The new edition of Matthew Ball's landmark book, The Metaverse, is out today, and boasts a new subtitle: Where the original 2022 version was And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, this greatly expanded edition arrives with the more modest and targeted subtitle, Building the Spatial Internet.
"I never liked the [original] subtitle," Matt tells me. "It’s too generic, reinforces the hype cycle, and isn’t a fit for my style overall (or how people think of my work, I think)." With the new subtitle, "I can better explain the topic from the get go, while also better explaining what my book will reveal."
That includes adding "spatial", a term popularized with the launch of the Vision Pro, to the subtitle.
"[It] was important to capture those who believe in Apple’s marketed vision of the future, but don’t subscribe to Meta’s."
Since the first edition, of course, "Metaverse" itself has lost its luster as a buzzword in Silicon Valley, especially with Meta's efforts in that category floundering, and "cryptoverse" platforms since imploding. The book's new edition addresses that backlash -- and the reasons behind it -- head-on.
But can "The Metaverse" be recovered as a term, and restored to prominence? I'm obviously biased on the topic, not just due to my own book, but having worked in metaverse platforms since 2003, and seeing their socially transformational power first-hand for so long.
Matthew Ball was one of the key individuals to make the Metaverse mainstream, so is among the best people in the world to answer that question.
Here's part 1 of our very deep dive on that topic and his newly revised book. And if you enjoy the read, please consider subscribing to my Patreon to support content like this, along with exclusive benefits.
PART I: MATTHEW BALL'S OWN INFLUENCE ON THE METAVERSE
Wagner James Au: Reading [The Metaverse] I was thinking one thing is missing from the book. I really don't think we would have been talking about the Metaverse in the same way or with the same ferocity, without your original online essays.
When I was at Linden Lab and after that [in other startups], we pitched the Metaverse to VCs and so on, and were just getting blank stares. And all of a sudden, your essays started getting traction. And I think that's one of the main reasons why Zuckerberg and [Roblox founder/CEO Dave] Baszucki and so on started talking about it. But what's your sense of that?
Matthew Ball: Oh, I think that's probably giving me too much credit. Some executives have told me they don’t think they’d use the term were it not for my essays – and Tim [Sweeney, Epic's CEO] very kindly blurbed my book by saying I had defined and inspired the Metaverse for year – but for the most part, I think I influenced the language and framing used by various companies and executives when explaining the Metaverse, their ambitions, and the size of the opportunity.
WJA: You were doing them in 2019 and then the pandemic came. So kind of you, plus the pandemic, and Travis Scott [performing in Fortnite] and a few other factors.
MB: Yeah, I mean, one of the central premises of my book was this 30-year-old term, seventyish year-old-effort, and roughly 100-year-old idea was finally starting to become a practical reality by the late 2010s. Whether or not it was called “the Metaverse,” I very much believed it was happening around us.
The first essay I wrote on the Metaverse was published January of 2019. I was writing it in the Fall of 2018, and if I were to be more generous to the potential contribution, I would say that it was perhaps because it was one of the first mainstream pieces that articulated what was happening at the time.
The essay was called “Fortnite is the Future, but Not the Reason You Think.” At the time, there was so much focus on what various reporters or analysts though was new or innovative or surprising – that it was a blockbuster commercial hit, but it's free. It's a blockbuster commercial hit, but all it sells are aesthetic items with no functional purpose. It's a blockbuster that pivoted from an unsuccessful game, the first game to mash up IP, that it's the first cross platform games, and so on. And all of those things were rare to be sure; they were not, however, industry firsts.
The more important argument in the essay is that Fortnite was, in real-time, realizing the ideas of the Metaverse. And what that says within this much broader shift towards cozy games, social gaming, to creation platforms such as Roblox.
PART II: WHAT'S NEW IN THE NEW EDITION OF THE METAVERSE
WJA: Thinking about the book, especially for people who read the first edition, what do you think are the most important new updates and highlights to the new edition?
MB: The three most significant changes are in AI, blockchains, and HMDs. These three categories are about 100 years old (or 80, depending on your definition), 70 years, and 15 years respectively.
In the original book, AI was a throughline. But the field has seen such tremendous advances over the last three years that it warranted a dedicated chapter. A major focus of my coverage was to talk about how the advances in graphics of digital simulation at large and artificial intelligence have been intertwined essentially since inception.
