"My Prodigal Brainchild" - Neal Stephenson on the metaverse, wearable computers \ stacker news

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"My Prodigal Brainchild" - Neal Stephenson on the metaverse, wearable computers nealstephenson.substack.com/p/my-prodigal-brainchild

1756 sats \ 2 comments \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 25 Mar tech BooksAndArticles

The legendary Neal Stephenson (the reason we have the word "metaverse," even if, as he himself notes, the concept existed before he wrote Snow Crash and would be re-invented independently plenty of times), writes on the "death" of Meta's metaverse and how he's changed his mind on computer-based goggles/glasses.

When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.

Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.

The piece is about much more than just glasses; it's about the future of online metaverse-like spaces, and like anything Stephenson writes (fiction or essay) is worth a read.

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146 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 30 Mar

there wouldn’t have been any upside for me if Meta’s Metaverse had succeeded. What remains to be seen is whether there’s a downside for me now that it has failed.

Stephenson offers some good advice to future attempts to make a metaverse, starting with:

Consider picking a different nameConsider picking a different name

People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who doPeople don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do

This one resonates strongly with me. Stephenson goes on to say:

Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.

If you build it, they won’t comeIf you build it, they won’t come

Stephenson almost gets to the point of suggesting that Facebook's metaverse failed because it was too centralized:

Typically, headset software can’t run - it can’t even boot up - without a connection to servers that make the whole integrated system work.

But he backs off before saying as much, and ends up saying the more obvious thing: metaverses in stories always have something big and exciting going on because they are set inside plots. But the metaverse in this world has no plot:

Having built it, though, you might discover that it’s just a lot of randos milling around waiting for something to happen.

Where Stephenson ends is that we already have a metaverse; it just doesn't have goggles - and isn't likely to anytime soon:

Roblox has something like 380 million monthly active users. Minecraft has something like 60 million. Fortnite has 650 million registered players. These (and others mentioned in the Tim Sweeney tweet above) are all virtual three-dimensional spaces where you can run around in an avatar and interact with faraway persons over the Internet. The only thing that differentiates them from the Metaverse, as narrowly construed by Metaverse-tombstone-cartoon-posting halfwits, is that no goggles are involved.

Wearing goggles may be a bridge too far for life in the metaverse. People seem entirely happy to spend all day every day on their device, but goggles take a lot of fun out of it. Perhaps Stephenson should write a new novel called Screens.

73 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebpoet 25 Mar

news to me that nealstephenson.substack existed