripts.
There's some element of cooperation that is usually assumed when people talk about the metaverse but I don't see any incentive to maintain it that way. Garry's Mod and Roblox are platforms that do what you're talking about, today. The way they maintain this cooperation is that they prevent users from having strong autonomy in games that others make. In Roblox, your avatar is limited to a few cosmetic choices for customization, and in Garry's Mod, you don't really have any customization at all in most game modes.
Real world is like that, you can “code” manipulate the world. However there is a limit on some extent and in such worlds there will be other limits like a consensual physics rule on servers entry, like “local laws”. Rather than LUA think on declarative contracts that limit your crafting based on agreed parameters.
> The only differences would be: (1) You aren't there to complete missions; there's no storylines and it's totally open-ended. There are no writers, and (2) The spaces and content are created by anyone, not a central company, and (3) You can go from GTA world to Red Dead world to tons of other worlds without changing missions or skins or avatars or whatever; they're part of the same huge space you can traverse without leaving VR. (4) You can code your own physical spaces and code your own avatar's abilities.
Because there's no guarantee that the experience is in any way comparable to the actual driving. It's in the manufacturer's interest to do the opposite. If the controls weren't standardized the simulation might have still been useful to learn the controls, but they are.
Besides, when AI cars come along the criterias will change completely. From driving experience to cost and comfort. That could be virtualized... but there wouldn't be much point in it.
Following up on the racing of infinite-speed cars, there was also an emphasis of optimizing your own user interface. That when every car could go at whatever speeds you want, the most important thing is how to interact with the car, and to control it. So it isn't just somebody else's code, but the skill and challenge of making your own code to suit your particular needs in an interface.
The metaverse goes against consumer trends in web browsing. People want to consume their information on the go while doing other things, this is why mobile presently dominates the web.
Who wants to context switch from reality into a virtual world just so they can see what the new Ford pickup looks like? Nobody, thats who.
This whole concept reads to make like a Facebook exec went into a coma just as Second Life was taking off and woke up recently demanding that Facebook cease on what they believe will clearly be the future of online interaction.
Can you imagine being Zuck? Super rich for basically creating the global gossip exchange and fraud factory, and he knows this, he knows Facebook is a clusterfuck of misinformation chaos. And he probably knows he is surrounded by yes people... I wonder if he knows he is in a nightmare.
I don't think it's a nightmare because he has choice and a fair amount of power. He could quietly retire comfortably if he wanted to, but instead he's making the play to reorient his company around a virtual-reality space. That sounds like a motivated person, versus someone trapped and going through the motions.
The point the OP is making is VR isn’t a domain where you test drive practical family cars. Sure you have racing games but how many people can afford, let alone justify, high ended performance cars for their family? And how many racing games do you see where people are driving boring (relatively speaking) family cars?
The point about VR games are that they’re an unrealistic escape. If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
>If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
What? Why?
A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution.
Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (which is actually just your perspective if you prefer beer, the orange-juice-loving person in the group is seeing the whole group drinking orange juice) and discussing the latest celebrity scandal. All of the cosmopolitanism and variety of social media, none of its artficiality and bullshit.
(Off course there is going to be new bullshit in this world, people will go through various hoops to pull idiotic pranks on other people and scammers will have a terrifying field day with the new convincing techniques the new medium will bring, but at this point this is just more or less real life. Real Life In Your Pocket that is. (hopefully eventually, it will have a PC phase first). Who is not excited by that?)
Imagine a professional like an airline pilot or a heart surgeon transmitting a read-only record of a flight or an operation, complete with haptic feedback and a temperature-and-wind reconstruction of the transmission environment. Imagine those records dumped to storage and serving as humanity's Library Of Crafts, a correction to our ancient shortcoming of only being able to capture in symbols what could be said (and with photography and microphones, what could be seen or heard), but not what could be felt or experienced.
Won't this absolutely revolutionise learning and communication? There is a very clear path from here to eventual Greg-Egan-style post-singular communication where
you are roaming freely in abstract structures residing everywhere from your head to a server in orbit.
Every thought or system or structure ever dreamt up by the human mind began with a 1:1 snapshot of reality that was then further filtered and compressed (Hume's golden mountain). The ability to arbitrarily construct, store, transmit and reconstruct 1:1 ever-more-convincing sensory representations of the world at will is nothing short of a revolution comparable to the invention of language.
That sounds incoherent. Why are we all drinking OJ/beer? Can we taste it? If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers (that all understand English and American culture enough for me to gossip about US celebrities apparently?) without risking giving up the lie?
Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket, too. It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.
