Is the Metaverse just the internet 4.0? Can we expect a box of Hazelnut Swirls or will it be littered with Bounty Bars?

I’ve been pondering the Metaverse recently.

Like many of a certain age, this virtual planetary panacea has been a long time coming.

My early youth was spent sitting in front of a black and white television, sans girlfriend or sans the thought that a relationship was more exciting than a ZX-81, immersed in the very first virtual adventure games.  The words virtual and adventure in the 1980s was not to be used literally or indeed virtually. These first forays into futuristic forests, pixilated palaces or digital dungeons, visualised beautifully on the front of a cassette tape, was of course in essence endless hours of sitting in front of a blank screen, or if you were lucky four lines aiming inwardly to create the illusion, and this was no Paul Daniels, of an infinite corridor, your home computer cursor flashing expectantly as it waited for your next step into the unknown.

Move forward.

Move left.

Open Door.

Enter Room.

The excitement building as you saw nothing, found nothing, did nothing, and then…

‘A troll has unexpectedly been locked in this room for 100 years, it has attacked you with the log of Zaindar, you will need to start again.’

And in an instant you were whisked back to the same blank screen, or door, to once again enter the never ending corridors of life as you started again, and again, and again.

And it was brilliant. Who needed a girlfriend at fourteen when you had this level of excitement in your life. I once got asked to the pictures, yes it happened, but it clashed with computer club and no way could sitting in a dark cinema with a female who you’d been meaning to ask out for a while but never had the courage to do so come close to the excitement of being with 200 mainly pimply boys, well mainly boys, all pimply, getting beaten over the head by a troll. I’m busy that night sorry. You couldn’t miss computer club!

Fast forward ten years and of course we had DOOM, the game that brought down a thousand corporate networks. Attend any networking talk, show, or event, and every speaker would, by law, have to have a slide that said, “Do you know how much DOOM is on your network right now.” Everybody of course did, because everybody was playing it.

DOOM was the corporate metaverse of the 1990s. UK and Global productivity charts show a major drop in GDP when new editions of DOOM were released.

Now, at Cabletron we were lucky enough to have written the world’s first Object Orientated Network Management platform, which through rudimentary intelligent could build a real-time model of all of the network components in your CMDB, which in turn when a failure occurred could identify any single points of failure or causal outages, suppressing alarms and alerts from devices downstream of the failed item, massively reducing network diagnostic times and time to resolution. It was brilliant.

What was more brilliant is that Spectrum ran on a Silicon Graphics box that had the best immersive flight simulator in the world at the time.

Between showing customers how our amazing Network Management Platform could learn their individual network environments and bring massive cost savings and improved uptimes, we were landing 747’s at JFK or taking off from Heathrow for what one day was a live flight to New York. That was a long day in the office, and we took it in turns to deliver inflight catering to each other as our extensive flight crew took international mandated rest breaks, to do some work, as we collectively guided our passengers safely across the pond. I tell you though, that landing was pretty tricky if your colleague, Andy Wragg, had secretly turned on a side wind and rain clouds.

And Spectrum could, using a sniffer, tell if DOOM was running on your network, which of course, it was, running everywhere. Finance was playing HR, warehouse was battling sales, the CEO was taking on the CFO with a Gatling gun in a trench somewhere in Europe. 

Fast forward another ten years of course and we had the XBOX, and a new era of immersive games and worlds to explore, but on a whole new level.

My wife, then girlfriend, bought me an XBOX for Christmas, with two games, Alien and Porsche Boxster racing.

Alien of course was one of the scariest films of the era; a genuine heart stopper, full of what my children now call jump scares, that didn’t just translate well into immersive gaming, it was just as heart pounding. We lived in a small house in Hungerford at the time, and after a session on the XBOX and Alien had to have a cup of tea before going to bed to calm down. Like the film you had a little personal radar to spot approaching Aliens, and when the blips started to blip faster, the handset started to shake and become as unfathomable as operating the large hydron collider at CERN as you tried to run, as a flaming great big [actually about 3 inches tall on a TV screen] sulphuric acid filled Alien would appear somewhere in your vicinity and after realising escape was futile you would try to blast it to death with your well, blaster, and of course die a horrible death. The game designers ability to bring the big screen realism to the home console was game changing, but times were a changing in films as well as games, and with most films being created by the same CGI that was being used in our computer games, the gap between film and game was becoming indistinguishable. To the point games started to become major films and make more money than films that were just films. It’s still the closest I have got to driving a Boxster BTW.

After so many versions of the XBOX [I am tight, so still on the XBOX 360 when Tiger Woods didn’t have a bad back] we moved into the world of virtual reality with the Oculus headset. I am too tight. My brother has one.

Three Christmases ago we sat in his beautifully appointed 1950s front room in Wrexham, our family, his, and my mother, as we lodged this space age headset onto  our bonces and entered new worlds.

I flew a Harrier down through the Welsh Mountains, wing tips flirting with danger as I banked and climbed my way down the valleys, an actual fighter pilot for the first and only time in my life. It was so realistic I became airsick and had to sit down for an hour before trying anything else. A massive T Rex chased my daughters down a corridor and they screamed in actual terror when it caught them. Imagine if it had been an Alien! My mother, the first throws of dementia properly taking hold sat on a tranquil beach for 10 minutes the waves lapping at her feet and the sun shining down on her, before we virtually pushed her into a roller coaster and sent her off on a trip she couldn’t help laugh and scream all the way through in enjoyment.

As we individually entered and got lost for moments in our own virtual worlds, of course half of the fun was not being in the Oculus virtual reality but being outside it in the real world enjoying watching our loved ones enjoying themselves virtually and physically in front of us all. Part of the joy of being there was not being there but being there.

