Metaverse, schmetaverse
Jul. 28th, 2022 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteThe "Metaverse" was summoned into existence with IRC, back in the 80's. Zuck's vision brings nothing new to the table, except some retrograde vision of the adorable cyberspace meeting rooms that William Gibson was already writing about. (Again, back in the 80's.)
It completely and perhaps deliberately misses the point. The next step is not about anything so grand. The "killer app" is niche and is right in front of most people: AR/VR headsets are on the verge of becoming the new essential engineering and artistic tool, not a replacement for the current emperor of communication tools (the smartphone).
Here's an example that should be close to everyone here, i.e. software developers: You sit down in a coffee shop with a foldable keyboard in front of you, and put on the VR headset. You bring no laptop with you, and no notebooks or manuals either. As soon as the headset is in place, external cameras on it immediately recreate the view around you as-is, but slightly dimmer. Then in front of you (in the virtual space), half a dozen five-foot-high curved screens of code appear, in precisely the configuration you left them 20 minutes ago when you left the house.
"So what?" you say. "This is basically like having a laptop." Well sort of. But the point is, it's actually EASIER to deploy than the laptop. THAT'S when it becomes the killer device.
The headset has one wire that goes over your shoulder down to a battery, which you can keep in your pocket. Other than that there are no wires to deploy. There are no controls to pick up. You can see and feel the keyboard in front of you still. You do not need a mousepad or a trackpad, but you do have a pointer: You move it by raising one index finger off the keyboard and pointing. Note that this is actually EASIER than lifting one hand up and placing it on a trackpad. You click by tapping your thumb, ever so slightly, wherever it is. The LIDAR sensors on the bottom of the headset track all this, as long as you don't turn your head more than 90 degrees away from your hands.
The displays are fixed to the environment, and of course can be easily rearranged. Of course, by the time you see an implementation of this, the whole concept of windows in a display will have been re-thought, to include elements that respond to the movement of your eyes specifically, elements that warp space, faux "work environments" with notes scattered on a desk, tools to examine data structures and memory contents in cube form, integrated side-by-side interaction with the same environment by two people, and so on. It would take the whole notion of screen sharing in a meeting to the next level, obviously.
If the device is light and responsive and high-resolution enough, you will suddenly hate developing on tiny screens anchored to keyboards. You will get used to having your custom 360-degree "work environment" deployable around you at a moment's notice no matter where you are, and you will begin using the more positional aspects of the environment to keep track of things and context-switch in ways you haven't even thought of.
Now, if it can be that useful to you as a software developer - a person who really just needs big legible grids of code and a good keyboard to do their job - think about how useful it's going to be to an architect, a painter, a photographer, an interior designer ... a piano teacher guiding her student's hands, a mechanic learning about an unfamiliar engine, a geologist making sense of land survey data ... anyone who would rather not have their visual information confined to a square.
Of course, a gadget that's this good at what it does would be pricey. But you could spend $1500 on a light but powerful laptop, or you could spend $2500 on this, and never need an external display. At that point you would break even.
Now, to get back to my point about Zuck and his "vision":
NONE OF THESE APPLICATIONS HAVE JACK SQUAT TO DO WITH A METAVERSE. They are serious things done by people at work, and they do not need any "social" component beyond what is already implemented. That whole vision of cool people "hanging out" in some virtual universe and having a blast with their spare time ... bugger that. Anyone with spare time is going to pull these devices off and go outside. But make no mistake, the technology is just about here to make a device of this type and quality, and people are going to find it very useful.
It completely and perhaps deliberately misses the point. The next step is not about anything so grand. The "killer app" is niche and is right in front of most people: AR/VR headsets are on the verge of becoming the new essential engineering and artistic tool, not a replacement for the current emperor of communication tools (the smartphone).
Here's an example that should be close to everyone here, i.e. software developers: You sit down in a coffee shop with a foldable keyboard in front of you, and put on the VR headset. You bring no laptop with you, and no notebooks or manuals either. As soon as the headset is in place, external cameras on it immediately recreate the view around you as-is, but slightly dimmer. Then in front of you (in the virtual space), half a dozen five-foot-high curved screens of code appear, in precisely the configuration you left them 20 minutes ago when you left the house."So what?" you say. "This is basically like having a laptop." Well sort of. But the point is, it's actually EASIER to deploy than the laptop. THAT'S when it becomes the killer device.
The headset has one wire that goes over your shoulder down to a battery, which you can keep in your pocket. Other than that there are no wires to deploy. There are no controls to pick up. You can see and feel the keyboard in front of you still. You do not need a mousepad or a trackpad, but you do have a pointer: You move it by raising one index finger off the keyboard and pointing. Note that this is actually EASIER than lifting one hand up and placing it on a trackpad. You click by tapping your thumb, ever so slightly, wherever it is. The LIDAR sensors on the bottom of the headset track all this, as long as you don't turn your head more than 90 degrees away from your hands.
The displays are fixed to the environment, and of course can be easily rearranged. Of course, by the time you see an implementation of this, the whole concept of windows in a display will have been re-thought, to include elements that respond to the movement of your eyes specifically, elements that warp space, faux "work environments" with notes scattered on a desk, tools to examine data structures and memory contents in cube form, integrated side-by-side interaction with the same environment by two people, and so on. It would take the whole notion of screen sharing in a meeting to the next level, obviously.
If the device is light and responsive and high-resolution enough, you will suddenly hate developing on tiny screens anchored to keyboards. You will get used to having your custom 360-degree "work environment" deployable around you at a moment's notice no matter where you are, and you will begin using the more positional aspects of the environment to keep track of things and context-switch in ways you haven't even thought of.