Why so? the first 3 paragraphs are 2 examples of why a 1:1 reconstruction of our world on demand can be an amazing thing, the remaining is the statment 'All creation or innovation that the human brain does, or is ever capable off, is simply mixing and remixing its readings of the outside world. So mutable and cheap on-demand reconstructions of the outside world will be an immense boost to creativity and innovation'
>Why are we all drinking OJ/beer?
Why are we exchanging asynchronous plaintext blocks right now instead of speaking on the phone or sharing 30-seconds videos on tiktok? This is the medium we chose, this is the medium the hypothetical group in my example chose. (from a sea of possibilities that make our communication options right now look like ancient letters)
>Can we taste it?
If the hypothetical social media app we're talking about is any good, it will have the option to sync your avatar to real-life-you on various 'motion paths', so that whenever you move along those motion paths, your avatar move in the same way. One of those 'motion paths' is all the movements your hand make when holding an actual drink, which would translate to your avatar mirroring the movement in the meta verse.
What happens if you release the drink ? you have the option of making the renderer either disappearing it or (for fidelity) putting it in a corresponding location in the dream. What happens if you can't or don't want to drink? you have the option to either make the renderer hallucinate a drink (along with believable drinking animations at believable intervals) or just make you appear in the dream as you are in meat space.
What happens if/when
the marriage of neuroscience and computers get fruitful enough that this whole thing is being served directly to your neurons, bypassing the many middle men in your eyes, ears and skin? You can have the additional option of eschewing physical mirroring of the meta verse and just have the gear directly stimulate the feeling of drinking whenever you drink in the metaverse.
>If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers [...] without risking giving up the lie?
Lie? Am I lying to you right now because my username is not the full name registered to my national number in my country's official records ? is the jvm lying to the code running inside of it by presenting virtual method calls as a hardware primitive? This is make-believe, the whole entirety of human civilization is built on it. Even my real name is no more real than the username I chose for this account, except merely by the virtue that more of my existence (more records, more of my opinions, more memories in more heads,...) is attached to it.
You have the option to say you're presenting as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of pretending to present as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of not doing that and saying to your group you're just making the renderer playing tricks on them, and on and on it goes. Whole ecosystems and apps will develop conventions and preferences toward particular options.
>that all understand English and American
This is entirely orthogonal to the technology under discussion, the internet have made millions want to understand English so they can communicate with a greater pool of people, and when cyber communication becomes as deep and convincing as the vision of the metaverse, untold millions more will be motivated to understand popular languages, and will be able to more efficiently than now because language learning (as all learning) will become much more effective and joyful, imagine the high-fidelity virtual/recorded tourism trips available by the petabytes to every person who wants them.
Again, when/If AI or neuro+cyber ever reach the moon they are aiming for, this will integrate nicely with the vision of the meta verse by, respectively, a real-time translation engine running in parallel or direct brain-to-brain telepathy, but even without this the metaverse faces a problem of languages that is no easier and no harder than the internet, which I see it handles perfectly fine.
>(that all understand English and American culture enough for me to gossip about US celebrities apparently?)
I didn't specify English or American exactly, I myself am a Middle Easterner with worse-than-average [knowledge of | interest in] all but the most popular celebrities even in my own country. International or regional celebrities have worldwide following even now and even by purely traditional media, and the internet have made the word 'celebrity' expand in very weird directions.
>Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket
"Electronic computers, why!, I already have pen, paper and my trusty slide rule right here my good sir. I see no purpose those 'electronic brains' of yours can serve"
>It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.
Nobody ever said it would, it's a very specific vision* with a very specific claims : We will construct our own sensory reality. Whatever can be fixed or made (much much) better by constructing and manipulating indistinguishable-from-the-real-thing sensory models of reality, this vision is implicitly claiming it would fix or make it better. This is a gargantuan subset of. humanity's problems. Whatever can't be fixed by this alone, won't, and nobody ever claimed otherwise.
* :When I say 'vision', I mean the actual vision advanced by visionaries like Greg Egan, Gibson, and others in their works, not the garbage copied-and-pasted from the marketing brochures of corporations jumping on the trend, or for that matter those marketing brochures themselves, which are a watered-down inferior version of the visionaries' vision. I'm just as opposed and unbelieving of the promises those companies make as anyone who ever read a headline or two about them, I just still believe in the underlying dreams they are appropriating/butchering.
This reads like some sort of techno-utopian fever dream.
People don't want to be completely disconnected from physical reality. The world you described is vulgar to any real human person, honestly it sounds like a cross between Brave New World and The
Matrix.
There would be no authenticity of experience in the world you imagine. It'd be people living out instagram fantasies continuously.
Society would eventually devolve into a decadent, fetalistic world marked by the boredom of playing a video game with god mode on, where humans would no longer be able to deal with hardship or conflict. Bored of travelling to places that don't exist, they'd try desperately to satiate their desire for authentic human interaction by sitting in virtual pubs chatting about the imagined escapades of pretend celebrities.
