Building The Metaverse
The talk about metaverse really went ballistic after Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the Facebook Connect event touted the metaverse as the social networking future. But most of the talk is not really about the true metaverse as envisioned in science fiction and first described in in Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk science fiction novel Snow Crash. A true metaverse needs to be an interconnected “Internet” of virtual spaces that are open to many different companies, not a walled garden. It will take an open platform offering access to a shared virtual space to create the true metaverse. And it will also require a level of standardization and interoperability that doesn't exist today.
In Snow Crash, the Metaverse was a phrase coined by as a successor to the Internet. It was a vision of how a virtual-reality-based Internet might evolve and was heavily influenced by early video games. This version of the metaverse resembles a persistent massive multiplayer online game (MMO). Players would have user-controlled avatars, and there were a social hierarchy, but there was pervasive access and a global scale.
The closest we came to open 3D interoperability was VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) back in the 1990s. The HTML approach to creating a metaverse using the VRML standard attempted to create a virtual 3D markup language that could be used to create and link 3D spaces together into one that you could access through a VRML browser. It failed.
The closest early attempt to build a walled-garden metaverse that had some limited success was Second Life, which created a virtual space where people could come to have fun, build stuff, engage in commerce, and share. But even Second Life was a closed ecosystem that relied on Linden Bucks for commerce. Second Life was not open to access by other platforms.
Second Life developer Linden Labs did try once more to re-invent a virtual community with a new business model. It is called Sansar. On March 23, 2020, Linden Labs sold Sansar to San Francisco-based technology company Wookey Project Corp, which will continue Sansar's current event-based strategy. Sansar was used to create a VR walk through in Aech's Garage VR Experience from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One movie.
That said, people are still intrigued by the concept behind a virtual meta-world and bits and pieces of it are starting to fall into place. Certainly, the rise of relatively inexpensive virtual reality (VR) headsets, such as the Oculus Quest, have spurred more and more interest into a VR platform. If we do get some form of metaverse, it’s likely that Nvidia will be one of the companies building the necessary toolchains. Nvidia’s Omniverse platform and set of 3D creation tools are a great way to jump start content development.
But Meta’s Oculus platform is still a closed environment with limited access. There are attempts to create a more open platform using other VR headsets from Valve and others, but nothing on the scale of Oculus. Not yet, anyway.
The biggest concern for a possible metaverse is that we will create a series of mini-metaverses, all tied to captive platforms, much like today’s video game console market. A rumored Apple AR/VR headset probably would be tied to an Apple ecosystem. This is not what the metaverse is supposed to be. We need a way to interoperate among these various silos much, as the World Wide Web (WWW) allows different content sites to be viewed through many web browsers.
And therein lies the real difference. The Internet, the WWW, and the browser all came from academia, research (CERN), and the US government (ARPA), where creation was about sharing information in a robust manor that encouraged an open ecosystem with interoperability amongst various sites and companies. What we are seeing with the metaverse is a “land grab” by a number of powerful companies that want to control user access and profit from it. It may be too late for an open metaverse platform to be developed without being co-opted by commercial entities and turned into a profit and attention center, much like the villainous Innovative Online Industries (IOI) in the Ready Player One movie.
Even in the book and movie Ready Player One, the Oasis was not without control. In fact, the end of the movie is about the fight for control of the Oasis. Although, in the end, [spoiler alert] the good guys won, what they won was control, and by being in control, they could use their power without limits. In real life, the corporations win and then we all learn to live with it while they profit.
So, is it too late for a real metaverse? One of the original founders of Second Life has decided to come back to Linden Labs and to see what he can do to resurrect interest in Second Life as a potential platform for a more idealized version of the metaverse. But can he really give Second Life a real second life?
There can be different types of metaverses – one for gaming, one for social, and one for business. Each has different needs. Maybe some grand unified version will happen in the future, but I don’t see a vision for it developing yet.
What people tend to forget is that the metaverse in movies and books takes place in dystopian worlds, where the metaverse is usually a substitute for a better first life. It’s not a bad idea to have a virtual place to go, but it should never become a substitute for the real world. Should it?
This is the first of a series of article TIRIAS Research will be writing covering the Metaverse and the companies best positioned to participate.
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