Lamina1, the Metaverse-as-a-Service startup co-founded by Neal Stephenson, just published a white paper adding much more detail to the platform that they are building -- join their Discord to get it.
The core announcement, however, is this: Neal Stephenson himself is making a virtual world:
Neal Stephenson’s THEEE METAVERSE
Under active early-stage development, Neal Stephenson’s THEEE METAVERSE promises a richly-imagined interactive virtual world with an unforgettable origin story. Built on the Lamina1 chain, creators will come to experience Neal’s vision and stay to develop their own. Stay tuned for more details.
This might surprise people who assumed the Metaverse was simply a fictional conceit from his 90s novel Snow Crash, but most of his subsequent books and career have been building up to this point. As he told me in a long interview recently, when I asked him how his novels influenced Lamina1:
“After I wrote Snow Crash I got to know people in the tech industry who had read the book and who had been working on projects like Habitat… and they had figured out long ago that you couldn't build these kinds of virtual communities without basically, other people's code running on your hardware. So they've gotten really interested in the problem of how do you do that without letting them take over your computer and then began to look to cryptographic solutions as a way to create that kind of controlled execution environment.”
Some of his other novels have also explored and expanded on the original Metaverse concept:
“If you look at the Diamond Age, that is a book whose entire plot makes no sense unless you assume the existence of a worldwide network that can transfer money anonymously. So now that the girl in that book, Spence, and Miranda know each other through a virtual environment for years, but they have no way to establish each other's real world identities, because of this anonymous system. The whole plot story basically revolves around that….
“In REAMDE, that’s explicitly about a video game in which real world money can be used, to carry out financial transactions and about the kind of various complications that arise from that. Fall is kind of in a sense a sequel to REAMDE, to re-engage some of the same characters and sort of takes that to the wildest possible extreme.“
As for this white paper, much of it delves deeply into how it will integrate with web3 technology (blockchain, crypto, etc.) For virtual world/metaverse developers, here’s some of pacific technology Lamina1 is creating:
