Strategist/investor Matthew Ball has a must-read primer to a new understanding of the Metaverse which is rather mind-melting, because it compares its coming emergence to the industrialization of electricity over a century ago. From my current perspective, I see many competing platforms we casually call Metaverses (ROBLOX, Fortnite, etc), and assume that several of them will evolve and mature over time, replacing and/or subsuming 3D gaming delivery platforms like Steam, while absorbing more and more non-gaming applications beyond entertainment.
Matthew's fairly brilliant vision, however, is much broader:
Sometimes the Metaverse is described as a virtual user-generated content (UGC) platform. This is like saying the internet is Yahoo!, Facebook, or World of Warcraft. Yahoo! is an internet portal/index, Facebook is a UGC-focused social network, World of Warcraft is an MMO. Other times we receive a more sophisticated explanation, such as ‘the Metaverse is a persistent virtual space enabling continuity of identity and assets’. This is much closer to the truth, but it too is insufficient. It’s a bit like saying the internet is Verizon, or Safari, or HTML. Those are a broadband provider that connects you to the entire web, a web browser that can access/render all of the internet’s webpages from a single screen and IP identifier, and a markup language that enables the creation and display of the web. And certainly, the Metaverse doesn’t mean a game or virtual space where you can hang out (similarly, the Metaverse isn’t now ‘here’ just because more of us now are hanging out virtually and/or more often).
Instead, we need to think of the Metaverse as a sort of successor state to the mobile internet. And while consumers will have core devices and platforms through which they interact with the Metaverse, the Metaverse depends on so much more. There’s a reason we don’t say Facebook or Google is an internet. They are destinations and ecosystems on or in the internet, each accessible via a browser or smartphone that can also access the vast rest of the internet. Similarly, Fortnite and Roblox feel like the Metaverse because they embody so many technologies and trends into a single experience that, like the iPhone, is tangible and feels different from everything that came before. But they do not constitute the Metaverse.
This is all true, though from a consumer perspective, a large subset of the population do consider their Yahoo! portal or Facebook account to be the de facto totality of the Internet. (In fact, for entire countries who only access it through low-end smartphones, Facebook is the Internet.) Arguably this is also true for the digital natives of Generation Z, whose effective definition of the Internet is typically confined to texting/DM messaging, and a very limited number of social apps (TikTok, YouTube, etc) in addition to Metaverse-ish worlds like Fortnite and ROBLOX. Then there's the question of 3D, avatar-embodied immersiveness -- generally considered a key component of the Metaverse -- and whether that will ever be embraced beyond the half a billion-to-a billion core/mid-core gamers already conversant in that kind of experience.
But like I said, this is just Matthew's introduction to a promised 8 part series, so this post is mainly a way of telling readers to keep their eyes out for his full exegesis. Follow him on Twitter here.
I think what he's reaching for is metaverse "framework". And on that I agree, the metaverse needs to be built upon capacity, protocols and lots and lots of interop. Smart to leave out cryptocurrency and ironic that cryptocurrency is hindering the 3D end of things because it's making graphics cards more expensive and harder to get because of miners.
I like people seem to be evolving past the metaverse as a space in a way. I got caught up in the concept early on. Worked with some folks in a company called Chaco communications and they had built a client called Pueblo, which was basically an HTML/VRML browser that could talk over TCP connections.
We married that with a MUD (MUCK if you want to be precise) called NeonMUCK. So at that point we had servers that anyone could set up and turn into a virtual 3D world with little effort. Now VRML was crude, but we had something that later projects like Second Life didn't have, which was the ability for anyone to create and run their own server with common protocols. This is what we considered the Metaverse. No walled gardens, here. Just the potential for lots of gardens.
But anyway, hoping new graphics innovations and systems like Pixar/Nvidia USD will help open this puppy up to become a real metaverse.
Posted by: Kyz | Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 06:16 PM