It's no coincidence that the primary tests, the vanguard for AI field research, has long been one of two use cases. One is the creation of a chat bot, and the second is the creation of a game, typically chess, to see if you could create artificial intelligence that performs as a human in a video game.
There's a story that I tell in the book that actually feels very modern, which is that the first AI that Alan Turing himself created was for a chess program, Turbochamp. And it was so powerful in its time that he couldn't find a processor to run it. It actually never ran.
Blockchains are 15 years old, but over the last two years, probably [seen] 80% of their maturity, right? Nearly all of their usage, investment, and expectation has occurred since 2019, and that led to going through puberty over the last two years.
And across its seventy, eighty year history, HMDs have seen perhaps their most significant product launch in the Vision Pro.
And so those are three wholly new and constructed chapters. And then complemented around that are myriad updates, on Epic’s partnership with Lego and Disney, the introduction of Epic’s Verse programming language, expanding out their interoperable asset network, advances in satellite Internet, and so on.
PART III: RECONSIDERING VR AND MAINSTREAM ADOPTION
WJA: So how do you hope this new edition changes the market's perception of the Metaverse?
MB: I don't have ambitions to change minds or the market’s perception at large. I think that depends on the products of the Metaverse, not the books on it. My goal is to provide those interested in the Metaverse – irrespective of whether they’re a passerby, entrepreneur, or Big Tech executive – with a better, more up to date, comprehensive review of the technologies, the players and the trends, which reflects not just what's happened in the marketplace over the last two and a half years, but the feedback I received from readers the first time around.
WJA: Have you substantially changed your mind on any of the major topics in the book?
MB: No.
WJA: Or, let's say, greatly evolved it.
MB: I certainly have a better appreciation for the technological challenges on Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs). I think one of the areas which I'm most proud of in the book is starting to take a look at some of the human acceptance problems [for VR].
If we take a step back right, we know that roughly 15 years ago, there was this broad consensus that we were maybe seven to ten years away from mainstream adoption of HMDs. You saw that not just with major tech companies, but with pioneers such as Philip Rosedale. We've seen at minimum, that that time horizon was fantastical, and at maximum, in fact, evidence from some of those pioneers, like Philip and users, that this technology may never be ready for the mainstream.
I would look at these learnings as kind of being twofold. They're really the same, but they're a little bit separate. One is that the technology has proven much more difficult to pull off than anticipated. But what's important to understand is it's not necessarily that the assembly has been more difficult than anticipated. It's that in many ways the minimum required specifications are a lot more intense than was originally anticipated.
Most of those discoveries have come from user testing. I know you've spoken about this, about women having twice the incidence of nausea [in VR]. We now know that interpupillary distance has a remarkable impact on the incidence of nausea, as does age, and even personality types, if you can believe it.
I write at length in the book about something called Vergence-accommodation conflict, which is actually just the ways in which our bodies have adapted to 10,000 years, so that when you look farther away, your eyes diverge, and therefore your brain automatically changes its plane of focus.
But when you're in VR glasses, everything remains in relatively equivalent focus, and therefore what you're seeing and the focus your brain think is required are in reflexive conflict. And so one of the reasons why we get nausea, motion sickness, simulation sickness, or just exhaustion, reflects the fact that eyes are not evolved for interaction in an HMD.
And so the deeper you go into the field, and understand the ways in which technology has been designed, conceived or contemplated, that you come up with a more nuanced perspective of the challenges here. I’m optimistic – and there are some interesting prototypes in development to address these issues, as I detail – but it’s tough.
And then, of course, this is where Philip [Rosedale] is an expert, once you start to understand the incremental challenges, it fundamentally changes the perspective on the payback, right? How much you have to get back from this experience to warrant the downsides, drawbacks.
WJA: Yeah, that just seems insurmountable. And we've known about these issues for years. Dana Boyd wrote that essay in 2014 and there's just been billions spent on [VR], and it doesn't feel like there was enough consideration that these challenges are greater than Meta and so on assumed.
MB: Yeah. I don't think it's breaking news to say that these challenges have proven more intractable than suspected. You can see that with the timeline, whether it's Tim Sweeney saying that the gaming PC would be shrunken down into the size of wearable Oakley glasses. He said that in 2016, projecting that over seven years.
