[HN Gopher] A Manifesto for the Metaverse
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A Manifesto for the Metaverse
Author : imgabe
Score : 24 points
Date : 2022-03-17 10:06 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tiltingatwindmills.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (tiltingatwindmills.dev)
| pavlov wrote:
| A disappointing article that's not a manifesto in any sense. The
| author doesn't seem interested in exploring prior art at all, and
| there's plenty starting from VRML which was briefly the hype
| around 1996.
|
| Crypto claims are repeated without criticism. For example:
|
| "With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity across
| the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address, which
| nobody else would have access to."
|
| How do you know address 0x381638eef881 is the Jane Doe who went
| to your high school? It's not intrinsically a better identifier
| than janedoe31@gmail.com.
|
| You can't expect people to have a single wallet address all their
| lives -- keys get lost, etc. And if you need a third party to
| provide an identity layer, well, that's just another Facebook.
| (Which of course the VCs hope that they'll be the ones to fund.)
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| Yes, it takes a remarkable amount of mental gymnastics to
| reconcile decentralized transparent information and the
| Facebook corporation.
| pavlov wrote:
| I'm saying the existence of crypto wallets does nothing to
| prevent another Facebook (or indeed the same one), just like
| the existence of PGP did nothing to prevent Facebook.
|
| The metaverse identity problem is the same as the web
| identity problem, and it is in no way solved by yet another
| identifier just because you can attach a pointer to a monkey
| JPEG to it.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| You inspired me to go have a look at VRML. With all respect to
| the work that has been done, its so incomprehensible to anybody
| outside the field. And it seems the modern version of it (X3D)
| is more focused on specifying individual scenes and behaviours,
| where what we need for the metaverse is the magic sauce that
| lets people build separate worlds independently and join them
| together through links. What does a link look like in such a
| world? is it a door I walk through? a button I press?
|
| We need something radically clearer and simpler to make it
| successful. I wish I could believe Zuckerberg really wants to
| build it but it is so hard to see him have the kind of altruism
| necessary to build any kind of open platform.
| [deleted]
| sdoering wrote:
| The first lines of the article actually tell most of the story:
|
| > What is the Metaverse? Wired tried to figure it out recently
| and the results were inconclusive. Where is the metaverse? How do
| we log in to it? Nobody knows!
|
| I read the article and only came away with 'we don't know
| anything, we use buzzwords to imagine solutions for problems that
| could be solved without buzzword tech, and call for let's build
| it'.
|
| To me metaverse sounds like a bubble of hot marketing and PR air.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| The manifesto for the metaverse may be found by consulting my HN
| profile.
| notahacker wrote:
| Feels like it misses the point. The "openness" of the web meant
| that anyone that could use a text editor could have a website and
| everybody could access it (and most of it worked perfectly if
| users accessed it asynchronously). The barriers to having your
| own coherent shared 3D experience a lot higher (and the entities
| that do it well aren't particularly interested in opening it up
| to everybody else)
|
| And of course the blockchain still feels like a solution in
| search of a problem. A blockchain isn't a solution to the problem
| of "anyone can design their avatar to look like anything they
| want" because the blockchain isn't a design restriction, and if
| you've got entities deciding that only the owner of a particular
| token can have a particular style of costume, that looks quite a
| lot like centralisation.
| notepalf wrote:
| This reminds me of https://janusvr.com/ , a way of creating 3D
| spaces using a markup language and collaboratively browsing an
| immersive internet
| giantrobot wrote:
| > With blockchain, users can maintain a consistent identity
| across the metaverse simply by verifying their wallet address,
| which nobody else would have access to.
|
| This can be done with boring old encryption keys and signatures,
| not stupid blockchain needed. Even then it doesn't solve the
| avatar problem. If I make an avatar that looks just like someone
| else (or their avatar) it doesn't matter if people can verify
| someone's identity. I can _effectively_ impersonate anyone I want
| if I can freely adjust an avatar. Unless you can manage to create
| a truly effective "avatar hash" there's no way to keep me from
| using someone else's model.
| moltke wrote:
| You barely need crypto. Ticket authentication would be enough.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| > there's no way to keep me from using someone else's model
|
| Indeed it seems to me desirable that I _could_ use someone else
| 's model. The obvious solution to spoofing identity is "press a
| button to view metadata of what I'm looking at"; the apparent
| visual world is hardly the only layer of reality we need to
| experience in VR.
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