Coder Decides He Wants Out Of VR

[ThreeEyes]

This is kind of interesting. A person in the biz decides he wants out. Not sure how indicative this is or how much weight to put in it, but it's a perspective and something to think about...

https://gist.github.com/rygorous/251b945aef2046ac7cee

So imagine a shared universe MMORPG, expressly operated by a company that
*already knows all your friends*, that's trying to maximize your engagement
("hey, all your friends are playing right now, don't you want to join too?"),
selling your attention to advertisers, and by the way, also building a detailed
profile on everything you do so they can do all of this even better in the future.
It's okay, go on doing whatever you want, we just want to watch! (Through your
own eyeballs if possible.) And mind, this has nothing to do with Facebook
specifically; given the current set of business practices in the tech industry,
this is pretty much what you end up with no matter which big player ends up
owning the thing. (Google is trying to tie you to their services too. As are MS
and Apple.)

[Jose]

That's a very interesting perspective, since that guy claims to have worked on the Valve VR things as early as 2012.

He's not against VR entirely, only the MMORPG/meta-verse aspect of it.

He made an interesting point about presence and how the term is being overused and that its meaning is getting diminished. Also interesting that he says that presence is something that the user opts in to. I agree with that, you have to will yourself into a state of presence, it doesn't happen automatically.

Thanks for sharing that link.

[AtariHistorian]

Seems authentic. Prediction is plausible. BRB, reblogging.

[Twitchmonkey]

Certainly reasonable concerns, but what is the alternative? If you want to avoid media that is going to be used as a platform to market to you then you have to cut yourself off from just about everything. I wish there was a way to avoid this issue, but without a good answer we just have to go forth and deal with these issues as they arise.

[cubytes]

oh yea ive tumbled down that rabbit hole with my Meta-verse Abstraction Layers thread -- its like an advertisers wet dream. ironic though because that aspect of it is more intrinsically social then simply consuming content solo.

still a never ending flood of distractions from reality is what VR will bring to society (as if we dont already have enough distractions). its like witnessing the down fall of humanity, completely disconnecting us from reality. but we are already disconnected and out of harmony with nature so that point is null...

its like creating nuclear technology then getting cold feet about how it could be used for nefarious purposes. with such a pessimistic view im surprised we made it through the cold wars without completely destroying ourselves. but i havent lost faith in humanity and with that in mind im sure we can get through VR without completely destroying ourselves

plus we are getting very close to the so called singularity the trans-humanism inflection point and from there things will just get very weird and bizarre making HMDs look like lego blocks silly toys -- assuming we make it that far.

on the flip side tho...

if you believe in such things like a collective consciousness then if you think about it this world has been observed from every imaginable perspective across thousands of years (every single living breathing creature uploading information to a collective consciousness). its like the collective consciousness got bored with reality and has dropped intelligence (language) down to our dimension in effort to observe something new. ergo virtual reality is like TV for the collective consciousness 😛

create new worlds. observe new things that haven't been observed before. defy the laws of physics

that is your purpose

get busy

jk jk but seriously...

[wildone106]

Good luck with that buddy, guess they will always need ditch diggers.

[cubytes]

"wildone106" wrote:
Good luck with that buddy, guess they will always need ditch diggers.

who are you referring too?

[cubytes]

i kid i kid... all jokingly of course, had a bit much to drink 😄 meant no disrespect. i understand why the developer feels that way...

as with any new technology there will be positives and negatives.... give and takes

[AtariHistorian]

x-post from reddit:

Let me try to sell it in a nutshell. I see I'll be working against the group collective here. He believes that a combination of three (boring) things will take us in the wrong direction (for individuals):

A more engaging experience than other media types
The perception that "the pinnacle of VR is a gigantic shared MMORPG" (The Metaverse)
The ad-financed model that is pervasive in the online industry (because we want free services)

He believes that, born out of today's environment, the Metaverse is destined to be run by a companies that are trying to both maximize your engagement and sell your attention to advertisers.

These companies will continue as they do today and build a detailed profile personal based upon your every action (if only to enhance their ability to engage and advertise to you even better in the future).

In a very real sense, you will either be the product or the work force of these companies ("in the sense that (you) are the ones doing the work - generating ad impressions").

You may think this is the right direction and not the wrong direction. The end-game scenario seems quite plausible. Keep you hooked, advertise, and continually record and analyze your actions to refine the process.

What I took away from this isn't that VR is bad or the Metaverse is bad. Rather, the Metaverse being born from today's online business environment is bad.

I think that a Metaverse born in the 80s or 90s would have been a subscription or usage-based service. A Metaverse born in today's environment is likely to be an advertising based service. He sees the problems that we have today on the Internet as being amplified in Virtual Reality. We will be put on the treadmill. They'll be trying to maximize our engagement so that we, almost as workers, deliver our attention to advertisers for a fee. And they'll constantly monitor and record our responses to try to make it that much more engaging, and to make the advertising that much more irresistible.

He predicts that this will be much worse than we have today, because VR is "a more engaging experience than other media types". So, you may think that services paid for by advertising are the best thing for you personally and you disagree with his view. I can understand that. But his prediction seems plausible, if not downright obvious.

[sugarmantits]

I do what I want!