New World Notes

Our Payment Systems Are So Bad, Making the Metaverse Might Mean Moving to Blockchain Systems (Which Have Problems of Their Own)

'I'm blogging Matthew Ball’s must-read, nine part metaverse primer over the Summer; my take on Part 1 (introduction to the framework) is here,  my coverage of Part 2 (hardware) is here, with Part 3 (networking) coverage here, Part 4 coverage (computing) here, Part 5 (virtual platforms) here, and Part 6 (open standards) here.

Part 7 of Matthew Ball’s Metaverse framework, on the challenge of payments facing the Metaverse, is the most daunting so far, veering into some thick if necessary weeds to hack through. If I had to summarize the whole thing in a single sentence, it would go something like this:

The payment options we have to deal with are so inefficient, unfair, and monopolistic, we may never get a Metaverse worth the name unless we switch to a blockchain-based system -- even though that has problems of its own.

To break Ball’s case down into more detail (with some analysis of my own):

• Current/traditional payment systems incur transaction costs and time delays.
• Virtual world-based payment systems, built on these payment methods, are even more costly and slow.
• At the same time, distribution platforms (consoles, Apple, etc.) lock in consumers and developers while hitting the latter with high fees, while also locking out payment competitors. (This is, by the way, starting to change.)

With mobile so dominant, and so necessary to achieving mass market growth, current Metaverse platforms end up paying most of their money to Apple and Google Play. For instance, while ROBLOX’s revenue sharing deal is reportedly harsh for their creators (especially as most of them are kids), the company itself takes a huge hit from Apple:

Philip Rosedale on Clubhouse Bringing High Fidelity's Metaverse-Driven Spatial Audio to the Massive Audio Chat App

Hear ye, hear ye 🔊 spAAaAaAatial audio on Clubhouse!

It's like surround sound, but w/ your own headphones. A more vibrant, human experience! Plus makes it much easier to tell who's talking.

thanks to @juberti for this one 👏 rolling out now on iOS, Android coming soon! pic.twitter.com/Zit6F9ijRK

— Clubhouse (@Clubhouse) August 29, 2021

Here's some Metaverse news that requires your headphones for the full effect (click the video above):

Clubhouse, the seriously popular audio chat app  -- it counts at least 10 million weekly active users -- just integrated Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity spatial audio:

High Fidelity’s HRTF technology, which stands for “Head Related Transfer Function,” maps speech to different virtual locations by subtly adding a time delay between stereo channels and replicating the way that high and low frequencies would sound entering the ear depending on a sound’s origin. The result, long used in social VR, gives virtual social experiences a sense of physical presence that good records have been pulling off for ages. Think listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in stereo with good headphones but instead of sound effects and instruments playing around your head, you’re hearing the people you’re hanging out with arrayed in virtual space.

"If people are going to talk in groups online, they are going to need to use spatial audio to understand each other," Philip Rosedale tells me, shortly after the announcement dropped. "We've put in 8 years (so far) working on doing spatial audio right, and are super happy to have people in the Clubhouse community now able to take advantage of this experience!"

This is the latest, fascinating plot twist in Philip's Metaverse ambitions, originally borne with the founding of Second Life, then re-emerging in his latest start-up, High Fidelity, which was originally founded as a Metaverse company. (Before, that is, pivoting in 2019 to focus on this spatial audio feature).

But where Second Life and the original High Fidelity struggled for mass adoption, it's finally been achieved, if only through spatial audio:

The Metaverse Can't Develop Like the Internet Since It Doesn't Have Open Standards -- But Metaverse Communities Can Help Change That. My Take On Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, Part 6

I'm blogging Matthew Ball’s must-read, nine part metaverse primer over the Summer; my take on Part 1 is here,  my coverage of Part 2 is here, with Part 3 coverage here, Part 4 coverage here, and Part 5 here.

As with previous parts of the Primer, Part 6, "Interchange Tools + Standards and the Metaverse" delves into just how difficult making a Metaverse worth the name will be. Because while many say the Metaverse is the Internet's next generation, the actual Internet was launched by academics and government researchers who valued open standards. But the major companies/platforms which are likely to launch the Metaverse are very much closed, for the most part:

All of the video games console operating systems, which are required to use console hardware, have chosen not to support open or third-party rendering API collections, such as OpenGL or WebGL. Instead, Microsoft Xbox exclusively uses Microsoft’s DirectX, while Sony uses its GNMX for PlayStation. Mobile devices typically support multiple standards, but they often restrict (or outright block) access to many drivers, which helps drive developers to their proprietary offering. PC and Mac are more open, but they’re optimized for Microsoft’s DirectX and Apple’s Metal APIs. As a result, a developer’s software needs to be written specifically for each platform’s ‘standards’. Fortnite needs to use Microsoft’s DirectX for Xbox, and Sony’s GNMX for PlayStation, Nvidia’s NVM for Nintendo Switch, and Apple’s Metal for iOS. Only Google’s Android has built its solution around OpenGL, but one could argue its dominance with Chrome and Chromium controls these standards for the web.

