What the hell is the Metaverse?
Roy Rodenhaeuser
Creative Technologist | Founder @ Canvastique3D | Capgemini Engineering | ex-Unity | ex-Yahoo/Verizon
Before the recent hype about the Metaverse, I might have occasionally used the term as a synonym for Virtual Reality, just like I might have used the word Matrix for the same. You know, once in a while it’s fun to reference science fiction work to highlight some commonality with a videogame or a real-life experience, but that was all there was to it, just a casual reference.
While now, I open my social feed and there it is, yet another brand that claims to be the first at doing something amazing inside this buzzword, from concerts with pop stars in Fortnite to selling something as trivial as a hat on Roblox, basically any commercial activity that the pandemic has put at risk during the last two years but now inside a multiplayer video game.
Others instead are promoting the Metaverse as a vision for a shared virtual space that is both persistent and immersive, where people take part in social activities and own goods through decentralized economy. Suddenly, it turned into a dreamlike collective aspiration about the future of the Internet.
So, what is it then? Are fun places like Roblox, Fortnite, VRChat, Decentraland, Animal Crossing — you name it — all metaverses or is there only one true Metaverse that is yet to be built? And, why has Virtual Reality anything to do with it?
Let’s start by going back in time, about 30 years back, when the Game Boy was the hottest gaming console and Wolfenstein 3D was just released for DOS.
The term first made its appearance in the 1992 novel Snow Crash written by science fiction author Neal Stephenson.
In his novel, the Metaverse is a computer generated world that exists parallel to ours, rendered as a perfectly round black sphere that would surpass the circumference of the Earth if compared in size. Stretching across its equator is a wide street simply known as, well, the Street, a boulevard that virtually welcomes millions of people at any given time, and because the required equipment to visit the Metaverse isn’t cheap, any building or sign placed in the most developed parts of the Street would immediately be seen by the wealthiest portion of humanity.
"Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on Earth will see it every day of their lives."
To induce a sense of presence inside this digital universe, a dedicated computer would generate an electron beam to project images across the lenses of a user’s goggles, 72 times a second with a vertical density of 2K pixels. Not bad even for today’s standards.
But this is just a fictional story, and back in 1992 the closest thing to it that one could experience outside of NASA labs was the product sold by a start-up named W Industries.
First presented to the public in 1991, the Virtuality system produced by W Industries would later appear across several arcade venues. It was followed by a few other attempts at consumer VR for gamers, but the interest from the consumer market eventually vanished, perhaps due to the high price point and limited graphic capabilities.
Fast forward to 2010, a 17 years old called Palmer Luckey, completed his first prototype of a VR headset. The garage-born project soon turned into Oculus VR in 2012, a company that launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign raising over 2.4 million US dollars, almost ten times the initially pledged amount, this to bring to life the Oculus Rift, a VR device specifically designed for gamers.
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"What I've got now, is, I honestly think the best VR demo probably the world has ever seen." - John Carmack, id Software
John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, soon joined as its CTO, and later in 2014 Facebook acquired Oculus VR for 2 billion dollars, as a “long-term bet on the future of computing” as Mark Zuckerberg said. Just like that, more or less, consumer VR became a thing again, a good part of it now under the umbrella of the largest social network in the world.
But, is Virtual Reality the Metaverse? It appears to be an important building block due to the unrivalled sense of presence that it conveys, but even after rebranding Facebook to Meta and apparently investing the likes of $10 billion dollars in XR just in 2021, Zuckerberg himself stated that the Metaverse isn’t just Virtual Reality or 3D if that matters, rather an embodied Internet, “a vision that spans many companies — the whole industry”.
In fact companies like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Unity seem to share another vision about it. They see the Metaverse as a digital depiction of the physical world, a Digital Twin. Any object, environment, and even the entire world could have an abstract version of itself including their physical properties, in a form that computers can process, enabling things like the remote supervision of a factory or city, the training of AI models using synthetic data, and the prediction of outcomes by running simulations.
Activities and information so deeply connected with the real-world that in fact, we could enhance and access using Augmented Reality. Not an escape into another universe but rather an amplification of what is directly in front of our eyes.
To sum up, I suppose there are metaverses with a small ‘m’, and the Metaverse with a capital ‘M’. Standing on one side, multiplayer games that have been around for a while, but that big brands recently realized can be more than that — concert venues, fashion stores, and exclusive boulevards where avatars model rare items. Also standing on the same side, Digital Twins, with measurable benefits for multiple industries powered by real-time 3D and spatial computing, my favourite version of it today.
And finally, standing far, far away on the horizon is a dream about decentralized economical and computational resources as the foundation of a shared and persistent digital world... the Metaverse.
This is my personal take on the subject, a way to make sense of how the term is being used across media rather than a definitive answer, which doesn't exist, not yet at least.
Below is a list of sources I used when writing the article. If you think there are some inconsistencies in what I said, feel free to comment or reach out directly.
Special thanks to Dr Eleonora Bacchi for proofreading the article and sharing her opinions with me.
Sources
Chief Executive @ Coaching 2100 | Industry 5.0 AI Leadership | Author of The AI Executive Brief & Strategic Thought Leadership First: AI Readiness & Industry 5.0 |
2ySpectacular thank you, Roy Rodenhäuser, applauding now.
Team Leader | Contributor | Girl Dad
2yAwesome to read your thoughts on this
Building Assets in Metaverse | Startup Fundraising & Private Capital Raising | Investor & Advisor to Early Stage Startups | Certified Corporate Director | Registered Independent Director-MCA/IICA India
2yGreat insights and perspectives
Lighting Tutor at RCS, Sabbatical Cover - Freelance Lighting Designer and Technician - Avolites Titan Trainer for Scotland - Vectorworks Specialist - Master of Education
2yThat’s a great introduction. I find it’s difficult to put my finger on what the Metaverse or metaverses is/are with all the noise surrounding it at the moment.
Start-up Business Librarian | Attorney | Metaverse Junkie
2yas a librarian I have to say that's a serious citation list for a LinkedIn article. Great job 😀