What Is The Metaverse?
The term “metaverse” is a word that has been around for decades but has recently been thrust into the broader spotlight, and is thus having it’s moment of media spotlight glory.
The term “metaverse” is rooted in sci-fi literature by general consensus of, well, almost everyone. However, the term blasted into mainstream consciousness this past year, especially over the summer with Facebook announcing the beginnings of its own metaverse push, and further digging in recently with a full rebranding to Meta, A Social Technology Company amid the current turmoil in regards The Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” investigation of whistleblower Francis Haugen. Mark Zuckerberg did not invent the term “metaverse”. The concept has been around probably since people were first thinking about the possibilities for the internet. It has been used in sci-fi books including “Snow Crash”, and “Ready Player 1”. The novel “Snow Crash” is even being made into an HBO series. See…
“A HBO series based on Snow Crash, the 1992 science fiction novel which coined the term “metaverse,” is in production.
Snow Crash‘s author is Neal Stephenson. The book (one of the best tech books of all time, GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi wrote) has a deeply complex plot touching on archaeolinguistics, religion, simulation theory, philosophy, computer science, and memetics. It was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the most prestigious science fiction award.”
via VentureBeat “‘Snow Crash’ inspired the metaverse, and now it’s becoming an HBO show” [5]
The Metaverse.
The Metaverse. It’s a term that is being developed right before us in our lifetimes, and is thus very exciting, modern and taps into the very present moment of our tech civilization. It can mean different things to different people. Right now, it’s a bit like explaining the Internet back in 1994. (See this video from morning news show “The Today Show” to see a cultural barometer for what the mass media was presenting at the time to answer the question, “What is the Internet, Anyway?”.)
The metaverse is the manifestation of the Web 3.0 (“Web3”) that we’ve been hearing about since the 2000’s when Web 2.0, dubbed the “Social Web”, was happening. And we can all see the effects of the social web now that it has been inextricably woven into the lives of early 21st century individuals.
It’s really all cycles, developments, further iterations of the general idea that is the Internet.
The metaverse is the next application built on top of the Internet. Like email, chat, the web, and blockchain.
The metaverse won’t be a destination but rather, it will be incorporated into our existing life, much like the internet has already done in so many ways.
In that cycle, we are now moving on to Web 3.0, the metaverse, the Internet of Things, the “All-Around-Us Web”. Take your pick. This is a development that has been happening recently with groundwork being laid the past few years, and really gaining momentum and fully taking off since the onset of the pandemic. (The pandemic essentially forced everyone through Webs 1.0 and 2.0, even the last remaining holdouts—non-techs, older generations, and complete neophytes finally had to get on-board and online at some point just for life’s essentials it seemed.)
This ”All-Around-Us Web” with all these terms (Web3, Metaverse, IoT, even crypto and especially blockchain technology) coming together is what the “final product” of the metaverse will look like. The metaverse is a broad term to describe this virtual realm
I also imagine it’s somewhat like explaining 2021 to someone even just 20 years ago in 2001. In 2001, the Internet still seemed new and even at that point it felt like the cutting edge technology that it was. But little did we know back then that the internet would allow us to hail cabs on our phones (“You telling me that this Nokia is gonna hail me a cab???”…Well maybe not exactly a Nokia, but you get the drift.) Back then, even PDAs were a distant ancestor compared to the budget’est of smartphones today.
As it stands right now, the metaverse is more concept than it is an implemented reality. And many different people have many varying concepts of what the final output of the metaverse will be.
“The metaverse is a stitching together of disparate technological phenomena of today—videogames, virtual reality, Zoom calls, cryptocurrency, social media—into a new whole upon which countless brands, creators and software engineers can do their thing.”
via WSJ “A Crowded Field in the Race to the ‘Metaverse’-Our digital future likely won’t be controlled by one company” [3]
“The metaverse, a concept rooted in science-fiction novels is an extensive online world that would exist across several technology platforms, not just one. People would be able to hang out in immersive, shared digital spaces using avatars that would allow them to virtually attend concerts or try on clothes in stores, just as they would in the real world. And Mr. Zuckerberg wants his company to lead the way, past social media and toward a more expansive vision of how technology can bring people together.”
via WSJ “Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Pivot Is Personal as Well as Strategic” [4]
“If the last generation is about sharing, the next generation of social is going to be about participating,” said [Sima] Sistani, who has held positions at Tumblr and Yahoo before starting Houseparty. “Maybe I didn’t call it the metaverse then, but that’s what it is. It’s people, interactive experiences, coming together and moving from one experience to another, having this shareability to move beyond walled gardens.”
