The growth of leading metaverse platforms in 2024 is now nearly 700 million active users -- increasing by 140 million people since Making a Metaverse That Matters came out last year. (See chart.)
But why are platforms like Roblox and Fortnite -- or for that matter, Second Life -- so successful?
Plainly put: Because the Metaverse, more or less as Neal Stephenson originally conceived it, works.
As described in Snow Crash, the Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world that's simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools that are integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology.
Each of these elements contributes to the strong/steady growth of leading metaverse platforms:
Highly customizable avatars enable users to express their personalities and interests far beyond the templated restrictions of traditional social media. This is especially powerful for the very young and all the many people who -- for vastly various reasons -- want to express themselves online beyond the restrictions of their real world identity.
Powerful experience creation tools enable those users to further explore and share their creativity with each other. This in turn creates a flywheel-fed pipeline of new content that no professional game company can ever compete with in terms of breadth, range, and efficiency.
Integration with the offline world through a virtual economy and external technology enables user creators of all kinds to earn money from their metaverse content, if they so choose -- while enabling metaverse platform companies to earn revenue of their own. Connecting the virtual world to external technology leads to new and novel use cases -- from simple web browser applications, to brain electrodes that connect disabled people to their avatars, and far beyond.
A vast, immersive virtual world that's simultaneously accessible by millions of people unifies those features into a single platform and experience, enabling the growth of highly diverse subcommunities of all kinds, with the “you are there” sense of immersion encouraging the virtual world to feel like “home” -- a third space online which brings together people of all ages, races, and national backgrounds.
When Neal Stephenson conceived the Metaverse, as he told me recently, it was an answer to this question: “What would it take content-wise to make 3D immersive graphics into as broadly popular as television?”
His brainchild is now starting to succeed at that scale, but perhaps more powerfully than even he imagined. And if I seem overly idealistic, I’d humbly recommend my book, where I tell some of the unexpected stories of amazing creators in diverse communities -- on platforms now approaching an aggregate usage of 1 billion people worldwide.
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Posted by: nystateofhealth | Tuesday, September 10, 2024 at 03:18 AM