Since I am always harping on Cramer on this forum, I guess I will say something positive for once... I am reading one of his books 'Get Rich Carefully' or something like that. I'm still in the early phases, but so far he talks intelligently here. And I do like some of the history he mentions, such as when he was an intern at Goldman, and describing when Quotrons were a new and THE THING in town... Watching traders at Goldman 'hit-the-bit' and manipulate stock prices... that price of thing. I like books that describe the times from the 80's and pre, and have the lingo to go with it. We'll see if I turn really negative toward the end of the book. Give me a bit to finish it as I'm very busy this week.
Could you point me towards an article or a book on the subject. I wasn't aware this has been such a huge trend back then. I would like to dive deeper into it and will do, but it would be helpful. Thanks.
I learned some VRML in 1997. Obviously, that wasn't going to work with a 75 mhz processor, 100 megs of ram and a modem. To me, people are being really short sighted with Meta at this point. Investing this much money into R&D on a hard problem will pay dividends. It will even pay dividends in ways that can't be anticipated. Meta stock at this point may as well be a call option on their R&D + their traditional businesses. If anything I am more reminded at this point of looking at the MIT Media Lab website in the mid 90s. It mentioned how wearable computing was going to be a big thing. I remember a picture of a guy walking around with a plugged in cord and basically the parts of a computer strapped to his body. People obviously were not going to want to wear computers but at the time if you said this was going to solve the wearable computing problem it wouldn't even make sense No one is ever going to carry a phone around with them 24/7, duhhh! That wouldn't have been incorrect either with the mental model of the phone at the time. I also think it is obvious that the low hanging fruit of tech has been picked. Anything new at this point is going to require massive amounts of capital for R&D and huge risk. The golden age that you basically risk nothing and then print money at an ever increasing rate each quarter selling software is gone forever.
Believing in the metaverse is like asking if you want to fuck a robot? If the answer is yes, then fine, you might be a candidate for living and working in the metaverse. But I will always want to fuck a real woman, a biological woman, a woman from birth, a woman born with a vagina and real breasts. I will even take her with all her craziness, rather than robot that could be programmed to do everything I like and how I like it (that is no fun anyway). My point is that since I'm a biological male, I want a biological female, and since I live in the real world, I prefer spending time in the real world most of the time. The idea that we will live and work in the metaverse is just dumb, for me at least. Walking around with a phone is a huge increase in convenience and productivity. So its not a fair comparison. The metaverse isn't increasing convenience and productivity for most things. It just stunts the need to live in the real world, and this isn't what most people want. Look at this this way. Nutrition in the future might be accomplished with a daily dose of pills. Imagine all the time and expense you will save if you can get all the nutrition you need in a pill. But who will go for this? Eating is enjoyable. Seeing friends is necessary. Having a dinner date as a precursor for sex is exciting. If you cut out that 2 hour dinner date by swallowing a few pills in 30 seconds, are you really living better? The metaverse fixes a problem that doesn't exist.
1) VR headset gaming is primitive and just embarassingly inconvenient in its current incarnation. The fact such games although graphically more impressive are unable to put a significant dent in traditional video gaming degree says everything. 2) VR hardware does not just need to be less invasive, it also needs to replicate the other senses rather than just the visual/aural. Unless you can reliably go "yeah I've been there done that" based off a VR experience I just don't see there being a major uptick in demand as a replacement for the real world. 3) As for the metaverse, while you could however create a 3D world operating system for a regular PC, it's quite probably in the category of solving problems that don't exist. The web browser is already really good at letting me navigate to any information and tasks that I need. I don't forsee having to navigate in 3D being pertinent or a helpful glue layer. Where I do see value is in a standardized and common game world interface used to implement multiple games and social activities, such as e.g. Roblox. But expecting that to be used as a replacement for a web browser is funny. I still spend most of my time reading text today because it's just a better format for a lot of communication than any of the alternatives.