The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world
medium.com
medium.com
Some initial suggestions:
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4...
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4...
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:l4...
Although they could just be people trying to get ahead of the curve.
Decentraland concurrent user count link: [1] 252 right now.
Sominium Space concurrent user count link: [2] 25 right now.
Yes, the user counts really are that tiny. Both have been live for more than a year, so it's not that they're new.
Somebody just paid almost a million dollars for a plot of land in Decentraland. Sotheby's has an outlet there. But nobody goes there.
The real metaverses are Roblox (about 1.8 million concurrent users today), Second Life (about 50,000) and VRChat (about 17,000). Maybe IMVU, but haven't found numbers for them. Fortnite is even bigger, but is more game than metaverse. The big ambitions outlined by Epic's CEO have not yet materialized.
He recently launched an ETF ($META) that indexes to "Metaverse" companies (Roblox, Unity, etc.).
I have always been pretty cynical about his takes and usage of "Metaverse." There's a lot of hand-waving and ted-talky grandstanding to make the "Metaverse" concept seem like something new, exciting and inevitable. But using "Metaverse" seems overly complicated, its just describing a large, centralized online community which isn't a new concept. World of Warcraft or Minecraft may have been the peak of the "Metaverse" so far, so it seems disingenuous to treat the "Metaverse" as something new and novel.
Kinda've stream of consciousness from me - but all this really seems like is someone with a consultant background applying frameworks and buzzwords to concepts that felt childish and unserious for so long (WoW, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc.), but now people are realizing that these companies and games can spit out serious cash, so they love someone who can package it together nicely through these frameworks and thought pieces. Boomers love this!
I think you're right.[1]
[1] https://www.matthewball.vc/all/forwardtothemetaverseprimer
Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite are close in various ways, and many apps have the feature set but are missing the user base.
at_19, sorry for the rebuke and the sarcasm.
That being said.
Metaverses are great.
I think there is an underpinning philosophical element to these discussion around aggregate universes that needs to be addressed.
My particular disdain is targeted at Fortnite.
Some of my disdain can be summarized via the Folding Ideas essay [1].
My disdain may or not be intrinsically linked to the ideals of capitalism, for which I think there is a larger discussion to be had. I believe, by all interpretation, Fortnite is a vehicle solely for capitalist ideals and doesn't allow room for alternative economic models (including capitalist synergies).
This, in concert with its branding (a childrens' game) is problematic for me.
Fortnite, in its essence, is an anarcho-capitalist model. The literal goal of any drop is zero sum by nature. Kill everyone else -> read kill as not literally kill, but subsume their resources and remove players so that one dominant entity can capture resources.
Part of the core gameplay is leveraging resources "enemies" have already obtained, mechanical efficiency, and coordination (if not solo-queued) against "the others".
The game, by its mechanics, is troublesome to me. This is not to mention the pure pay-to-win psychological manifest of their online store (which the video essay details). In short, the community forms their opinions based on the amount of capital a player had -> allowing the player to purchase skin-du-jour and enable a perception of higher status. The logic follows that a player with a newer and rarer skin *must* be more talented and mechanically efficient.
That is the summary of my angst whenever this subject is brought up. I'm not convinced that the thrust of any multi-m/b/illion dollar company when talking about the "multiverse" is anything other than a shallow ideological vector aligning with their checkbook.
I am convinced in the Minecraft and Roblox arguments as they have incredible creative power, systemically, although the same argument can be applied selectively. They are not adversarial by nature, however mini-games do exist within their ethos that push this ideology.
I think that it's frustrating to see any backing without challenging the long-term psychological effects of seeking mechanically derivative ideologies of one, possibly reductive (in implementation, not practice), line of economic philosophy.
I genuinely hope that covers the groundwork.
Once again, I'm sorry your comment caught my ire.
I suppose, personally, that I am jaded to the argument at its core, and very passionate about how those vectors are exposed.