Zuckerberg said people would just replace their smartphone for wearable AR glasses within a decade, and it's going to turn out that those devices haven't even shipped within a decade.
WJA: I still don't see it on the business side, a come to Jesus moment of “OK, maybe we need to totally rethink our approach to HMDs.” I still don't see a shift from Meta and other companies about changing their focus. They're still pushing ahead, trying to make this mass market where maybe they should focus on niche use cases [for XR].
MB: Certainly the question around how you go to market is, I think, an important one. I do think that Apple, to some extent, was strained between the expectations they set with how significant an offering the Vision Pro was said to be, with announcing the era of spatial computing, while also shipping what has been widely (and I think accurately) described as a dev kit, or at minimum, a relatively niche entertainment device for the uber-wealthy and/or a helpful complement to industrial engineering and media professionals who have $20,000 of compute on their desk.
When you take a look at the Quest a few years ago, nearly all of the marketing was around, you know, quotidian use cases, whether that was Horizon Workrooms or just hanging with your parents. And nearly all of the usage is essentially playing video games. And that's, of course, a far more niche market, not one that is going to justify tens of billions of R&D over the short term, nor was it a focus of Meta’s marketing. Meta has since reoriented themselves quite substantially towards gaming.
PART IV: WHY UNDERSTANDING SNOW CRASH IS SO IMPORTANT
WJA: One thing I liked with the book, you expanded the Snow Crash section, or expanded the section talking about Snow Crash’s influence. And was curious what inspired that.
MB: I started writing the original edition of my book in March of 2021. The final manuscript was submitted the first week of 2022 and by the time of Facebook’s name change on October 28th of 2021, the book was effectively locked. Two months out, as you well know, you can’t really do anything structural – it’s too late to change your chapter orders, your narratives, your leads, your throughlines, etc. And even by the start of 2022, it was still too early to know what the name change meant for Facebook, let alone the term “Metaverse” and/or culture at large.
I mention this because when I began writing the book, I was writing primarily for builders, for technologists, for those with long-running fascinations with 3D graphics, simulations, and virtual existence. The type of people who have not only read Snow Crash five times start to finish, but they have a copy of it on their bedside. And even if you go back to the Metaverse Primer, which I published in June 2021 and was a prototype of my book, it presumes a ton of pre-existing knowledge of the Metaverse. The Primer didn’t even define or try to explain the Metaverse! It just went deep on what it takes to make it. As such, it didn’t make too much sense to discuss what Neal did believe then that he doesn’t now, or richly imagine the narrative connectivity with other science fiction work of his and earlier eras.
But as a result of Facebook’s name change, as well as the crypto boom of 2022, the Metaverse was thrust into such a public light, and the dialogue very quickly became confused, broken, and weighted. My book also reached a much wider audience than I had anticipated. And so when I began updating the book, it was necessary to rethink the very explanation of and origins of the term “Metaverse,” to unpack Snow Crash in detail, and I even added a five part “What the Metaverse is not” section.
One of those is that it’s not dystopian! What was the quote you used your book? Where Neal says that not only is the Metaverse not, per his original intent, dystopian, but the dystopian elements are satire!
WJA: He told Kara Swisher that. I put that in my book to push back on the idea that, “Oh no, this is a horrible dystopia”, but it's actually a really comical, wacky novel -- you know, the Godfather, who's riding a skateboard, an Asian rapper. (Of course, now that's mainstream.) But all that kind of wacky stuff that's not Orwellian.
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
— Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman) November 8, 2021
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
MB: Yeah exactly. In the book, I added an illustration of the famous “Torment Nexus” tweet because it’s a really funny tweet. It's a sincerely funny tweet
The person who wrote it happens to be a writer for The Onion. And that’s exactly my point. The term just hit the pop culture in a way I could never have anticipated with the original book – and then the term ricocheted all over the place. And so while very little of the update overall is specific to Snow Crash, science fiction, and the term/terms themselves, it was nevertheless important to go deeper on these points.
WJA: I've been thinking a lot like, looking back at the hype wave of say, 2020 to 2022 -- do you think there's anything we could have done in retrospect to avoid the backlash that did happen?
