Watch: Philip Rosedale Interviews Metaverse Pioneer Avi Bar-Zeev on Helping Create Second Life Prims, Apple's VisionPro, and Much More

Philip Rosedale's latest vlogcast interview is with Avi Bar-Zeev, an XR/metaverse pioneer who's been doing this so long, he was working for a virtual world company in the 90s which Neal Stephenson used to visit shortly after Snow Crash came out -- when Stephenson first reportedly looked into creating the Metaverse himself. (At least that's what Avi remembers; more on that below.)

Since then, Avi helped create Second Life's prim-based creation system (a topic he discusses with Philip here), and eventually went on to do experience design work for Apple's VisionPro. As he tells Philip: 

"It's really good for a lot of certain applications but what Apple's throwing down the gauntlet with is saying this is the next user interface paradigm, and it's the one that's gonna displace the mouse and windows... It's not just about having more screen real estate. It's about having the content come off the screens. And so a lot of the toolkits they've shown make it easy for you to pop stuff out of 2d into 3d including personas." (Personas being what Apple calls "avatars").

In the interview Philip mentions an amazing user-creation demonstration of the power of prims -- watch that below, plus an excerpt of my chat with Avi from Making a Metaverse That Matters:

Read about creating "Watch the World" here

The Metaverse was never simply just a fictional conceit for a cyberpunk novel. 

In fact, based on one expert’s account, the first steps to actually build the Metaverse were taken by Neal Stephenson himself.

That’s according to Avi Bar-Zeev, whose own footprint in metaverse-related technology is impressive in its own right. Currently a senior experience prototyper at Apple, Bar-Zeev helped develop Second Life in its early days, co-founded the mirror world project eventually dubbed Google Earth, and co-invented Microsoft's Hololens mixed reality device. But his first job out of college was at Worldesign, a very early virtual world company based in Seattle, launched in the early 90s during the first flush of media and business excitement over VR.  

Shortly after Snow Crash was published, Avi tells me that Stephenson, a Seattle resident himself, would often hang out in the Worldesign office, located above an antique furniture store in the Ballard neighborhood. 

At some point, as Avi recalls, Neal Stephenson’s visits took on a very specific end goal:

“Neal came by with his business lawyer and was really interested in, ‘Could we build the Metaverse now? How much of the Snow Crash Metaverse could we actually build on present 1994 computers?’ [Stephenson] wanted to know if it was feasible to build the Metaverse for consumers.” 

The Worldesign team, which was showing off VR demos it had made to companies like Disney, had a sober answer to that question. As Bar-Zeev puts it now:

“We told him it's probably not going to fly in 1992 or 1993: ‘You're going to have to wait awhile.’” The computing requirements at the time were simply not feasible. “We were using $100,000 computers to do decent VR.”

Again, this query didn’t seem to stem from research for a new novel. In Bar-Zeev’s telling, it reflected plans by Neal Stephenson to build something like the virtual world he had just written about.

“We met with him and his lawyer, so I think it was serious.”

Read the rest of the story here.

Comments

[Nadeja]

So many fascinating things in this article! And I miss the old times, when everyone was building with prims, creating in the sandboxes. Another interesting thing is that in March 1992, just a few months before the publication of "Snow Crash" (June 1992), another influential work in the history of virtual worlds came out: "Ultima Underworld". Although it wasn't set in a cyberpunk world and it was single player (as a RPG, you interacted with NPCs), the player's character was also called Avatar (apparently, Stephenson came to the idea independently, even though it was called "Avatar" in the Ultima series since Ultima IV, 1985), the gameplay was nonlinear and with emergent storytelling, it was an immersive sim: there was crafting, fixing the equipment, cooking and eating, you needed sleep too, and to carry different kind of lights, each illuminating the walls differently and eventually burning out. Its first-person 3D engine was quite sophisticated for the time (and influenced Carmack's Wolfenstein 3D engine too, that was a lot simpler and flat, but also a lot faster): you could look up and down; when you walked, the camera would bob slightly to simulate the motion of the walking; you could jump, swim, and even fly, there were slopes and bridges, you could drop items inworld from your inventory (not too different than "rezzing" in SL), you could take notes on the map, and many other things... It gave you the sense of being in a real environment, freely esplorabile anywhere and interactive, and with customizable avatars.

By today standard maybe you won't call it a virtual world; but in 1992, when Snow Crash was published, Ultima Underworld was the closest thing to it. So this is the best Neal Stephenson or someone else could get from the most powerful PCs (and taking most of the hard-disk space) in 1992. In 1994, VR was still so early; in 2014 VRChat was released; now the Vision Pro is going to released in 2024 and I'm curious to see if it will be a flop or if it will be the the new iPhone, marking the beginning of a new era of devices.

[Wagner James Au]

I totally remember Ultima Underworld! In fact I mention it in the first book because Philip played it in college. Thanks for the reminder!

[Lr]

Virtus 3d and swivel3d. Both on the Mac. Tools that predate snowcrash and prims.. ;). Cube3

[Lr]

30 has been the new 10 fir 25 years.. that’s why burning man and virtual worlds fail…. No one wants to educate and manage the rules. This is why only the better games survive, and all tech solutions are just just color tv.

[Lr]

Copyright . And secondlife? Vs Facebook? Lol. Ask Star Wars. Ask Disney Ugc platforms could have been built organically without massive real world iP violations, they weren’t. This was all known at the time. XR ethics are not new. None of this is. Let’s keep it real.

[Luther Weymann]

I love these people. They are so harmless and so totally out of touch with the rest of us. Wearing Apple strap-on goggles is, in his quote, "gonna displace the mouse and windows." Best out-of-touch joke of the year!