“We’ve seen this happen in the past,” Sistani said. “I come from a media background, and people moved from traditional media to social media. And this new generation is moving from social media to games. That’s where they’re having these conversations. That’s where it’s beyond the ‘like,’ beyond the news feed. And that, that’s the metaverse.”
via Washington Post “Epic Games believes the Internet is broken. This is their blueprint to fix it” [1]
“The blend of the current workforce and the virtual world is just the beginning of a much larger movement of the hybrid worker. It is more commonly referred to as The Metaverse.“The Metaverse (made up of the prefix “Meta” meaning beyond, and “verse” from universe) is the convergence of a virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space. This includes the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet. To simplify, Metaverse is a three-dimensional virtual reality world (or in this case, virtual workspace) in which many people (including employees and customers) exist simultaneously — an online world (office space) to hang out in (or work, you get the gist). Imagine throwing on digital eyewear, instead of hopping on that conference bridge. “Work From Home” becomes “Work from The Metaverse” where collaboration tools are enhanced by 3D, AR/VR, and spatial audio. And when it’s time for community and social interaction, you meet by the online watercooler for a quick sync, eat in the digital lunchroom and go to happy hour in the virtual pub.”
via AT&T (https://about.att.com/innovationblog/2021/work_from_home_metaverse.html)
The metaverse is the pulling together of all these disparate parts into one. All these applications, collaboration tools, social media, cryptocurrency, video meetings, chat, concerts, all reachable through an open, unified, single user interface.
The Open Metaverse
One major area that we should start with it the idea of an open and a closed internet. We generally like open internets that do not restrict our movements. The idea of a “walled garden” is the concept of content being restricted to a certain area. Think AOL around the turn of the millennium.
“These early attempts at the metaverse are akin to early internet services such as America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. Those companies offered walled-garden services that approximated the greater internet but weren’t open. The internet didn’t flourish until the walls broke down and it became an open ecosystem.”
“To be a true metaverse, all the individual virtual worlds being created will need to interconnect and interoperate, Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen says.”
via Investors (https://www.investors.com/news/technology/metaverse-is-it-sci-fi-hype-or-the-next-big-thing)
They offered some good content but the curious folk were always left with an itch to explore the greater, wider INTERNET! Outside of the walled of AOL’s or Yahoo content, etc. This was the Web 1.0 “Static Web”, first waves of the internet as it too was being further fleshed out from the governmental/university level to the consumer level.
Walled gardens are frustrating, especially when you know that they clearly exist and can’t keep out. (I imagine it would be like when you know you’re living in a simulation and can’t hit the re-start button. Frustrating, it seems.)
“In the same way that Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are incompatible platforms with their own app stores, we’ll all be left with the same choices we have today when accessing the internet—whose walled gardens do we want to inhabit, and how do we minimize the hassles of trying to move information, contacts and content between them?”
“Anand Agarawala, CEO of VR collaboration startup Spatial, says that his company is working on “portals” that would allow users to jump between various companies’ metaverses, just like we jump be- tween different websites by click- ing on links. “We’d love if we could make a portal in Spatial to a portal in Horizon Worlds,” Facebook’s VR collaboration app, he says. Facebook has yet to build the connective tissue that would allow such a thing, however.”
via WSJ “A Crowded Field in the Race to the ‘Metaverse’-Our digital future likely won’t be controlled by one company” [3]
So let’s now imagine what little we know of the metaverse and ask ourselves, “Do we want and open or closed metaverse?”
Methinks, we want an open metaverse, yes?
Indeed, of course!
Essentially a framework that is open, interoperable, and decentralized, as much as possible.
