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Hacker News Comments on
Introducing the Icelandverse

Inspired by Iceland · Youtube · 287 HN points · 2 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention Inspired by Iceland's video "Introducing the Icelandverse".
Youtube Summary
The Icelandverse is unlike any other open-world experience with “-verse” in name, because it’s real. Plus, you don’t need a funny-looking VR headset.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
I don't quite get why people are so hyped about VR. A novel experience, sure. Something to be "in" everyday, I'm not sure. And what about R [0], which we already have, and way better than VR, anyone?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enMwwQy_noI

cal85
Where are all these people who are so hyped about VR they want to spend every day "in" it? Maybe some of these people exist, but I don't think they exist in anywhere near the numbers they seem to exist in people's imaginations.
zigman1
It has an amazing potential in gaming. For example, racing, which in R is too expensive for the majority, while the computer simulations are so close to reality, that the VR ads to the experience.

It is also used by architects when designing buildings and different spaces, so it can also be used in professional environment.

On the other hand, I think that all the meta thing is just corporate hype blown out of proportions. I can imagine tho that for some people their R isn't that great, or they will never have a chance to experience certain places in the world in first person. My 90 years old great-grandmother can experience Iceland only through TV documentaries, google street view or maybe VR.

Their previous spoof of Zuckerberg's Metaverse video was also great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enMwwQy_noI

q-base
Hahaha I had not seen that one either. Thanks a lot for sharing. That really made me laugh as well :)
shakezula
the part of that where he gives up on opening the door had me cackle laughing. Thanks for sharing this, it’s absolutely perfect.
mxuribe
This is hilarious; bravo!
aasasd
Only now learned that FB has videos about the ‘metaverse’. I'm five minutes into FB's video, and it feels like a recreation of both late-80s' explainer infomercials and early-90s' pop hallucinations about the computerized future. I bet FB regret that they can't sell awkwardness directly, because they have tons of it.

I'll have to take breaks to watch the Icelandverse vid every ten minutes, to get through 1h17m of Zuck and kitsch 3D. “You can bring things from the physical world: photos, videos, art, music, movies, books, games” ooof man.

Nov 30, 2021 · 272 points, 68 comments · submitted by rococode
memco
Loved it! Here’s another good video in a similar vein I’ve enjoyed lately: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2tQzCqkIQ60&feature=emb_title.
jeffrallen
"...and the vegetable was lettuce."

This should be the meme of 2022.

Lettuce. Think about it.

Terry_Roll
Clever
zestyping
That was hilarious! The punchline really got me at the end.
devopsian
LOL this is hilarious!!
tdeck
That one definitely has a Veridian Dynamics vibe

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CoDWg2nJ8ew

UnpossibleJim
That show came about before its time.
bborud
This is the first time I've thought about the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is the first non-animated character to inhabit the uncanny valley I can remember. (After briefly wondering if the video featured a CGI character).
ggambetta
Way too cold. The way forward is the Meatverse (https://meatver.se)
granra
Lol. I feel like this was created only for the proof-of-steak pun!
ggambetta
Can't confirm nor deny, I'm just sad that few people seem to get the "cryptographic hache" one :(
Apofis
This is awesome. I would totally much rather save up money for a trip to Iceland than for some VR setup from "META".
lostmsu
A trip to Iceland would cost 5x-10x times more though (not that I am saying it is not worth 10x+).
l0k3ndr
So, I am sure this video is very likeable and all. But I don't think metaverse is a total bullshit. Virtual is an experience as well. You can't for example experience flying without risk in real world and for some people experiencing those sort of things might be cheaper in the metaverse. Again I am not sure what metaverse companies are planning to form. But to me it looks like a interesting future.
UnpossibleJim
I agree. It's just escapism, no different than WoW or Everquest (and yes, I'm showing my age). This time they're just attaching NFT's to the housing and goods and using Crypto to buy those virtual items.

Most people will still interact with the Metaverse on a flatscreen and not an Occulus. They'll spend money on it like they did/do on mobile games. Some people will spend WAY too much, but most people will spend $20 or so a month for an hour of escapism while they're on the bus. More if they have to be on a plane with WiFi.

saevarom
Mark Zuckerberg saw this and commented 2 weeks ago: https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/nature_and_travel/2021/11...
Aachen
Saying good-natured on twitter "I should visit the Icelandverse soon" basically, no like press statement like I expected when clicking the link.
GrifMD
I'm surprised this hadn't already been posted here! Iceland really does have a great marketing department.
belter
Seven times so far :-)

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Icelandverse&type=story&...

