Does the Metaverse Matter More in 2024? An Online Afterword to My Book!

It’s a bit more than a year since Making a Metaverse That Matters reached bookshelves in June 2023. Barbenheimer be damned, my awesome wife Brooke even thoughtfully placed it above American Prometheus (the basis of Chris Nola’s biopic) in our local Barnes & Noble. 

Much about the Metaverse has changed since then, while much has remained constant. Here’s an update of relevant highlights since publication in four parts: 

• Vision Pro & “Spatial Computing”

• The Metaverse Platform Landscape, 2024 

• New/Upcoming Metaverse Platforms to Watch

• Where Are They Now: Philip Rosedale, Neal Stephenson & Beyond

The first section addresses the waning hype around the Metaverse as a term, while the second section addresses its continued relevance in the only area that ultimately matters: Active users.

First up, the Metaverse in the post-Apple era:

Vision Pro & “Spatial Computing”

Above: Demo-ing Follow the White Rabbit on Vision Pro

The greatest shift since Making, of course, is a new conceptual framing fueled by the arrival of the Apple Vision Pro, announced in June 2023. (Right as my book was going to shelves!) 

Released in February 2024, Apple’s headset is fully capable of displaying VR experiences -- and will even include a Vision Pro version of leading metaverse platform Rec Room -- but the company made sure to frame the device around its augmented reality capabilities, and a shiny, seemingly new term: Spatial Computing.

Seemingly overnight, that term supplanted “the Metaverse” across Silicon Valley. Somewhat ironically, the term is not Apple’s, but was coined in the 1990s by Bob Jacobson of Worldesign. As I wrote in the book, Neal Stephenson was making regular visits to the Seattle-based VR startup at the time, asking the team if they could feasibly build, well, his Metaverse. 

I say this is a “conceptual framing” shift, because actual purchases of Vision Pro remain quite small, with total sales in 2024 expected to be below 500,000 but probably closer to 250,000 total worldwide. But Apple is Apple, and where it goes, we must follow.

As a sign of that profound change, the new 2024 edition of Matthew Ball’s The Metaverse comes with a new subtitle: No longer How It Will Revolutionize Everything, but Building the Spatial Internet.

Matt’s essays and subsequent book were integral to driving interest in the Metaverse concept, but this book’s new edition is adjusting to market perceptions: For one thing, it’s heavily expanded from the original. For another, the term has lust its luster in the corona of Tim Cook’s new device:

“The ‘spatial’ aspect reflects the fact that many companies have pushed away from the term ‘Metaverse’,” as Matt Ball explains to me in an email, “and it was important to capture those who believe in Apple’s marketed vision of the future, but don’t subscribe to Meta’s.” (Much more on Matt’s new edition in an upcoming post!)

XR expert Avi Bar-Zeev worked for Bob Jacobson out of college and eventually went on to lead Experience Prototyping for Vision Pro at Apple. So he’s in a unique position to concur: 

“I think Spatial Computing is the best term for this new kind of human/computer interaction, where we make heavy use of people's natural context, perceptions, and physical interactions. It's not a question of popularity as much as clarity. Calling everything ‘The Metaverse’ during peak hype helped almost no one to gain clarity, and I'd argue it still doesn't yet exist, and therefore has zero actual users.” 

We  disagree on the “doesn’t yet exist” part, but are vehemently aligned on the belief that the Metaverse as a concept and a brand has been utterly battered out of recognition -- especially after Meta attempted imposing a de facto “the Metaverse is whatever Meta’s Reality Labs is making” definition, then failed to gain a mass market in these efforts .   

My own take is it's not an either/or dilemma: There are very popular virtual worlds that qualify as metaverse platforms, at least two of which (Roblox and Fortnite) are very likely to evolve into The Metaverse. At the same time, there's also promising potential for Spatial Computing applications that aren't metaverse-related because they don't have a virtual world component.

“The key difference between The Metaverse and any large collection of Spatial Computing experiences is that the latter are all consensual private spaces that don't need to connect to all others;” as Avi puts it, “whereas the former is stitched together into something resembling a giant public space.”

The Metaverse Platform Landscape, 2024 - Market Leaders

Most of the platforms I tracked in Making saw pretty strong growth, led by Roblox, which now counts more active users worldwide than the United States has people.

Overall, total monthly metaverse platform active user growth tracked in this chart increased by 140 million people, for a total global audience of 690 million:

Numbers in parentheses represent public statements by the platform company, from major news/industry publications, or reported directly to me. Other figures represent estimates or 3rd party counts from New World Notes, along with RTrack, and Metaversed.consulting.