Some agreed upon ideals of proponents for the open metaverse include the metaverse being: open, interconnected, interoperable, cross-platform, social, and persistent.
The convergence of the physical and the digital crossroads.
Not controlled by one corporation or entity.
The fact that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg pounced on the name “Meta” for their rebranding is very telling of how they want to control the metaverse. It reminded me of how back to the turn of the millennium the hot term was “search” and search engines and a company existed called Search.com. Most people use google today, not search.com. That’s basically what Facebook and Zuckerberg did, they said…let’s be the Search.com of the metaverse!
So that’s already giving me a bad taste and disconcerting.
But ideally the metaverse will decentralized. Right now there are many differently companies and platforms vying for a piece of the meta-action. We have the gaming industry at the fore and fueling, innovating, creating the space with Fortnight and Roblox. Facebook is rebranding under their “Meta” name and that umbrella will include it’s push toward AR/VR and it’s Oculus range.
Indeed, Facebook is making a major push with the Metaverse.
“As with most of Facebook’s strategy announcements, Thursday’s rebranding formalized a shift that has been underway for years. The company already has more than 10,000 people working on augmented and virtual reality projects in its Reality Labs division — roughly twice as many people as are on Twitter’s entire staff — and has said it plans to hire 10,000 more in Europe soon. Earlier this week, the company announced that it would spend about $10 billion on metaverse-related investments this year, and it has been acquiring V.R. start-ups in what could amount to a metaverse land grab.”
“There are several types of questions one could ask about this metaverse strategy. The first and most basic is: What is a metaverse, and what will Facebook’s version of one look like?”
“That question was answered, at least partially, by Thursday’s presentation. Mr. Zuckerberg painted a picture of the metaverse as a clean, well-lit virtual world, entered with virtual and augmented reality hardware at first and more advanced body sensors later on, in which people can play virtual games, attend virtual concerts, go shopping for virtual goods, collect virtual art, hang out with each others’ virtual avatars and attend virtual work meetings.”
via NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/technology/meta-facebook-zuckerberg.html) [2]
This almost makes me think of a mall analogy. Like, yeah sometimes a “Simon Mall” is nice, but there are also other malls.
And this is the argument of Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney.
“Now we’re in a closed platform wave, and Apple and Google are surfing that wave too,” [Epic Games CEO Tim] Sweeney said. “As we get out of this, everybody is going to realize, ‘Okay we spent the last decade being taken advantage of.'”
“For years now, he has eyed a solution: the metaverse. And steadily, over several years, Epic has been acquiring a number of assets and making strategic moves with the goal of making Sweeney’s vision for the metaverse a reality.”
via Washington Post “Epic Games believes the Internet is broken. This is their blueprint to fix it” [1]
As stared earlier, the metaverse should be open and interoperable, an open oasis as opposed to a walled garden.
“Sweeney pointed out that even if the last year of quarantine accelerated the acceptance of persistent online worlds operating like our real one, there’s a host of standards and practices that need to be ironed out to create any kind of metaverse, not unlike how government-funded researchers in 1986 formed the Internet Engineering Task Force to formally develop and promote Internet standards.”
“You need an entire suite of standards, and the Web is based on several,” said Sweeney, citing such factors like HTML becoming the standard file format for displaying web browser pages. “The metaverse will require a lot of them, file formats for describing a 3-D scene, networking protocols for describing how players are interacting in real time. Every multiplayer game has a networking protocol of some sort. They don’t all agree, but eventually they ought to be lined up and made to communicate.”
“Sweeney said he’s optimistic and hopeful that the Internet’s next evolution may return to the spirit of cooperation — and the fear of monopoly — that drove the AIM alliance of 1991, the landmark agreement between Apple, IBM and Motorola to standardize personal computer technology.”
So now we see the concept of the metaverse. Let’s break down some of the players.
Major metaverse players:
- Decentraland
- Cryptovoxels
- The Sandbox
- Soniuum Space
- Second-Life
- Fortnight
- Roblox
- FB = Meta Platforms Inc.
- Microsoft’s Mesh
Major metaverse players trying to broaden and expand their foothold include the virtual worlds of Decentraland, The Sandbox, and Somnium Space VR.