Sosh101
Another good metaverse send up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3X7LGx4Rao
chrismorgan
I’m baffled by the superposition of a digital logo. Why didn’t they use a physical rendition of it (3D printed, jigsawed, whatever), or use a flag of Iceland?
notum
I've been trying to book my EU/US transfers via Iceland just to absorb it a bit from within the airport, sadly though Icelandic Air is making this almost impossible.

So I've decided to facilitate a proper visit next year. I'm obsessed with country, and as far as islanders go they indeed seem much more welcoming than Japanese :)

JohnWhigham
I thought Iceland was looking to put the brakes on the influx of tourists they're getting? This does not help that.
trutannus
Where on earth did you read that? This is the exact opposite of what is happening. Tourism is either the second or the first largest economic sector outside fishing and fishing technologies.
yakkomajuri
Brakes? Iceland's economy is heavily tourism-dependent. Measures were implemented for COVID but tourism is necessary.

Sectors like tech are growing (as is the case everywhere else), but without tourism Iceland's economy is not far from that of the Faroe Islands: fish, fish, and more fish.

(P.S. I live in Iceland)

EDIT: There are movements towards more sustainable tourism, however.

iso1631
I thought there was some banking stuff going on - how did that work out?
tdeck
Is this a genuine question or the ultimate troll comment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Icelandic_fi...

trutannus
I was going to comment on this also. The post you're replying to would be like someone saying "isn't a major energy company failing over in the states" when they mean Enron. Iceland managed to completely recover and is now one of the richest countries (per capita) in the world.

That said, I've always seen people try and stir up a strange amount of FUD whenever a Nordic nation is mentioned. FUDing Americans about Scandinavia is practically a sport at this point.

I'm half expecting the mythical Swedish gang war, or rape crisis, to be brought up in reply to this comment. Go do some research on reporting techniques and legal definitions first if you're about to 'well actually' me on that.

christrowe
This video tells us that metaverse is not the way to go but instead exploring the world has to offer.
vmception
I had some layovers in Iceland on some now defunct airlines.

It really did feel this way, like a great purgatory full of other travellers on the same airlines, not so dissimilar from a multiplayer game aka metaverse. offline similarity to Elder Scrolls for its Nordic theme or the Witcher. Also real life but yeah

zivkovicp
Ridiculous, nobody wants _reality_ anymore. /s
felgueres
Guys this is 2 weeks old, no longer relevant
dagurp
Yes, put [2021] in the title
obiwan14
For a moment I thought we were in 2022 already. Oh, well, I guess I still have to wait another 30 days.
vaylian
XKCD 1053
egeozcan
The releases from iceland are glacial[0], no need to worry :)

I guess this video can also be seen as a statement against the ultra-fast-paced communication expectancy if you squint your eyes a little bit.

[0]: https://guidetoiceland.is/nature-info/glaciers-in-iceland

Terry_Roll
Excellent!
obiwan14
"Enhanced actual reality without silly looking headsets."

That was funny. Would actually love to visit that place.

bigyellow
Unbelievable cringe, possibly even more so than actual Facecrook product. I couldn't even watch the whole thing as it was too painful. I know it's satire, but it's just too painful to watch even a satirical rendition of creepy Zuck.
axegon_
I know this is supposed to mock the metaverse-thing. And the first time I heard about the metaverse, my reaction was: "what a colossal pile of dog shit". My opinion hasn't changed even the slightest. Like why? What sort of sane human beings would put themselves through that? I had this discussion with a friend on Sunday. The sad part is that he agrees with me but said that he was willing to bet that people would blow hundreds of thousands on virtual nft crap for metaverses. Which, even after having worked 8 years in the gaming industry(and seeing the 5-6 figure amounts people spending on in-app purchases) up until not all that long ago, seemed like bs. So we made a bet. Next morning an article pops up about someone spending 600+k on a virtual yacht. I mean what the hell is wrong with people?
meheleventyone
Thing to remember is that’s 600k of crypto which has probably never been “real” money and may well have been a wash trade anyway. It’s not overly clear to me that it’d be easy to get that nominal value out as USD from the crypto original either. So you see ridiculous, inflated, purchases made.