To leave with you with some substance:
My ideal "Metaverse" is one unbounded by isolated cultural norms, and may actually be present in our lives today. I can see nothing good coming from an Epic Metaverse, but I see indie hackers using 3-d printing and free STL files making amazing robots. I see people designing in FOSS for those particular files that they can't find online. I see people developing completely OSS games in FOSS game engines so that someone might have entertainment free of charge. Maybe they will morph their own game? The metaverse is already here, and pushing shared brain farms is not something which I will back down from.
I am increasingly defensive as this argument arises because I see no implementation in which capitalist capture (the system which enables creators and both isolates them to that system) can have any real benefit as a shared experience. It's possible but not beneficial.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. There's only so much I can fit here, but I'm happy to expand if you need more context.
Nvidia has Omniverse
Roblox hit a $58B market cap in June
Unity has VR chat
And there are a zillion startups/indie games that claim to be "The Metaverse". Of course, for the metaverse to be successful, we need a common protocol, not walled gardens - but this is deep topic, and I don't want to type it all.
Media is moving to the metaverse - Fortnite concerts, Roblox concerts, Porter Robinson's virtual event, Tomorrowland, Lost Lands (couchlands)
Enterprise is moving to the metaverse - Microsoft/Epic games partnership for global 3D info (can't remember the name), Nvidia's Omniverse, just go google search "digital twins"
Rocket League, Fortnite, and Roblox are partnering with big brands
The metaverse is taking shape before our eyes. What we're missing is a common interop format, and the leading contenders are USD (Pixar, Nvidia) and gltf (Epic Games, Mozilla).
I'm building a business for the metaverse at the moment, and there is something real if you look past the hype. The problem is that it doesn't quite look like the metaverse of _Ready Player One_ or _Snowcrash_. So it's easy for people to dream in the wrong direction. As you might expect, much of this is pretty incremental progress, but that doesn't make as great of a narrative, and the conclusion of the available incremental progress is monumental - but there's a ton of work to be done.
I love talking about this stuff. If you want to work with us, or just trade thoughts, feel free to reach out to me about it.
I will say I think it's a bit of an antipattern to get too stuck to a particular fictional representation of something. It doesn't seem to be too common, but it tends to blind people to the real possibilites because they're too busy trying to jam it in a mold created by someone 30 years ago. Kinda reminds me of what I call the BOAC fallacy: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916 although it's not the same. Just because someone wrote about it in a particular fun story doesn't mean that it's going to end up that way, and I'd bet it won't.
Most fictional universes tend to ignore business fragmentation, which takes us to...
"What we're missing is a common interop format"
Perhaps it's my own limitations, but I can't even dream of what a "common interop format" would look like, or more importantly, why any player would agree to use it anytime soon. There's a lot of business case studies as to why everyone will be happy to agree to an "interop standard" of their own control and let other people's content into their walled garden, to be subject to the constraints of their walled garden, but will not do anything to let content out of their own walled garden, the net effect being no interop. This smells of Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL/etc. all over again.
Unless you just mean simple avatar interop, although the lowest common denominator is going to be pretty low for a while. Roblox probably runs entire gaming worlds with the resources an Unreal 4 avatar designed for a high-end computer could demand.
I believe a counterexample to ignoring that fragmentation is Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End, which I have not read, but I believe there is no single AR "metaverse" in that, but the technology is used for all sorts of things; you can opt in to the "fantasy" "metaverse", or the sci-fi one, or the Victorian England one, etc etc.
And also how multiplayer gaming in general isn't really included. To me, multiplayer gaming is where the real numbers have gone for the multiverse. It's just that most people don't care so much about things being completely open, configurable and user-scriptable as much as they do about other parts of the experience being smooth.
I actually think that the fact that these platforms such as SL and many others no one has heard of are so configurable makes a lot of people want to avoid them because it seems like work rather than play for them. And also the lack of constraints can be an intellectual burden for people.
But we do have things like Roblox and other contenders now that are more open.
I think to really get to the original cyberpunk spirit of the metaverse, we are going to be waiting for more comfortable VR gear to be widely available and cheap. Such as VR/AR using new technology that is much more like wearing a normal pair of glasses. I also think that wide deployment of new faster low-latency Wifi is going to make a difference in what applications can do.