And of course they were all games. Mere entertainment we could dip in and out.

Another decade, the first attempts at a virtual utopia, Second Life now itself just a game, comes the promise of the Metaverse.

A world where virtual and reality, reality and virtual may is intended to become so blurred that we will pixilate our lives into what for many may become a single morphed existence.

Today of course, the Metaverse is being used by corporations, the corporations that have invested in it in the main, as a virtual and unbounded mechanism to do the things that corporations do in real life. A large consultancy firm has acquired 6,000 so their new team members can on-board themselves and familiarise themselves with the business without having to be anywhere to do it, but be everywhere they need to be to become part of the firm and its culture. Step forward. Turn left. Open Door. Oh its HR!!

Training is moving into the metaverse where engineers can be coached on fixing complex machinery using a digital twin of the physical machine they will soon encounter. Putting engineers into front of the actual thing they might have to fix is expensive, slow, and limits the number of engineers we can produce. The UK government and opposition talk of training up thousands of engineers to insulate our homes. Doing that physically will mean the last house gets insulated just before the next ice age. But doing training, all sorts of training in the Metaverse world makes a huge amount of sense. And those same engineers can go on to fix those digital twins which will in turn remedy problems with their physical beings.

The business / industrial Metaverse is in my view a compelling and natural extension of the digitisation of business operations, and it makes a huge amount of sense to continue to hyper-digitise activities that businesses and their people need to get done, and get them done immersively. I’ve never sat through an induction and felt induced to enjoy myself. Give me a headset any day.

At Sapphire we are working on operational processes and platforms will exist and be improved on in the metaverse. Low code is already taking hold in our world, so no code meta-process isn’t a huge leap of faith, it’s an interesting and possible exciting new way for companies to visual and improve on the way their business operates. Integrate process mining into the metaverse and then walk or fly [I may be a Welsh Dragon in the metaverse] and don’t think a process you see running through your business or department is optimised, edit it in the metaverse and change the way your business operates or automates itself at the swish of a hand. We will have something to show soon.

I see a huge amount of good about the metaverse. In industry and business, I only see good if I am honest. The value we are getting from 2D and then 3D digital can only continue to give for so long, and we must continually find new ways of scaling digital value into the future. The natural if not supernatural extension of our business world and industrial world holds imaginable and unimageable opportunities.

But, as Forrest Gump said, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.”

Mars Wrigley consulted 2,000 people aged between 18 and 65, and while this generation love the thought of dipping their hands into the Internet and finding anything, 18% of them would feel irritated to find only little Bounty bars were left in a tub, and 58% believed it would lead to a family argument.

And that got me thinking about metaverse digital transformation.

We start all projects with a clear view of the outcomes and benefits we want from an initiative. We can see a new world, not with absolute clarity, but enough to grasp onto and start a new journey.

But, without governance and control and a continual focus on those end goals we can be accidentally or purposely taken off our track to those positive outcomes.

The wonks at Meta or Microsoft or any of the other tech mega corporations banking and betting on this utopian world don’t just see our companies dipping their toes into this immersive digital sea, they want us, our lives, and maybe our souls to be neurons deep and consumed and re-constructed virtually.   

I can imagine sitting with my metaverse skin glove and my headset actually holding the hand of my mother wearing the same and feeling totally and utterly connected to her. A major Consultancy firm said a few weeks ago, nobody will make any money in the metaverse for many years. Holding a distant mums hand remotely is more than money could ever buy.

But that coffee cream can give way to so many toffee pennies.

It is starting to become possible, and of course the meta corporations will demand this, that every moment we live will be digitally captured, analysed, and recreated, so they can recreate us in this life, and the next.  You can already turn up at your own funeral, or something like yourself, recreated from your social media posts and interact with your relatives and turned into your own AI!

In the metaverse you will be able to live forever, and meet living relatives, but in the future live digitally with everybody you have known. Sounds like something doesn’t it? Meta-Heaven? There is a theory we were once an advanced civilisation, aliens, who are re-building what we had before. Is heaven just the way we describe a metaverse we once had?

Do these meta companies already have our digital twins somewhere, using all of our social data to model how we think, and speak, and interact, and using us to simulate us and the world around us? One day you may bump into your own digital twin in the metaverse. In quantum things can exist in two different places; do you already exist in a computer somewhere thinking and interacting with your friends and family. I would bet on it that some of us do. I am too boring for them to bother we me.

Like all new things, like all great initiatives, the metaverse will be a mix of things we want, we like and unfortunately it is going to include so many things we don’t.

We laughed and loved with my mum because we were outside the virtual world as a family, connected, seeing the woman we love enjoy herself like she hadn’t for many years. If we had been on that same rollercoaster all wearing our headsets would we would have all had a good time, but we would have lost sight of what was important in that moment.

So like all great digital transformation projects, business or in life, we must have people off the roller coaster ensuring we all have a good time, but we never lose sight of the end result we are after.

They will find the Bounty Bars for us and ensure they are controlled or minimised, to minimise those family arguments we as teams have, must have, as part of the journey of change, but also enable us to keep moving on to brighter and happier times when that particular box is finished.

I hope sometime soon I can be with my Mum every evening and hold her hand, that haptic glove allowing us to connect in a way that is different to how we have done in the past but still as rewarding if not more so as life and distance makes it impossible today.

But, I also hope the hand controlling the future isn’t totally immersed in the roller coaster we are all on, and they can help us find the Bounty Bars of life, and maybe not remove them, but ensure we find more Hazelnut Swirls.