It’s a bit like EVE Online where the existence of PLEX allows for a conversion between USD and the in-game currency ISK and hundreds of thousands of dollars routine gets “destroyed” in big fleet battles.

vmception
It is just giving some transparency into things that have already been happening

Didn’t know people spent that much? Companies selling collectibles and companies selling play 2 earn stuff knew

meheleventyone
I'm saying it might be lousy information that's been intentionally distorted and not a realistic view of the actual dollar worth.

In the same way hundreds of thousands of dollars of virtual spaceships aren't destroyed even though the conversion can be made. It's an illusory comparison.

vmception
$600k in a cryptocurrency is sellable for that much cash.

$600K in a NFT is sellable for that much cash, or the nearest bid, no different than Ebay.

Wash trades also occur. People are discouraged from that due to transaction fees. Some people aren't discouraged from that.

meheleventyone
When someone chucks $600k into an NFT from dollars for some virtual land I'll be much more likely to believe that it's actually worth that (to the individual) if it's demonstrably not a wash trade. And 'or nearest bid' is doing a lot of work. Lots of NFTs out there with a big disparity between bid amounts and asking price.
vmception
spend 2 minutes on an NFT marketplace? there are many trades between addresses that have registered aliases via ENS, which is the best way to determine if something is not a wash trade. Noteworthy is that you are starting from the opinion that things are wash trades, while the NFT users are not, and given the amount of energy necessary to support this opinion from someone not even participating it makes me wonder if any observation is possible to contradict your stance.

would you like a specific trade to debate? does it have to be $600k for this standard? I see some decentraland plots recently traded for $20,000.

thinking further about it, its easier if you owned an NFT other people were interested in, because then the bids - if they arise - would be from other people and you'll be one less person that would hold the likely wash trade idea. many NFTs are free to acquire during their initial creation.

meheleventyone
Really no need when people actively research the field and we can see on aggregate what's really happening. Full transaction logs are useful for like that. And surprise, surprise: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-00053-8
vmception
What is intended to be the surprise there? That it acts just like the fine art world?

This discussion was about prices are driven significantly by wash trades and that paper doesn’t suggest or imply that.

meheleventyone
We have very different ideas about what this thread of discussion was about!
Abishek_Muthian
My first reaction when I heard 'Facebook' becoming 'Meta' was "One of my favorite word in my frequently used vocabulary would now be second guessed before using"; Every now and then I used to dream of establishing small meta-science labs in India like Meta-Physics, Meta-Chemistry... Now it's going to be weird to dream about it.

More urgently, I'm worried "meta" hyperlink on my forum would be ignored by my visitors thinking it's just a link to Facebook; Where as it's an link to meta discussions about the platform.

simonebrunozzi
Or, maybe, the $600k virtual yacht is a stunt, organized by insiders, to convince someone else to pour huge amounts of money in that particular currency.
ricardobayes
We are more detached from real life than ever. Looks like Idiocracy was a documentary, not comedy.
axegon_
I take Idiocracy over what we currently have - at least leaders were charismatic.
ljm
In many aspects we've entered a post-scarcity society, to the extent that scarcity has to be invented by things like NFTs. For these people, they might as well have found a game breaking bug in the thing we call existence.

Of course, it would be nice if we got more of humanity on board with this first, what with the vast majority of the population being in poverty, or worse.

thewarrior
How can we be in post scarcity if millions of people are in poverty?
EvanAnderson
It's another case of the future not being evenly distributed[0], presumably.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/681-the-future-is-already-h...

Karsteski
Perhaps it depends on who the "we" is.
axegon_
Well we have two worlds running in parallel as we stand: Most of North America, Europe and certain parts of Asia and the rest of the world. A large portion of what I refereed to "the rest of the world" is as distant from us as the middle ages. Not even apples to oranges at this point. Sure, you could argue that billions are poured into bridging that gap but the simple truth is that never works. Even if there wasn't an insane amount of corruption involved, that still would not cut it or change much: I had a professor back in the day who summed it up perfectly in one sentence: "No one has gotten out of poverty through charity". Though I absolutely adore Hans Rosling's "Factfullness", somehow I cannot find a way to share his optimism. And in his function as a doctor, I recon even he would have dialed down his optimism if he were alive now and witnessed how COVID was being handled for example.
pintxo
As I see it Roslings optimism stems from looking at changes over tens of years and the progress that’s visible on these timescales.
axegon_
I'm pretty sure the events surrounding COVID has undone most of that progress(assuming there's any left at this point). Our survival as a species is incredibly fragile and even more so with social media facilitating propaganda and misinformation. Even in developed countries, the situation is nothing short of depressing.
Klarios
I thought about this as well and I'm not sure.