Somewhat surprisingly, Meta’s entry trails far behind the rest. In April 2023, an executive at Meta assured me that a mobile version of Horizon Worlds was coming soon. But beyond a small rollout to select users, that’s yet to happen.

By contrast, the leading generative AI platform, ChatGPT, only has some 100 million monthly active users -- far less than Roblox (let alone Minecraft, let alone Fortnite). This is obviously not an apples-to-apples comparison, but in raw basic terms of “activity many people regularly do on the Internet”, the Metaverse still dominates over gen AI.

Upcoming Metaverse Platforms to Watch

Since Making went to press, several startups have announced new/upcoming metaverse platforms. The first two on this list roughly track with my book’s prediction that the next Grand Theft Auto might take on metaverse-like qualities: 

EVERYWHERE: Now in closed beta testing, the platform from veteran developers of the Grand Theft Auto games, Everywhere is a platform enabling users to “unleash your creativity to build, remix, and play with others in a vast connected world.”

HELIX: Hypersonic Laboratories is a new startup which just got funding to build HELIX, an upcoming multiplayer role-playing sandbox platform for user-generated content (UGC). I recently got an early peek at what they're building, and the ambition is pretty impressive. As David Chiu, Hypersonic's head of business, put it to me recently: "Think of it as Garry's Mod meets Grand Theft Auto meets Second Life powered by Unreal Engine 5".

Playable Worlds: Founded and led by venerable game designer Raph Koster, his new startup is built on his experience with Metaplace, his web-based virtual world platform which failed to get traction and closed in 2009 -- after which, his team recycled the world’s content into some successful Facebook games. So Playable will launch (perhaps as early as this year) with a “games first” approach: The primary goal will be to roll out a successful sci-fi MMO, and once that's out, gradually release ever more UGC tools/features so that players can sustain and build on that activity.

RP1: Unveiled at Augmented World Expo 2024, backed by a bootstrap startup, RP1 is creating a platform that's the closest I've seen to being the canonical Metaverse. Read about my demo here. (Pictured above: My “Hamlet” avatar above the mirror earth of RP1.)

Where Are They Now: People, Projects, and Topics Covered in Making

VR and nausea: I naively assumed the section in my book which revealed that Meta has not reportedly done any follow-up research on the propensity of females to get nauseous using VR would get more attention. That virtual reality tends to make half the population sick seems rather important! 

But there is at least some increasing awareness of the issue: As I reported on VentureBeat, Avi Bar-Zeev is calling on the VR industry to publicize its internal data around nausea and gender, while VR pioneer Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford confirmed with me that it is still very much a live, ongoing challenge. One day soon, we may finally be able to address it openly.

Second Life mobile launch: The long-promised launch of Second Life for iOS and Android finally happened in June 2023, opening new vistas of possibilities (and growth) for the OG metaverse platform.

Neal Stephenson and Lamina1: The founding father of the Metaverse continues to be active participant in Lamina1, the blockchain layer for metaverse platforms he co-founded (and is now chairman of):  

“We're currently working with him and his publishers to launch a number of IP-related projects alongside creators across the film, music, gaming, and digital art spaces, alongside our growing community of over 50,000 open metaverse developers, builders, enthusiasts and creators around the world,” Casey Halter, Lamina1’s Director of Content & Community, tells me. (No new word, however, about “THEEE Metaverse” [sic!],  the virtual world Stephenson was announced to be leading development of in 2022.)

Philip Rosedale and FairShare: Philip’s digital currency with a UBI component and a mission  (very on brand for Philip) to reduce income disparities between the wealthy and the poor is still in development. “I'm looking for an app developer and co-founder,” he told me recently. “Just starting on the app now. and hopefully raising money.” To support the project, Philip recently published a white paper and an active Discord community. (Links here.)

Sine Wave Entertainment's Interoperability Project: Adam Frisby’s highly ambitious plan to launch a fully interoperable metaverse platform was delayed, but is still expected soon, he insists: “We got  waylaid, best made plans and all,” Adam tells me. “The overall tech sector downturn made it difficult to launch at the time, but we're still on track to do it later this year.” (As to what “waylaid” means, that’s an interesting story in itself; more, hopefully, in another article.)

In another report, I’ll explore the state of Generative AI in metaverse platforms. At this point, the technology remains far from established/scalable.

This is a dynamic Afterword I’ll be updating through 2024. If there are topics you read about it in Making that you’d like to know more about, please let me know in comments -- and mahalo for reading!

Comments

[Martin K.]