Open, social and persistent are key unifying themes. These worlds have their own economy and currencies. Worlds with their own marketplaces, games, social experiences and virtual land ownership, users can build and customize their own land, building anything they envision. These functions are interconnected and seamless. They can be accessed from multiple devices from 2D mode on traditional desktops to an immersive VR more on a users desktop or mobile device.
One feature that oddly somewhat creepily stuck out was “Live Forever”, or an automatic recording mode of oneself on your own property for future AI analysis to bring to life.
Microsoft
“However, Microsoft’s plan is based on underlying technology, known as Mesh, that it unveiled earlier this year to handle far more complex virtual interactions on different types of hardware, from PCs to virtual reality headsets. Also, Microsoft executives said they saw the adoption of personal avatars as the first step in a progression that would see workers become increasingly comfortable with new forms of virtual interaction that might seem alien to them now.”
“Appearing as an avatar “seems simple, it seems like just one step, but that’s the type of step I think people are ready to make”, [Jared] Spataro [(head of MS Teams)] said. “Maybe it’s even kind of light-hearted in the beginning.”“
via FT (https://www.ft.com/content/62d4652f-faec-4ef7-b642-1ae7b4262563)
Microsoft is allowing users to appear as avatars, or animated cartoons, in meetings and virtual work-spaced environments.
Microsoft appears to be using this strategy to “introduce” the “older” generations to the idea of being in a metaverse. This idea of “being in a metaverse” is already old hat for kids using Roblox and users playing Fortnight.
The whole idea of meeting in a 3-D virtual world and being like, “Ok…we’re here…now what do we do???” is a very “old” way of thinking that clearly necessitates Microsoft’s strategy of easing people into the metaverse here.
The younger generations are so comfortable in the metaverse, that they went beyond meta (“meta-meta”) and starting doing activities in these realms that weren’t even the original intention, but have now spawned an entire industry. They didn’t need a warm introduction. And the generation that’s following Gen Z!?!?!? Well, yes, THAT is when the metaverse will be a completely natural everyday occurrence, like how we grab out “morning paper” online now, which was “the future” back then, that we are living in now, currently. (I hope everyone stayed with me there.)
Things like Travis Scott’s concert, a virtual concert during the pandemic. I don’t see that going away. Instead the reverse. That’s where we’re heading. That’s the metaverse.
Biblio:
[1] Epic Games believes the Internet is broken. This is their blueprint to fix it. by Gene Park, Washington Post, September 28, 2021. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/09/28/epic-fortnite-metaverse-facebook/)
[2] The Metaverse Is Mark Zuckerberg’s Escape Hatch, by Kevin Roose, from NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/technology/meta-facebook-zuckerberg.html)
[3] “A Crowded Field in the Race to the ‘Metaverse’-Our digital future likely won’t be controlled by one company” by Christopher Mims, WSJ, October 30, 2021. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-joins-a-crowded-field-in-the-race-to-build-the-metaverse-we-all-have-a-stake-in-the-outcome-11635514884)
[4] “Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Pivot Is Personal as Well as Strategic” by , WSJ, October 30, 2021. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerbergs-latest-pivot-is-personal-as-well-as-strategic-11635508801)
[5] “‘Snow Crash’ inspired the metaverse, and now it’s becoming an HBO show”, by David Heaney, via VentureBeat.
[6] “Microsoft takes on Facebook by launching metaverse on Teams”, by Richard Waters, via FT. (https://www.ft.com/content/62d4652f-faec-4ef7-b642-1ae7b4262563)
[7] “Time to Brush up your Avatar – Working From Home with xR & 5G in the Metaverse”, by Shiraz Hasan, VP, Partner Exchange & Ecosystem Innovation, AT&T. (https://about.att.com/innovationblog/2021/work_from_home_metaverse.html)
[8] “Is The Metaverse Just Sci-Fi Hype Or Is It Truly The Next Big Thing?”, by Patrick Seitz, (https://www.investors.com/news/technology/metaverse-is-it-sci-fi-hype-or-the-next-big-thing)
