Until we reach the point where outside becomes ruined and hostile I do not think a metaverse has much attraction to your average person, I see that as the main reason as for why VR became MR and then just AR.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
Indeed, physical world, nature, mountains, beaches, human look-in-the-eyes interaction, breeze of fresh air on a hill you climbed and so on is something extremely important to humans. Some feel it more, some less but ie everybody recharges in nature, just not everybody is so connected with their own bodies to actually recognize it.
I like a bit of gaming and VR seems like almost-there, but its just a gimmick in one's life, and for life quality purposes never should become more than fringe relax activity.
And for corporate-privacy-destroying virtual spaces - they would have to pay me massive amounts to spend, unwillingly, any time there. Those are the last people who should be in charge of such place
Indeed! Your comment is probably the most important in this thread. The Korean/German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes a lot about losing humanity because of tech advances.
I am retired so this is easier for me to do: For every hour each day I spend on tech (personal AI research, writing) I spend 90 minutes hiking with friends, playing games like Bridge, enjoying meals with my wife and friends, reading good literature and philosophy, etc.
I worked for 50 years before retiring, but even working, I tried to balance human time vs. tech and work - often leaving 'money on the table' but it was worth it.
Pardon an old man ranting, but I think so many people seem caught up in the wrong things.
The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest.
A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays.
https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
Going by how little it is spoken on here I assume it is a localized phenomena, but the word of Fluxer.app is spreading among my spaces and it is open source and selfhostable and federation in the future.
The official instance and full time dev is funded by a cheaper discord nitro like premium sub.
It very recently became public and since that makes people think it is vibe coded I recommend reading the making off blog post https://blog.fluxer.app/
It isn't yet 1:1 with discord, no phone app yet, but it is by far the most discord like discord alternative (closer than Stoat), but open source and selfhostable.
My google photos doesn't even seem to support facial recognition, maybe I turned it off somehow at some point, but it doesn't seem like google photos supports manually selecting a face (a face that isn't detected), which is something I use a ton with Immich, it is very convenient, even if a bit tedious if going through a backlog.
Annoyingly you can't create a person that way yet with immich, but that's where digikam helps.
Never used Alexa to buy something (not even sure that was supported here) but it not showing you what you are buying, which I feel like it must have on some devices, just sounds like a design mistake, ChatGPT and all other LLMs will be the same if just spoken to.
Also, I would never discuss something I am buying with an LLM, the moment advertising starts being used to influence its output it will be the same as discussing the product with the product page (which of course is only positive) and ignoring negative reviews.
I guess that doesn't matter in games where the world ultimately doesn't matter, it will be better procedural generation, but personally I adore games where the developers actually put effort into designing a world that is interesting to explore, where things are deliberately placed for story or gameplay mechanics reasons.
But I suppose AI could in theory reach the point where it understand the story/theme and gameplay of a game while designing a world.
But when anyone can generate a huge open world, who really cares, is the same as it is now, gotta make something that sticks out from the crowd, something notable.
It's the human guidance that makes it special. Low effort single sentence prompt creation like meta does here is super boring of course.
But it can be a tool for people with great imagination but not the technical skills to make it real.
Every time we talk about AI people think it will be used only as an easy mode A-Z creator. That's possible but creates boring output. I view it more as a tool to assist in the difficult and tedious parts of content creation. So the designer can focus on the experience and not tweaking the little things.
Because that would likely be confused with compute shaders, which are not accessible in VRChat, we still regularly use geometry shaders, which as far as I know are just terrible compared to the alternatives.
The closest to compute shaders we have are camera loops using render textures and AsyncGPUReadback which has been limited to only handle inputs and outputs in the form of textures.
Also the reason why it is even done in shader is because the scripting language in VRChat is 200X-1000X slower than normal Unity scripting, with no async or way to do threads.
There are two things holding back mini games and special worlds, inexperience and Udon.
The more technically impressive worlds don't just use the VRChat provided object syncing or interactions, they create their own systems tailored to the world, but Udon, the world scripting language, is sluggishly slow, 200X-1000X slower (according to VRC themselves and I know is true from experience), compared to ordinary scripting inside Unity, which means the only ones able to make their own systems are not only good at coding, they are really good at optimizing, on a generally amateur creation platform like VRC those people are very few.
They are trying to recreate Udon to be more performant, but small company and their first attempt was discarded after the sole employee working on it was let go.
Network delay could be considered another thing holding back mini game creation, but even if the network stack was better, you have people all over the world, latency will always be an issue.
So with every prompt you are expected to wait that long?
I highly doubt general people will be willing to wait, it also doesn't seem entirely viable if you want to do it locally, less bandwidth and no caching akin to what a literal search engine of data can do.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
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