i dont mean this to be harsh, but i have simply not seen anyone make an effective virtual space that isn't essentially an art project. that's not to say someone can't enjoy a sea of swirly lights, colorful particle effects, and extremely plastic looking alien plants, just that i don't think i would spend time in that space. i am not compelled to exist in that space.
i don't know why the metaverse idea took off so hard. well, that's a small lie, i think i do know. i think everyone was captivated by the idea of a subjective space, a blank canvas constrained only by the number of advertisements available to fill it. and by everyone i mean exactly 7 people with mailing addresses in menlo park. but i don't know why everyone thought we needed to build an entirely new canvas.
and that is where the dream ran short, i think. it's not because it was too big, but because it was too small. dreaming of a virtual 3d world where we all stand around like buoys in the waves marveling at architecture rendered with the graphical fidelity of a play station 2 is such a tiny, microscopic sliver of a dream that could have been. can be. ...kind of,, is?
vr tech kind of sucks
i've tried a lot of different virtual and augmented reality demos and devices. i've been tangential to the scene ever since the google cardboard made its debut. in fact, i think i still have the eyepiece lenses for it in a box somewhere. i have at least tried several of the various early headsets that came out after it; anything from the first vive to the hololens. i even owned a windows mixed reality headset (who remembers those?) that's still kicking around somewhere. and none of these left me wanting to engage with the later devices. the only demos available were either short games or "interactive visual experiences." which, through not necessarily the fault of the developers, pretty much universally kind of sucked. and none of them inspired me at all to try out the somewhat recent flavor-of-the-month "metaverse" worlds.
and i think part of this is how interactions work. you give me basically puppy mitts and a laser pointer, and somehow i'm expected to believe this is the future? please. sure a mouse and keyboard may not the be the optimal human-machine interface but it's sure a helluva lot better VR controllers. a mouse is so much more precise and less limiting and keyboards, if utilized correctly, allow for nearly seamless interfacing with very little muscle memory! why would i want to deal with the digital equivalent of a chastity cage just to interact with my friends when i can do that just fine already! wait. already... i can do that already?
gopher
gopher is a "protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents." it was built back in the days of text only computers and who am i kidding if you're on this website you probably already know what it is better than i do. some of you have probably used it! but anyway, it's for getting text content in document form. and then later came Hypertext Transfer Protocol which let us distribute, search, and retrieve hypermedia information and we could do more than just documents! and what we think of as the internet has only evolved and expanded and now you can transfer entire applications across the world in milliseconds. and we've had decades to build on this and perfect our interaction and our interfaces. and we have more than just documents and hypermedia, we have voice and video and instant messaging and did you know PDFs support 3d models? like holy shit we can communicate and collaborate and share our work and ourselves with such a massive amount of bandwidth its almost overwhelming! i can instantly stream my concious thoughts to my friends on more platforms than i have fingers and each and every single one of them has unique features and formatting and elements that make them diverse and useful in their own right! and some are good and some are bad and some are actively dying (r i p twitter :( ) but if one of them kicked the bucket right now it wouldn't matter! i would just route my connection through some other link, through some other platform.
because when you boil away all the branding and the logos and the ui refreshes every six goddamn months, that's all our modern web is. it's connections between people. it's an interconnected web of people and communication styles and channels that range anywhere from emojis to video calling and you get to pick the level of engagement you're comfortable with. and isn't that the dream? isn't that what the "metaverse" tried to sell us on?
isn't that what we already have?
