In Case You Missed It, Saying "The Metaverse is Dead" is Officially Dead

 

Right: Business Insider's hilariously misguided "obituary" of May 2023

 

To recap, here's just some of what has happened since Business Insider published that metaverse "obituary" not even 12 months ago:

 

• Roblox, which described itself in its IPO filing as the Metaverse, recently gained 350 million+ monthly active users -- more people on that one platform than the USA has citizens.
• Epic Games, led by CEO Tim Sweeney, who has wanted to build the Metaverse since the 90s, reported 100 million monthly active users on Fortnite -- and more recently, that Disney now owns nearly 10% of the company in order to build an interoperable universe integrating IP (Marvel, Star Wars, Disney/Pixar movies, etc. ) from the media giant.  
• Apple launched the Vision Pro, which includes a partnership to integrate top metaverse platform Rec Room.
• Metaverse platform VRChat passed 100,000 peak concurrent users -- up from a peak of 40,000 in 2021.
• Even Meta, which has struggled with its own misguided strategy, saw its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds become a top 10 most popular app on its Quest platform. (Behind Rec Room and VRChat, to be sure, but still.)

Ironically, all this has happened while "AI" was supposed to be the sole leading buzzword in Silicon Valley. But here's the thing:

Buzzwords with little understanding of the underlying technology are destined to disappoint. The Metaverse was declared "dead" by people with a straw man's conception of it, or not even the vaguest notion of how it was originally, painstakingly defined. But after the buzz faded, the platforms and the people who found value in them kept thriving.

Comments

[¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Same happens with AI belittlement, AI naysayers and predicting the AI "fad" ends. Progress goes on.

AI research is your best bet for the Metaverse.
Sora. Video generation models as world simulators
https://openai.com/research/video-generation-models-as-world-simulators
"a promising path towards building general purpose simulators of the physical world."
Read "Emerging simulation capabilities"
"[...] We find that video models exhibit a number of interesting emergent capabilities when trained at scale. These capabilities enable Sora to simulate some aspects of people, animals and environments from the physical world. These properties emerge without any explicit inductive biases for 3D, objects, etc.—they are purely phenomena of scale.

3D consistency. Sora can generate videos with dynamic camera motion. As the camera shifts and rotates, people and scene elements move consistently through three-dimensional space. [...] Interacting with the world. Sora can sometimes simulate actions that affect the state of the world in simple ways. For example, a painter can leave new strokes along a canvas that persist over time, or a man can eat a burger and leave bite marks [...] Simulating digital worlds. Sora is also able to simulate artificial processes–one example is video games. Sora can simultaneously control the player in Minecraft with a basic policy while also rendering the world and its dynamics in high fidelity."
Look at the video of Sora generating and playing Minecraft.
It has limitations and it's not real-time (yet), but the models are becoming better and better.