Yeah, absolutely. (And we do have fads for various peripherals that come and go.) But VR is presented (at least in this kind of context) as “it’ll be everything, all the time!” And just… no.
I always think of that Walmart VR shopping experience demo:
It’s so absurd, I wonder if it was made tongue firmly in cheek, or just to demonstrate how much of a bad idea it was (or if the client just said, “We don’t care how ridiculous you think it is, here’s what we want”). It feels like a design from the VR fad of the '90s, before the advantages of web shopping may have been obvious and the UIs weren’t as developed, and it’s just inexplicable to me it was actually made in 2017. It’s the kind of thing that requires someone to really be pushing VR to ignore how much worse it is than existing, mature, 2D interfaces for shopping.
I’m so glad Flash is gone. For a while every fancy website was creating it’s own inscrutable website navigation using Flash. Trying to find the content you wanted was like solving a Myst puzzle.
An archery coaching website blew tens, likely hundreds, of thousands of dollars creating a 3D virtual archery coaching center interface you have to wander though to access the “store”, “archery coaching range” and what not, making you go through pointless trudging through an empty apocalypse devoid of people (too hard to render at the time?) instead of an easy dropdown menu click. (The website soon tanked, having spend all their grant money on an interface rather than actual content, which they thought users would create for them on the “If we build it they will come” theory of Web 2.0)
I confess that I perversely liked those weird Flash interfaces, though I didn’t have to deal with very much of it, nor on sites I spent much time with (I can see that it would have gotten old, quickly). The “metaverse” as a web interface makes orders of magnitude less sense, even. You get the idiosyncratic interface problem on top of a whole bunch of other issues (the ‘wandering around in space instead of a mouseclick’ being one of the more egregious ones).
Ug. An old friend of mine told me that he’s been working hard on an art show that opens at a museum next week, and I was planning to attend to show my support for his struggling art career. I just now found out that it’s a virtual museum and that I’d need a VR headset to attend. So even if I had a headset I wouldn’t be getting any wine and cheese.
That’s really weird, especially since they could just use VRchat and then it would be available on any stand alone VR headset and on almost any PC without a headset too.
I’m helping with making open source social VR/collaborative creation software and making it work well in desktop mode is one of the crucial goals for our team. The silly part is that we are avoiding calling it “metaverse” due to how gross that word has become.
It’s dumber than “cloud” computing, but related. There is no “cloud”, there is just other people’s computers. And there is no “metaverse”, just different proprietary MMOs.
I made my bones building those Flash websites in the early 2000s. The truth behind it was that I lightly studied animation in college, having been obsessed with animation and game design as a kid, but far too cowardly to consider aiming for art-based career. Web design was where the jobs were, so every jazz musician who hired me but couldn’t really pay, but also let me do whatever I wanted turned into those virtual environments. Eventually I dove headfirst into learning ActionScript thoroughly and managed to build some pretty good games…right as Flash died. Now I’ve spent 13 years building pretty clean and efficient user interfaces for a large nonprofit. All the while, of course making games in JavaScript and HTML DOM in my spare time…