People construct avatars and profiles about who that want to be in a world they want to be in. Nobody wants a 1:1 with actual reality because we already live in it.
It’s the same reason we watch super hero movies, read comic books and novels. Escapism. If the virtual world is a 1:1 with actual reality then there is literally no reason to enter the virtual world.
And why are text mediums so popular? Because they’re convenient. VR lacks that same convenience.
> the first 3 paragraphs are 2 examples of why a 1:1 reconstruction of our world on demand can be an amazing thing
But they obviously weren't "a 1:1 reconstruction of our world": You can't all simultaneously be drinking beer and be drinking OJ in the real world, so all the scenarios were false.
Your input methods comment is key. Today we can have an almost true to life virtual driving experience with peripherals like direct drive steering wheels, loadcell pedals, shifters and a motorised driving rig. It's an expensive hobby with great innovation. Until the interface problem is fixed for VR then it will be a very subpar experience compared to what's already available.
You can now extrapolate this to almost any interaction in VR; walking, flying, typing or shooting.
Until there's an input method that is able to emulate these experiences effectively, then it is pure science fiction.
VR is potentially good for some video games, like 3D it's a technology and just because you're using it doesn't mean it's magically making your game better. There's an era of early 3D platformers that were terrible because the people making them don't yet understand how this form works, they're maybe expert 2D platform game designers, but not everything they learned applies cleanly to the new form.
It can take a long time to unlearn things in video games. It took years after video game arcades ceased to be the dominant factor for games to get rid of "Lives" that existed only† to ensure players pump coins into the no-longer relevant coin slot.
I think Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes shows off what VR can do well that you couldn't do otherwise. The isolation between the player defusing the bomb and everybody else is part of the game. The fact that the player defusing can't look at the bomb manual is enforced by them being in a VR environment with no manual.
In too many VR games, the VR is largely an impediment, and the takeaway is "This could be a good game, shame it's VR".
† OK things like Hundred Mario challenge and the modern Endless Super Expert show that you can do other things with this form, but it's pretty arbitrary, there's no way this would exist without the history of video game arcades.
Extremely good points. VR has the potential to revolutionize education, and by extension workplace training. With the addition of AR, that education/training can have a persistent presence on the job.
I wonder when society will realize all this technology has no value without the support of the single most valuable resource on this planet: humans and their educations. The number one asset of any/every company and every nation is their people - yet we treat people as completely disposable. Our civilization is literally insane today, and will remain so until this clear value is recognized.
I do think the potential around VR is greatly oversold however there are still benefits outside of gaming: concerts, remote conferences, having kick ass multi-screen home office for those who don’t have the space for one.
The office example is the real winner for me. But imagine what it would take: a wireless VR headset with massive resolution that still allows me to look at my surroundings so I can drink a coffee or eat my lunch and is comfortable enough to use for several hours with no breaks.
That’s why I said “for those who don’t have the space”. You might live in a one bed apartment and not have the room for a dedicated work space so VR might be the alternative in such a situation.
I appreciate this isn’t going to be a super common use case but it’s definitely something that might appeal to some who have well paid jobs in expensive to live locations (like London and SV).
Much as I hate FB, as a piano player I loved their little graphic showing how mixed reality would send the notes down to your hand positions on the piano as an endless Star Wars kind of scroll thing. I would do that just to exercise my mind with some classical or jazz pieces. I can think of a slew of other ways VR is useful. Training doctors for surgery. Training pilots. Mechanical engineering and prototyping. None of that means we should live in VR. Just that it's a powerful tool.
By this logic nobody should play Gran Turismo because a Superman game exists.
> You can't test legroom or the seat cushions, because your avatar doesn't don't have a body. So I don't see how you can realistically sell an actual real-world car, because isn't most of its function and design unnecessary in the metaverse?
By this logic it's pointless to make a website to promote your car because you don't need a car to surf the web and you can't test the car by visiting the website.
The web is pretty analogous to the metaverse and the most plausible path to an actual metaverse may be an evolution of the web browser. It's the only platform with a sandbox strong enough to run completely untrusted code on your local device with no centralized gatekeeper manually enforcing rules, which I think is a hard requirement for a real metaverse. Any metaverse contender that doesn't start with that is doomed to eventual irrelevance.
But I don't think, as the author of the article seems to, that today's web is already the metaverse and nothing will change. What really drives platform change is input methods. The iPhone was a new platform because it used capacitive touch instead of mouse and keyboard, and the web evolved with it. The metaverse will be a new platform because it will use still different input methods (yet to be determined, probably not the VR controllers we use today) and the web will have to change again, perhaps more radically this time.