GPUs also have their own flavor of these protocols, too. Nvidia’s drivers are effectively a ‘platform’ that developers utilize to access a PC user’s hardware, working in concert with Microsoft’s DirectX, for rendering.

But if companies like these want to keep their standards closed, their customers, unified, can demand otherwise. As Matthew writes, the runaway success of Fortnite caused gamers to clamor for the chance to play together with their friends on other devices -- and their clamor grew so great (as did their threats to take their eyeballs elsewhere), even proprietary AF Sony finally complied:  

Inside Horizon Workrooms: Oculus Vet Jim Purbrick on Mapping Real Offices to Virtual Spaces -- and How His Team Used It During the Pandemic For Their Own Meetings

Last week's launch of Facebook's Horizon Workrooms garnered a lot of guffaws due to its sheer Zuckerbergian much-ness, but beneath the VR-for-office meetings platform is some impressive tech.

On his blog, Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (who helped lead development of Workrooms)  goes into detail on a key Workrooms feature -- virtual mapping of the user's real meeting location/surroundings:

[Workrooms] shows you an entirely virtual environment, but asks you to indicate the position of real world objects like your desk in a process which feels like a more detailed guardian setup process. Workrooms then positions your avatar in the virtual world so that your real desktop aligns with your virtual desktop.

When you reach out and touch the virtual desk your hands touch the real desk. As long as the important virtual objects within arms reach are mapped to real objects, the virtual environment can be much bigger than the available real space while maintaining the illusion that every virtual object can be touched as well as seen.

Jim (who left Facebook late last year) allows that this is not the type of set-up you want to be strapped into for your entire day: "Currently you wouldn't want to use a Quest all day," as he puts it. "But you could easily attend several typical hour long meetings a day without feeling uncomfortable."

Throughout the pandemic, the Oculus group developing Workrooms would actually use their own platform to hold meetings:

XR Pioneer Sees Facebook's XR Plans as Trojan Horse Threat to Society

Here's some good weekend reading from Avi Bar-Zeev (previously featured here), an XR pioneer with serious cred who after working and consulting on XR projects with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Linden Lab in the early years, likely knows about anything in the space worth knowing. And his forecast of what Facebook plans to do with its XR projects (such as the recently-announced Horizon Workrooms, not to mention Zuckerberg saying Facebook is becoming a Metaverse company) is decidedly Cassandra-ish:

We’re at a critical inflection point. This ultra high-tech ad-driven machine, epitomized by Facebook, represents a new kind of Trojan horse that we’ve only just recently welcomed into our world. Night is falling and the sacking has barely begun. In the future, we run the risk of being so entranced by our shiny new gifts that we lose the will to fight entirely.

On the other hand, if Facebook and others really become true privacy-first, consumer-first companies with business models that reinforce it, if they listen to criticism and welcome independent oversight, they could still become the core companies we depend on, with enough meaningful introspective data and the right protections to actually make our lives better than today.

I just hit up Avi to quibble a bit with his roadmap; while it looks roughly plausible to me, I spy some problems for Facebook's plans: For instance, Quest 2 sales are slow, the PSVR is giving them heavy competition, and Horizon (from what I'm told) is having development challenges; and now, a lot of people are laughing at that Workroom thing. Wouldn't all that change this roadmap?

ROBLOX Exploiting Young Game Developers According to Startling Exposé

I usually blog Matthew Ball's Metaverse Primer on Thursdays, but this new exposé by freelance UK journalist Quintin Smith (Wired, Edge, Eurogamer, Kotaku) is important viewing now -- and is just as important if not moreso for the future of the Metaverse, and whatever it becomes.

In his report (watch above on his People Make Games YouTube channel), Smith delves deeply into the ways ROBLOX monetizes user creators on its massively popular platform -- many or most of whom are minors -- with mechanics that he deems so exploitative, he compares them at one point to the infamous scrip that abusive companies used to "pay" its workers. 

"For me," as Smith puts it to me, "the most egregious part of the whole story is the platform's minimum withdrawal amount of 100,000 Robux, which equates to $350 US when a developer withdraws it. If you take into account Roblox's cut of 30% of every transaction on the platform, it means a developer needs to have taken 143,000 Robux from its users before they're allowed to withdraw it as actual cash." 

In practice, Smith goes on, this tends to lock ROBLOX creators into the system: "The cost for users to buy 143,000 Robux is around $1430. So your game needs to have raked in $1430 in Robux before you, the developer, receive so much as $1." (Also, a ROBLOX developer can only cash out if they have a $5/month premium subscription.)

As I've noted before, user creators in Second Life earn as much revenue in total from the platform as Linden Lab itself. And Second Life's user base is mostly adults, while ROBLOX's user base is primarily under 18.

"If you accept that we need to treat minors who are doing a job better than we treat adults doing the same job," says Smith, "that's just abhorrent. Especially when you consider the platform is encouraging kids to come and work for them."

