What really baffles me is how handwavey proponents of the Metaverse are being about the technical challenges, and I'm glad the article brings this up.
It's pretty much unfathomable that you could build a standard that would allow for the kind of seamless interoperability that's being promised. You'd either end up with an outrageously complicated standard that's completely impractical to make use of, or you force people into a very stringent set of artificial limitations. That's assuming you are capable of tackling the unknown technical challenge that lies ahead, which is entirely in uncharted territory since no one has ever been stupid enough to try this.
Someone was telling me earlier about how in the Metaverse you could, for example, get a character skin for Fortnite and then use that in Roblox too. When I hear that the alarm bells start ringing. Even if we assume that this just works, and all issues related to implementation magically don't exist, Roblox looks absolutely nothing like Fortnite and any skin carried over from there will look totally out of place.
Actually, what if you have an avatar from a more adult oriented game and use it in a kids' game like Roblox? Is there gonna be a standard for what's acceptable that we should assume every vendor will follow to the letter?
But no worry, I'm told, this Metaverse annoucement just means they're going to start researching these problems and working on them from an architecture and standards viewpoint, and so the answers will eventually present itself. So, basically, this amounts to a promise to commit resources to an R&D project of unknown scope and duration to ROI, with largely uncrystallized use cases and exclusively commercial entities as arbiter of how the standards will look and lots of investor cash, all just so we can do things we can basically already do better with conventional technology at a significantly lower CO2 expenditure.
It's really nothing more than a giant investor cash sink that's going to keep a lot of people busy for decades and then fizzle out. Years later people might ask why the hell we ever fell for this nonsense, but we didn't: this is just how capitalism works now.
It's pretty much unfathomable that you could build a standard that would allow for the kind of seamless interoperability that's being promised. You'd either end up with an outrageously complicated standard that's completely impractical to make use of, or you force people into a very stringent set of artificial limitations. That's assuming you are capable of tackling the unknown technical challenge that lies ahead, which is entirely in uncharted territory since no one has ever been stupid enough to try this.
Someone was telling me earlier about how in the Metaverse you could, for example, get a character skin for Fortnite and then use that in Roblox too. When I hear that the alarm bells start ringing. Even if we assume that this just works, and all issues related to implementation magically don't exist, Roblox looks absolutely nothing like Fortnite and any skin carried over from there will look totally out of place.
Actually, what if you have an avatar from a more adult oriented game and use it in a kids' game like Roblox? Is there gonna be a standard for what's acceptable that we should assume every vendor will follow to the letter?
But no worry, I'm told, this Metaverse annoucement just means they're going to start researching these problems and working on them from an architecture and standards viewpoint, and so the answers will eventually present itself. So, basically, this amounts to a promise to commit resources to an R&D project of unknown scope and duration to ROI, with largely uncrystallized use cases and exclusively commercial entities as arbiter of how the standards will look and lots of investor cash, all just so we can do things we can basically already do better with conventional technology at a significantly lower CO2 expenditure.
It's really nothing more than a giant investor cash sink that's going to keep a lot of people busy for decades and then fizzle out. Years later people might ask why the hell we ever fell for this nonsense, but we didn't: this is just how capitalism works now.