MB: I don’t because I think even when you go to Meta, as the sort of firestarter for the terminological mania, Mark said very clearly that the Metaverse would begin to emerge over the next five to 10 years. He said that over and over throughout that first announcement day into the press. John Carmack was even more cautious, just saying that he believes it's a multi-decade trend that began with Doom and other graphical advances in the 90s.
The problem was, as I detail in the book, you kind of had these four different cohorts.
You had the people who said the Metaverse is here now, and a subset of them that said it's been here for years.
You had those who said it was going to be here imminently; Bill Gates is one such example.
Then you had those who said it's five to ten years away.
And then you had those who talked about it as a general transition, including Sweeney and Jensen Wong and Carmack.
Irrespective of the cautions from those latter two groups, the narrative just compressed to immediacy. The parallel rise of crypto also gave credence to the argument that we were undertaking some instantaneous transformation of society. And I think that as a result, it just completely became narratively confused.
You know, the best aspect of the Metaverse is that no one owns the word. But as a result, whether that's Tim or Mark or Neal himself, there's no ultimate authority on this. "This is what it is or isn't, you're using it incorrectly: This is the definitive published definition."
I know you and I joke all the time that Neal was pretty descriptive in the book, but he never actually defines it in a single sentence. There's no canonical one liner, and so I don't know that there was much that could be done, you know?
WJA: I mean, that's why I went through in my book, passage by passage, and said, “Okay, well, here's basically the de facto definition, if you go by what the description is.” And it's describing things that are closer to Fortnite and Roblox than some very hypothetical thing that Zuckerberg is talking about. But somehow the media didn't catch on to that -- like they kind of constructed a straw man and then destroyed the straw man.
MB: Not to call out the press or the average person, the truth is that even at inception, Mark was very clear that the Metaverse was not a VR-only experience. It wasn't a VR and AR only experience; it would be a persistent 3D network that also underpinned the physical world. And yet, at the time, all of Meta’s products were VR. The only thing you could buy or touch or really see from Meta was in virtual reality.
And so when a company of that prominence and that popularity changes its name while simultaneously saying, “Here are our current products that fit within that category,” I don't begrudge people for misunderstanding things.
And though Snow Crash was concentrated around VR and to a lesser extent, AR, MR interactions in the Metaverse, those devices still weren’t the point. They were access devices to a social forum of 3D avatar-based representation and unconstructed simulated reality. It wasn't about the tech. It's not a book about what VR means to the world.
PART IV: REVIVING "THE METAVERSE" AS A CONCEPT, POST-HYPE WAVE
WJA: Do you think we can recover the Metaverse as a brand and a concept, and recover it away from Meta? Or as you kind of suggest in the book, maybe we should just move away from the term?
MB: One of the ways in which I finished the original book is I talked about the fact that I don't know what the Metaverse will ultimately be called when it arrives, and I suggest that we may just end up reverting to the “3D internet” or just “Internet”.
I wrote an essay earlier this year called “Metaverse, Spatial Computing, and the Terms Left Behind”, it was kind of a rumination on how language evolves, and it does seem, thus far, that the term is so loaded and misunderstood and so many parties are strategically shifting away from it, that it does seem unlikely that the term is ever reclaimed in mass usage.
Which is to say the niche usage of it in 10 or 15 years may be more correct than it is today, but I have a hard time imagining that it becomes the mainstream usage. You know, as I wrote in that essay, the degree to which Roblox in particular seems defensive about it, essentially like rewriting their history of using the term, tells me how poison they consider it to be.
Dave Baszucki literally wrote “2021 was the year of the Metaverse.” He commemorated Roblox’s IPO, the largest gaming IPO in history, with the hashtag #Metaverse. And then in 2023 he’s saying we didn't actually use the term.
WJA: That's kind of mind-boggling, because they [Roblox the company] are moving very rapidly, we're talking very large growth, they added telephony and some other features, where it's like, okay, so this does feel like it’s evolving toward becoming the metaverse with a capital M, just in terms of growth and features, but they don't want to call it that anymore.
MB: Yeah. I mean the more important point, to point to your forecast from the start of the year. Which is look, it is obvious that the accurate use of Metaverse is probably at an all-time low, that HMDs remain years, if not a decade plus behind expectations.