He tells me he reached out to ROBLOX the company about his report, but received no reply.

Then again, even as ROBLOX enjoyed a speculator IPO earlier this year,  few if any reporters have explored the company's monetization policies:

Niantic Throws Down Gauntlet Against the Virtual World Metaverse -- But Making Its "Real-World Metaverse" Will Be a Challenge

With all the hype around THE METAVERSE lately, this was bound to happen -- though I'm somewhat surprised it's coming from the CEO of AR-based virtual world creator Niantic:

A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one — or we can work to make sure that doesn’t happen. At Niantic, we choose the latter. We believe we can use technology to lean into the ‘reality’ of augmented reality — encouraging everyone, ourselves included, to stand up, walk outside, and connect with people and the world around us. This is what we humans are born to do, the result of two millions years of human evolution, and as a result those are the things that make us the happiest. Technology should be used to make these core human experiences better — not to replace them.

Once again, based on what Neal Stephenson himself told me, Snow Crash's Metaverse is not exactly a dystopian warning. (We are starting to get into "Let me tell you what Fahrenheit 451 is really about, Ray Bradbury" territory with this novel!)

In any case, I'm glad to see this debate met -- I admire Niantic's technology and design team quite a bit, and would really love to see a mixed reality virtual world become a viable model. That said, the jury's out on whether Niantic itself is the one to pull what it has in mind off -- again from the post:

Four Reasons Why Cloud Streaming is the Best Solution for Making the Metaverse (Comment of the Week)

After thinking about the many technical obstacles facing the creation of an ideal Metaverse, longtime Metaverse developer Lex4art argues that cloud streaming is the best solution we have at our disposal now. Here's his case:

Accessibility & Pricing Flexibility

Anyone can join, hardware requirements are super low (fast enough Internet connection + some kind of display + some kind of input to move/interact with the metaverse). There's also flexibility in monthly fee: the lower the requested rendering quality and lower video stream bitrate (lower traffic), then the less it can cost for the [end user]. Maybe even free connections will be possible for lowest quality. So, if you need quality - pay more. If you don't need it - pick a less fancy solution that still gets job done.

Three more reasons from Mr. Art:

Making the Metaverse Will Require a Major Breakthrough in Computing Power - My Take On Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, Part 4

I'm blogging Matthew Ball’s must-read, nine part metaverse primer over the Summer; my take on Part 1 is here,  my coverage of Part 2 is here, with Part 3 coverage here.

Part 4 of Matthew Ball's Metaverse Primer includes a personal story highlighting just how much computing power a Metaverse worth the name will require: The launch of Rival Peak, a "Massively Interactive Live Event" produced by one of the venture capitalist's portfolio companies.  (Trailer above: Basically a reality TV competition show but starring NPCs in a virtual world, streamed to Facebook Watch.) The show required so much computing power to deploy, Amazon Web Services briefly capitulated to its demands:

In fact, it barely operated on AWS. With eight environments (production, backup, staging, QA and development), each of which was supported by over a dozen GPUs and hundreds of other CPUs, Rival Peak once ran out of GPU servers on AWS, and, during testing, routinely exhausted available spot servers.

Because there were no specific players (let alone a ‘player one’), Rival Peak doesn’t fit the instinctive definition of the Metaverse. However, the operation of a persistent and unending virtual world that supports unlimited interactions, each with lasting consequences, is as close to the end-state Metaverse as any other. And even in its nascent form, and without requiring meaningful consumer-side processing, it was running out of compute.

Rival Peak is not even a single shard virtual world with live user-controlled avatars dynamically creating content, yet the computing power required to achieve even its limited amount of interactivity, while having it simultaneously experienced by tens of thousands of concurrent users, was just too much for AWS to handle.  

This takeaway stands out most to me with Part 4 (just as it did with Part 3 and networking): The ideal Metaverse will require a significant leap in our existing technology.

Other highlights:

Metaverse Evangelists Typically Dismiss The Idea's Dystopian Origins

Technologist Anil Dash started an interesting Twitter thread recently about a Vice essay on the Metaverse's dystopian origins, something that's rarely mentioned amid the newfound buzz over the topic. It's actually a theme I raised in 2016 for this Wired article: 

There’s an eerie parallel to these Silicon Valley projects and the sci-fi novels that inspired them. Stephenson’s Metaverse thrives as the real world descends into misery---the US undone by crime and chaos, most of Asia ravaged by economic collapse. In Ready Player One, the 2011 bestseller that Steven Spielberg is adapting for film, the poor live in stacked trailer homes and spend most of their squalid lives logged into a metaverse called Oasis. Even as entrepreneurs... build actual metaverses of their own, the real world also faces a future shaped by economic uncertainty and global climate change.

In both novels, the strong implication is that the Metaverse is popular in the future because real life is too horrible to bear. I've brought this point up to several Metaverse developers, and they've consistently dismissed the connection; many of them have argued that the dystopian aspect is merely for the sake of telling an exciting story.

Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at Oculus, had a typical reply to me when I raised the issue back then: