Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has blogged about mobile phone footage from Joyce Bettencourt of John Carmack talking Metaverse, Second Life, Minecraft and a hell of a lot more at Oculus Connect 2015; John Carmack: “Crass Commercialization”, Not High-Mindedness, Will Lead to the Metaverse.
John Carmack, for those who aren’t familiar with the name, was the co-founder of ID Software and lead programmer on games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake amongst others. These days he’s the chief technology officer for Oculus VR … the company behind the Oculus Rift … I hope most of you are familiar with Oculus VR! Oculus offer their staff free breakfast, lunch and dinner on their campus, so they sound like a decent company to work for although with perks like that you wonder if their staff get time to go home or out for a meal. Don’t panic, they also say they have family friendly policies.
Anyway, back to the footage. This comes in at just over fifteen minutes long and would probably have been longer if it hadn’t been for the fact that Joyce’s battery on her phone died whilst filming. Modern technology hey. I hope this is legally obtained footage, I trust Joyce so we’ll dive right in and I’ll embed the video at the end of this post.
John Carmack talks about virtual reality, head tracking devices, how the technology is still evolving and you get an insight into just how technically challenging getting a compelling VR experience to work is. He also talks about virtual worlds and the metaverse and I guess that’s what most people who read this blog will be interested in.
He starts talking about virtual worlds around the two minute mark and then gets deeper into the concept of a metaverse around the four minute mark where he states that he fought against Oculus building a metaverse team because they don’t really know what they are doing well enough yet, he adds that they didn’t want to build a Second Life but better in some way. John also raises the point that what the metaverse is still a question that hasn’t really been answered.
However John does say that there will be people who don’t have any interest in VR games, but will happily teleport around to virtual cities and locations, so we can see that use cases for VR are likely to be wide and varied. There’s also a really interesting (to me at least) part where John talks about how things just happen and that a lot of the predictions and plans for where technology may leads us, doesn’t always work out that way, but other use cases come to the fore that weren’t expected.
John also leans towards a product such as Minecraft being a better fit for a Metaverse than Second Life because Minecraft has user generated content and game play. This will rub some Second Life enthusiasts up the wrong way because we have game play in Second Life. Loki Eliot, Estelle Pienaar, MadPea Games and Linden Realms have created games within Second Life. However with Minecraft, the gameplay is more consistent and people are guided far more easily.
There are pro’s and cons to both approaches, in Second Life free form roleplay is popular because the platform is suitable for that concept. This can work very well but some people find the process of creating their own character, writing their own biography and getting into unscripted scenarios difficult. There’s plenty of room for both approaches but the real key is to have both approaches readily available.
There’s a lot more in the video, discussion about motion sickness, navigating around rooms, what needs to be updated, vision issues, it’s all rather interesting.
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