But the popularity of these virtual worlds, and these networks of virtual worlds is persistently underestimated, and yet rapidly and continuously growing. Roblox itself, a single platform, has more active monthly users than the Nintendo Switch plus the Xbox, plus the PlayStation combined, they have an estimated 25 to 30,000 worlds being created daily. That is, to me, more significant than the taxonomy or the terminology. [Editor note: In January I noted that Roblox is on track to have more active users than the entire US population this year. -- WJA]
Above: Matt speaks about the Metaverse from within a metaverse platform in 2021
WJA: Hopefully I'm remembering this correctly, [I recently was telling you], “I can't believe the business world is not grasping how big Fortnite and Roblox are in terms of mass users -- like, can't they see beyond all of the hype and hand-waving and see this is a huge opportunity?”
And you said something like, No, when you tell them about Roblox they just don't care. They just see it as a game. So they can't think of it as anything beyond that.
MB: I went on CNBC a little while ago, and they specifically said, Why are we here talking about the Metaverse, the Metaverse is dead and AI is the new thing here. When I start talking about Roblox, they’re like, “OK, if you're just going to talk about Roblox, I don't get it, we’re not talking Metaverse.” And yet it’s representative of the same thing – if you want to push it down into “it’s just a game,” fine – but the popularity, usage of, and nature of Roblox today all reflects a cultural evolution. Which is, of course, is more accurate to the original depiction in Snow Crash, right?
PART V: THE COMING OF THE METAVERSE GENERATION
WJA: Is it a time issue? We just wait for Gen Z to get into their 20s and early 30s and bring this conversation up again?
MB: It's very clear that that's going to be a big part of it, this generational behavior shift.
We can really think about these technological waves as having three different layers: The first is when a generation grows up with a new technology. The second is when that generation’s entrepreneurs create with that technology. And the third is when that generation adopts the new technologies produced by their peers.
Here’s an example. Anyone could have created Facebook long before it was created in 2004. There was no technology which was created in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, that made Facebook possible. And of course, we have remarkable evidence of that – the fact that Second Life predated both Facebook and even MySpace! People are shocked when you say Second Life came out before MySpace. Shocked!
But what ended up happening is that you have an individual who grew up with the technologies required to make Facebook, they are native to that technology and the culture around it, and then they create something which reflects their experience and their usage.
Zuckerberg grew up on IRC and on email, and he created a product for him and his peers that was based on those concepts. Evan Spiegel does the same thing in 2011. He grew up with a Razr smartphone and early smartphones. He grew up in an era of him and his friend sexting on mobile phones, so he created a product of that era.
What I am excited about when it comes to Roblox and similar platforms, is that technology really emerged between 2005 and 2015. Sitting here in 2024, we are just now getting to an entire generation that's grown up using it. And so we’re just starting to get to the point where these users will create products themselves that reflect the usage.
The generation that is just now hitting their mid-teens is the first true social 3D generation. I grew up playing Doom, I grew up playing Second Life, and I'm not ever going to talk down to how popular those games were, but we didn't have a generation that grew up with that being their primary social forum. What we had were sometimes significant, but nevertheless minority and niche portions of the population, which used them as a pastime, not as a generational forum. And that's certainly what we see through Roblox.
WJA: Well, that's an interesting thought. So the people that will become the Zuckerbergs and so on of the next generation, they're probably teenagers right now in Roblox. I interviewed one, “LAGurlz” from Jamaica, who's gotten almost half a billion visitors to her game [Starving Artists]. And, you know, she's 21, 22, so she could launch something really big in the next few years.
MB: Yeah, totally. We know that many of the top Roblox experiences are by former teens now in their early 20s. We see this all over: Gorilla Tag is such a great example, it's not something that someone who grew up playing AAA games on PS3 or P34 envisions producing.
It kind of reminds me of John Carmack’s critique of Meta’s strategy was always that they had a “Metaverse strategy”. And his point was you need to focus on products that people love and then organically start to bring them together over time. Gorilla Tag is certainly not the product you would design to build the quote unquote Metaverse, but It is as instrumental as perhaps any other software on that device for turning their HMD into a 3D social network.
In part 2, we'll talk about Vision Pro, generative AI, the "cryptoverse", and much more.
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Digging deep! It was nice discussion to listen through...
Posted by: Lex4art | Wednesday, July 24, 2024 at 12:21 PM