Now, if it can be that useful to you as a software developer - a person who really just needs big legible grids of code and a good keyboard to do their job - think about how useful it's going to be to an architect, a painter, a photographer, an interior designer ... a piano teacher guiding her student's hands, a mechanic learning about an unfamiliar engine, a geologist making sense of land survey data ... anyone who would rather not have their visual information confined to a square.
Of course, a gadget that's this good at what it does would be pricey. But you could spend $1500 on a light but powerful laptop, or you could spend $2500 on this, and never need an external display. At that point you would break even.
Now, to get back to my point about Zuck and his "vision":
NONE OF THESE APPLICATIONS HAVE JACK SQUAT TO DO WITH A METAVERSE. They are serious things done by people at work, and they do not need any "social" component beyond what is already implemented. That whole vision of cool people "hanging out" in some virtual universe and having a blast with their spare time ... bugger that. Anyone with spare time is going to pull these devices off and go outside. But make no mistake, the technology is just about here to make a device of this type and quality, and people are going to find it very useful.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 11:24 am (UTC)Sounds very reasonable. Let's see about the resolution; are we already there, with the level of resolution we see on a laptop screen?
darned kids and their whatzy-doozits
Date: 2022-07-28 11:10 pm (UTC)Get everything possible off of my head, if I'm going to be wearing that thing all day.
Also, while we're at it, make sure the 'Metaverse' function is disabled. That thing is, at best, another unwelcome distraction pumping ads into my face, and at worst, the end of society as we know it. :-P
Re: darned kids and their whatzy-doozits
Date: 2022-07-28 11:21 pm (UTC)Re: darned kids and their whatzy-doozits
Date: 2022-08-01 09:42 pm (UTC)Who needs all them fancy-schmancy geegaws, though? Back in my day, we used COMPOSITE video and we LIKED it. You could run the VR headset dinglebopper on channel 3, and the Tivo on channel 4! Add an A/B box, and you got somewhere to plug in the ol' Laserdisc and the Gamecube, too!
Re: darned kids and their whatzy-doozits
Date: 2022-08-01 10:55 pm (UTC)Re: darned kids and their whatzy-doozits
Date: 2022-08-01 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 03:20 am (UTC)Personally I also think those applications would be great. I can only imagine producing music in a VR environment, as even 2 large monitors is endlessly frustrating, let alone the tiny dimensions of a 16" laptop screen (which is my situation at this specific moment, prevented from using my non-climate-controlled studio/office by the punishing heat). I would totally welcome this.
But yeah, apart from that? It boggles my mind that some people (Zuck, I guess??) didn't learn at least this one lesson from the pandemic: people need to be in the same room together. I don't mean that aspirationally, I mean that people need the actual, physical, often inconvenient presence of other humans in the way they need food, water, sleep and sunlight. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic as two weeks of isolation was becoming an indefinite period, thinking, "well this can't go on all that long because, seriously, at some point, people gotta fuck." It turned out that people started to feel nostalgic about their *offices*, the place they couldn't wait to escape before, that's how deeply the extended deprivation of personal contact affected them. VR hangouts may well be fun for a little bit and in moderation, but I'd guess it's probably about as satisfying as a diet of cornflakes.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 03:37 am (UTC)No algorithm yet developed (that I know of) can give you as accurate a picture of the sound produced by your mix under *every* set of conditions, as will two reasonably decent-quality, flat-eq speakers of at least 5" (ideally larger) woofers positioned correctly in relationship to your ears in a reasonably acoustic-absorbent environment.
For an example, the spatial sound algorithm that Apple rolled out recently is absolutely amazing and it sounds fantastic, and often it's in the uncanny valley with realism. I use it listening to YouTube videos and I hear the reflections of the person's voice off the wall *behind* me. But mixing in it would be a super bad idea since there's no telling how this mix would translate to any number of other environments. Mixing *only* on simple headphones generally doesn't work either. (Personal practice is to mix on loudspeakers as much as possible, headphones as much as necessary.) So as far as I can tell, professional music production will require actual physical loudspeakers at some point in the process -- even if those speakers only exist at a mix/master facility you pay to make your productions shine.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 03:55 am (UTC)We make as much rough shit as we can "in the stooodio" and then out of necessity I end up doing the long tail of post production with headphones, moving eventually to repeated listens on the home stereo and in the car. The most frustrating ingredient is always vocals. In one medium it sounds perfectly legible, then in another it sounds like wharbarggbrrgl* or is annoyingly forward.
Personally, I loathe Apple's "spatial sound" shit and anything else like it. To me it's just a glorified version of the "stereo expansion" button on very old amps. If the source is shitty mono, I'm happy to hear it in shitty mono. Also these goddamn kids keep sneaking onto my lawn.
(*This is a technical term that is meant to invoke the noise a happy dog makes when you're spraying a garden hose into its mouth)
no subject
Date: 2022-07-29 05:39 am (UTC)Handling feature elements with headphones is in general really hard, with bass being either a tie or a close second in terms of difficulty. Compression on the vocals can make them more tractable, but in general the truism if it sounds good quiet on loudspeakers it'll sound good loud everywhere else is pretty much accurate in my experience, regardless of any Fancy Effects(tm) applied.
Oh and since you mentioned mono -- it's really useful to sum to mono and play the resulting mix at a relatively low volume, listening out for balance. Since so many people (sadly) listen to all their music on speakers that are effectively mono (like bluetooth speakers) at a volume below speaking volume. This has been really revealing for me since I learned about it.