Technology improvements like these are coming up over the next few years.
Only a fully open source project could give the freedom to do anything in a virtual world. Something you can run yourself, fully modify, and connect to others. Then again, open source gaming isn't a very big scene. Something usable on this scale seems unlikely for now.
So... commercial virtual spaces it'll end up being. Enjoy your ads.
Despite technically having everything required to tick that box, development is shackled to the funding capability of a single company, land values are extortionary considering the cost of server hosting these days ($300+ for a 'sim' a month, when they shard them up 100s to a server).
The solution has to be a set of standard protocols and interfaces that can be implemented by anyone, just as 'the web' was. Every time I see a 'Secondlife killer' come along I judge it's success at taking out the incumbent on it's openness, and I'm yet to see a real contender.
The architecture is rather expensive to run. Operating cost is per region, not per user. Regions run 24/7 regardless of whether any user is in them. Trains continue to run, crops continue to grow, grazing animals graze, a few cars drive themselves around, traffic lights continue to change...
Improbable's Spatial OS tried a more flexible architecture, where regions were dynamically resized as users entered and left. It cost US$400 million to develop, was expensive to run, and all four games based on it shut down due to high costs.
A big seamless virtual world is a hard problem. Except for the voxel crowd (Roblox, Minecraft, Dual Universe) who seem to be good at scaling, at the cost of being blocky.
Please don't take offence, but g5095's stance is akin to early US federalists advocating for strong centralized governance, whereas Animats stance is akin to US democtratic-republican values of distributed governance.[1]
If you think about Animast's point, that "regions run 24/7 regardless of whether any user [citizen] is in [consciously using] them. Trains continue to run, crops continue to grow, grazing animals graze...", and the the discrete energy cost of operating those regions - is this not the very challenge that all governments face in the "real world"?
With the maturation of the 'Metaverse', in which all functions of nature are boiled down to the discrete (countable) energy packets needed to transfer information, are we not seeing the struggle between centralized vs. distributed government play out in virtual space? If so, can we leverage the Metaverse as a proxy for nature, generally, to find the mathematical ideal balance between these two competing forces of democratic civilization? The result, I would presume, being some difinitive proportion - the measurable distribution and magnitude of 'control' energy with respect to the distribution and magnitude of total energy of a predominantly nonstochastic system (society).
It seems like there is a nexus here between control theory, information theory, thermodynamics, and indeed, sociology, that can be studied using the Metaverse to arrive at a more balanced societal framework. There is a truth here begging to be understood.
Second Life itself is rather open. Why this is so is interesting. Second Life isn't really run by Linden Labs. Linden Lab management is rather passive. They see themselves as a municipal government. Most things are run by land owners. You can buy virtual land, for which Linden Lab charges a fee for having it hosted. That's their main revenue stream. You can build things, and set up businesses. You can sublease. A few companies own large amounts of land and operate like real estate developers.
On your own land, you have considerable power over visitors. You can eject or ban them at will. Because of this, Second Life doesn't have in-world "moderators". There's a tiny "governance" team, and it deals more with land issues than user issues. There are some annoying people, but they get banned from popular spots and usually give up.
Advertising isn't a big thing. There are shops with signs, occasional billboards, and a web-based store. All the ads are for things useful within the virtual world, not real-world products.
So, while it's sort of a walled garden, it's not very. The client is open source, and more people run third-party clients than run the Linden Lab one.
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...
The kicker for me was the VR conference last year at the start of the pandemic that while anyone could attend in VR, only 25% did. Most thought attending on zoom was just easier. If it is not worth using VR for a VR conference then it seems pretty hopeless.
Maybe "virtual reality" has always been a mistake as a name as it is always going to under deliver.
I should be helping to build the Metaverse but I just don't believe in the concept anymore. At least not headset VR and I don't think I will live long enough to see an alternative.
Try to think and you’ll crash from hitting memory limits. Hit your processor quota and you’ll be spun down for the rest of the month. Like a forgotten Wordpress install you’ll be ravaged with malware, only able to talk about cheap v1agra, frantically spamming all your contacts.