COVID potentially kills older and more vulnerable people. This might have reduced the burden for some people.

Of course payed by death which is never good but perhaps from a statistics point of view in 10 years.

I thought about this also when thinking about climate change and I think that might have a much more general bad effect.

In a world with a lot of riches (tons of still existing infrastructure) strong weather scenarios can destroy old and critical infrastructure much faster than time.

USA only were able to get more budget for infrastructure with Biden and have a huge deficit.

COVID is very weird as human life feels very cheap. While lots of people don't want to wear a mask (low effort) to save a life and in parallel we pay so much money as a society when someone has cancer and needs very expensive medication.

Let's give that person x access to medical procedures which cost a million and let others die while it would cost us much less to help them.for me personally COVID tanked my general assumption that we would be much more reasonable.

Not sure how to determine the loose on trust.

axegon_
The US has a very diversified economy, which certainly limits the damages. There are countries which rely almost entirely on tourism for instance - Spain, Italy, Portugal, Croatia, Greece, they were all severely affected.

I am more pointing towards the millions out there who genuinely believe that Bill Gates is behind covid, that covid doesn't exist, that the vaccines contain microchips or are chemicals that destroy your reproductive capabilities. That substantially lowered my survival expectations as species.

willmw101
>A large portion of what I refereed to "the rest of the world" is as distant from us as the middle ages. Sure, you could argue that billions are poured into bridging that gap but the simple truth is that never works.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-in-ex...

axegon_
> The share of individuals living below the 'International Poverty Line' of 1.90 international-$ per day.

1.90 is absurdly low. That totals to $57 for a 30 day month. That hardly covers just your food and water intake in most areas of the world. If you live in the temperate climate zones where fresh water isn't extremely limited and your menu consists solely of rice and potatoes... Maybe, just maybe. I live in a relatively cheap country with plenty of fresh water around and that would get you 500 grams of rice and 2 liters of mineral water. At 70kg I could hypothetically just survive off of that but only just. Anywhere else where food and water requires transport or significant amounts of processing, you are very much screwed.

margalabargala
Indeed, this is why it's called "extreme poverty".

Isn't it terrible that despite this situation being as awful as you describe, it still applies to around 10% of all humans?

lambdadmitry
Most (all?) people on incomes like that practice subsistence farming and/or natural economy.

Also, state pension for many Russians (and Russia usually isn't considered a very poor country) is in the range of $130, which is just about twice higher. Add the fact that private pensions are very rare there, and you can see how thinking that that's "absurdly low" is a pretty privileged position.

axegon_
I live in a country which is similar standards to Russia in that regard(say hi to the origin of your alphabet), so it's definitely not from a privileged position. Yeah, I make magnitudes above the average but that hasn't always been the case - growing in the 90's in a family which was considered a state enemy until the end of the communist regime is anything but privileged, as you can probably imagine. I've been in positions where an additional expense of 25$ seemed as distant as 1 billion. 130 may not seem all that different to you from 57 but to those with 57 in their pockets, 130 look worlds apart. Farming and natural economy is only applicable in rural areas. With the ongoing global urbanization, this will likely become more and more rare in the following decades, granted we recover from the effects of covid eventually, which I kinda doubt at this point.
arno_v
Have you tried to buy a new GPU recently? :P
CPLX
Why does everyone act like this is some massive cultural shift or new phenomenon instead of the latest representation of one of humanity’s favorite pastimes.

It’s gambling. People have done it for millennia. You invent some system and some arbitrary rules about what’s valuable (the right domino, an ace of hearts, a jpeg of a monkey, a beanie baby) and then some people win some money and some people lose.

It’s happened before and it’ll happen again it’s the least surprising thing our culture has ever done. It’s just the superficial details that change every generation or two.

Nov 30, 2021 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by i13e
Nov 21, 2021 · 5 points, 0 comments · submitted by irony123
Nov 14, 2021 · 6 points, 0 comments · submitted by samsk
Nov 13, 2021 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by pragmaticalien8
Nov 12, 2021 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by marc__1
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