> Apple’s headset is fully capable of displaying VR experiences -- and will even include a Vision Pro version of leading metaverse platform Rec Room

I actually changed my position on this prediction a bit because the Creative Chief Officer of Rec Room Inc. Cameron Brown (a.k.a. gribbly) discussed releasing Rec Room on the Apple Vision Pro recently: https://youtu.be/ZVEfuf-VDlw?t=579

To be clear: I still predict that Rec Room will not be released natively on Apple Vision Pro in 2024. (And neither in 2025.) However, I concede that the way Rec Room communicates a potential release is quite ambiguous and a little bit of wishful thinking is enough to hope for a release in the "longer term".

I don't know why Rec Room Inc. is not communicating more clearly. Maybe they hope for future partnerships with/investments by Apple or other companies. In any case, I would be very surprised if we saw a release in 2024 (or 2025).

[Martin K.]

> There are very popular virtual worlds that qualify as metaverse platforms, at least two of which (Roblox and Fortnite) are very likely to evolve into The Metaverse.

I'm skeptical about this. If we agree that "The Metaverse" (as described in "Snow Crash") is "stitched together into something resembling a giant public space" with potentially more than a million simultaneous users in the same virtual space (I'm thinking of a giant stadium where everyone can see everyone), then my take is that the technical challenges are so expensive to overcome (and would put such a high burden on potential users) that it doesn't make economic sense for metaverse platforms like Roblox or Fortnite to support "The Metaverse".

I would hypothesize that the higher the potential number of simultaneous users in a virtual space is, the fewer scenarios are there that are economically sustainable. What number still makes sense depends on many factors, but for the foreseeable future it will probably be below 1000. For scenarios with larger crowds (e.g. the audience of large music or sports events) computer-generated characters will usually be sufficient to fill up the ranks in multiple shards (instances/copies) of the space. As long as you can call/text/invite any user any time within the platform, most users won't be bothered by the fact that only a relatively small number of actual users is actually visible to them at any given time.

The idea of a single, persistent virtual space for millions of simultaneous users just doesn't appear to provide enough benefits to make economic sense.

[Wagner James Au]

> a million simultaneous users in the same virtual space I'm thinking of a giant stadium where everyone can see everyone

We can already "see" them through their user profile, which I think is sufficient.

[IncompetenceDeservesFiring]

I'm sorry, but they've taken everything to do with virtual worlds and 'metaverses' and made them extremely boring. All the figureheads who even use the word are boring. Phillip is boring. Linden Lab is boring. Talk about the metaverse is boring. Videos with avatars sitting around in chairs who don't even have their faces and lips rigged to match their talking is like watching paint dry.
Roblox is not a metaverse, it is a game with many games to play. Fortnite is literally a game, but demonstrates how it can accommodate a pop artist seen by millions of its players.
Just because on can party, build custom levels for, have meetings, social events, concerts, etc doesn't make it a metaverse. People were doing the same 'metaverse' activities in games like Quake and Counterstrike long before 'metaverse' was a buzzword. It's all so boring now.
What matters is having cool spaces to hang out in, that are interactive, and all your friends WANT to be there. This is why Grand Theft Auto online has more users than Second Life, and they're all standing around ALSO buying clothes, cars and houses for themselves and even roleplaying.
Metaverses, like SL likes to call itself is a NICHE market, serving 0.000000000001% of the available gamers out there, and will NEVER reach the user counts of these platforms EVER.
VR comes around every 6 years or so, people try it, people hype it, then they throw it away in the corner of their room never to be used again, because its a novelty and fun for a bit, but a nuisance over the long run.
Glad you're moving towards covering ALL virtual platforms and discussing this though, because hitching your wagon to the Linden Lab train isn't the way to go anymore

[Martin K.]

> Metaverses, like SL likes to call itself is a NICHE market, serving 0.000000000001% of the available gamers out there, and will NEVER reach the user counts of these platforms EVER.

Back in 2004, one could have reasonably made the same prediction about that website for college students that Mark Zuckerberg launched then. But seriously: Facebook and other social media don't appeal specifically to gamers but to a much larger audience (billions of Facebook users instead of hundreds of millions of PC and console gamers - the numbers are important). Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook won't care how many of today's PC and console gamers will be using their future wearable AR glasses. PC and console gaming is just not a large enough market to be important for their endgame.

Thus, yeah, gamers will be disappointed by future immersive products of Meta and Apple: the end of Echo Arena VR, the (relative) failure of Horizon Worlds, the lack of popular mixed-reality games, the lack of popular social VR games on Apple Vision Pro (like Rec Room!), ... the list of disappointments will continue!