"Because everyone is going to be able to create their own... spaces... Horizon is going to have this property where it grows and expands and gets better and better over time."
- Zuckerberg keynote (1)
In related news, a high-ranking Facebook exec revealed that Zuckerberg had been planning to name this massively multiplayer online experience "Myspace".
After heated internal discussions, Horizon was chosen as the brand name for Zuck's vision for "the future of computing", as, well, it seemed somewhat less played out.
Haven't watched the keynote yet, is this a renaming or expansion of Facebook spaces (already a VR world where you connect with your friends) ? Or is it something new entirely? And do you need a fb account to go to Horizon?
> As part of the launch, Facebook will on October 25 shut down its existing social VR experiences Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms, leaving a bit of a gap until Horizon launches.
I'd love to see a decentralized version of this - VR instances run on individual or group-owned servers that perform the bulk of the environmental simulation and rendering for clients, and have some sort of intercommunication protocol. Once we have high-res environments and fluid UIs to use them, I really want to create my own virtual space, share it, and experience others' spaces, I just don't necessarily want Facebook controlling it.
Have you checked out JanusVR? It's pretty much what you're describing. Its web client, native client, and server are all open source. Anyone can create worlds and host them like you would any other website, and links between sites are represented as portals.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! So what are the features a big company like Facebook can offer over e.g. JanusVR? Asset generation? Network effects? Does JanusVR have anything like a killer app?
Create a virtual world that completely mirrors the real world, and that world will need currency and economics at scale too, why not use an alt coin as it's base?
I love my Oculus Quest device and some of the experiences that you can buy for it are very compelling (eternal thanks to the developers of Vader Immortal) but, I just don’t see much fun in VR for huge numbers of participants.
I helped build a VR racing system at SAIC in the 1990s that had two units, each with full motion, haptics in steering wheel, and it’s own Reality Engine graphics display. Racing against one other person was lots of fun. I may be having a failure of imagination here, but I just think I would enjoy Horizon, as it is described.
Its for many reasons:
1.It scale better: less memory/rendering time.
2.It allows low-end hardware.
3.It appeals to children(probably a huge chunk of audience).
Facebook isn't going the Second Life route(visuals-first,scripting, limited capacity servers), they're making something that is essentially a casual/social videogame with VR and scripting added - and capable of hosting hundreds(like VRchat).
That book also featured crypto-currencies which is of course another thing Facebook is dabbling with. And it had a plot that featured vastly diminished US government marginalized by commercial burbclaves and other corporate entities, which seems to be exactly why governments are anxious to block Libra and worried about companies like FB having valuations exceeding the GDP of most countries.
I recently re-read Snow Crash. I love that book. A lot of that stuff looks a lot less like science fiction these days.
Well, you know the saying, “Cash flow solves everything”? Sometimes it masks problems you’d have to solve other ways than just throwing money at them. This is the only problem cash flow can’t solve.
In related news, a high-ranking Facebook exec revealed that Zuckerberg had been planning to name this massively multiplayer online experience "Myspace".
After heated internal discussions, Horizon was chosen as the brand name for Zuck's vision for "the future of computing", as, well, it seemed somewhat less played out.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOJ8KE5g6kg&t=45m01s