A Framework for the Metaverse
matthewball.vc
matthewball.vc
If you skip through the series to 'Evolving User + Business Behaviors and the Metaverse' you avoid the hand-waving tech roadmapping and get to how this technology is supposed to change people's lives, and what's described is (mostly) super entertainment-oriented, consumerist, and corporate-crossover-branded to the point of self-parody.
At times I get the vibe that VCs are very keen on having "Fornite but you spend $10,000s more on digital clothing, steroids, vehicles, and housing because you no longer care about the physical world. Oh and the sex workers are now digital. Your 'friends' are digital too, and also computer algorithms." No thanks.
It approaches something like Infinite Jest's Samizdat videotape. Entertainment perfection so engrossing it may literally kill you (if Facebook hasn't made sure you're hooked up to food, water, and sanitation systems).
Small, but crucial difference: the Samizdat did not involve money transactions :)
Which to be clear is not to say that the concept of the metaverse is somehow recent - it's exactly as old as it's made out to be, but the obsession - particularly from SV elites/VCs - seems to have manifested very recently.
One thing that also rubs me the wrong way is that it's nearly always accompanied with cryptocurrency boosterism - even though I see absolutely no reason why NFTs or Bitcoin or Ether or Tether would be a critical part of the metaverse at all. At worst it seems like a transparent attempt to shoehorn something that has proven to have few applications outside of raw speculation, into a concept that might actually be interesting.
The total failure to also acknowledge that depictions of the metaverse are overwhelmingly dystopian is also alarming. I have some willingness to believe that a virtual universe could be a benefit to people - but "let's recreate Snow Crash!" is... not that.
I’m not disagreeing with your overall characterization, but I think NFTs in particular are poised to be a very integral part of the purportedly forthcoming metaverse.
Why can't I buy the game item with actual fiat currency (or its many non-crypto microcurrency equivalents like what MS and Sony operate for their stores)? They can also intermediate its authenticity and ownership between games.
This is how things work right now - there are lots of promos where some in-game addon or item is provided upon validating ownership of some other thing. All of the major stores (see: Steam, PS, Xbox) provide this functionality.
The only real difference here seems to be decentralization - but how does that benefit me as a consumer? I know there's a lot of words spewing around re: "authenticity", but I still fail to see the practical applications of a virtual hologram sticker on horse armor.
But this echoes my overall feelings about crypto - it presents many downsides and few upsides. The only consistent upside it provides is decentralization - but it's only an "upside" insofar as it is ideologically attractive to adherents. In nearly all cases the decentralization provides no tangible benefit to the bearer.
If game company A goes out of business, they won’t take your digital asset with them.
Additionally, a skin (for this example), could also be rendered decades from now in a retro-style game arcade within the metaverse. The permanence of the blockchain will probably outlive most access keys to it.
A father could pass down his private keys and digital assets to his child as his legacy.
It’s a brave new metaworld.
But this isn't how any blockchain is currently implemented. With NFTs the underlying asset is not actually stored on the blockchain - URLs are, and the URLs are just as prone to being dead as the companies that own them.
I can see maybe a point with decentralization being a guard against bitrot, but that isn't how it works? Hell, there are already NFTs with dead URL pointers, so they are now nothing more than certificates of authenticity to content that is unviewable. The hypothetical retro skin will die when the company that issued it goes out of business - all the blockchain will give you is a permanent faint outline of the content where it used to be, it doesn't preserve the content itself.
There are a lot of junk NFTs now, but it doesn’t have to be that way
1. What does 3D space add? If I want to shop for some item it's more convenient for me to look at a list with pictures and text than to wander through a 3D store. It's also more efficient for the vendor to provide the list than pay people to model the interior of their 3D store, scan all their products in, etc. The Internet won through being more convenient, I don't see how this isn't a step backwards.
2. What are we going to do about UGC kitsch? Second Life and more recently VRChat and NeosVR have provided demonstrations of what a metaverse combining content from thousands of creators of mixed skill levels is like. While I can appreciate it on some level, the fact is it's hideous. Are the operators of metaverse-Amazon really going to let their in-store aesthetics be ruined by a low-poly neon-purple wolf wandering through it while I'm trying to browse? If they are, why? If they aren't, how is this an interconnected metaverse?
3. Why is anyone going to respect the interconnectedness of the metaverse? Websites successfully resisted the Semantic Web. Businesses don't want to point the way to their competitors. Games want to constrain what the player character can be to fit a specific power level, tone or art style. Fortnite, for all of its metaverse cred, does not allow players to upload their own avatars and has never (to my knowledge) added a portal which when entered closes Fortnite and opens another game.
Virtual Reality is a Sci-Fi thing. I'd rather have Augmented Reality so I can have reviews on products while I browse a real/physical store without taking out my smartphone (which is getting slower and slower as time pass by).
IMHO, VR will never be a thing, not with the current technology at least.
I don't want to live in a world were the idea of sitting at home to live in a virtual world instead of going out is considered "progress".
It's not either/or. I enjoy VR experiences. I enjoy sunshine, fresh air and travel.
For me VR is just an obvious upgrade to a flat screen for viewing spatial content and environments. I don't always need it but the fact that I can grab a headset from the shelf and view something properly rather than peering at it through a small rectangle seems to me to be a good thing.
Cinema will never be VR. This leaves video games and simulations, both are expensive to make and play.
VR will never be as popular as a smartphone or a movie, it will always be a niche.
And the moment when every one has an oculus rift (or whatever headset) with a computer able to use it with enough FPS is far far along the road. So far we might turn in another direction before getting there.
I'm not a fan of 360 video (it's very flat compared to true 6DOF VR and the resolution is currently very poor) but I think you're being unfair.
This is a creative failure - not something intrinsic to the medium. Watch a carefully made 6DOF experience and tell me that this problem isn't solvable. Wolves in the Walls or Gloomy Eyes are amazing examples of guiding the viewer through a volumetric scene.
> This leaves video games and simulations, both are expensive to make and play.
Considering I disagree with your previous statement I obvious disagree with this too. I'm also fairly sure you're missing a broad swathe of content but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "simulations"
> VR will never be as popular as a smartphone or a movie, it will always be a niche.
Probably true but I'm fine with that.
> And the moment when every one has an oculus rift (or whatever headset) with a computer able to use it with enough FPS is far far along the road. So far we might turn in another direction before getting there.
Why is "everyone" an important benchmark? Smartphones were interesting even at the point where they were still niche and they would have remained interesting had they stayed that way. As long as a medium has enough makers and consumers to be self-sustaining then that's ok. I think VR has demonstrated a staying power way beyond the original nay-sayers. There's great work still being made and sales are still increasing.
And I still enjoy it and want to contribute to it.
When you say sitting at home in a virtual world, I think of online meetings, which could be improved by having a more real-like world, rather than talking to a wall with Harry Potter like moving pictures of people.
Are you thinking of Star Wars holograms but in VR?
Interconnectedness is really just a hyperlink, but instead of going to the link by clicking a link, you go through a space. That space could be a portal or it could just be moving from one area to another, a web equivalent would be that you're scrolling a website and after scrolling for a while the content is loaded from another server.
>Interconnectedness is really just a hyperlink, but instead of going to the link by clicking a link, you go through a space.
Hyperlinks are much easier to implement. There's no requirement to have your game engines interoperable and translate seamlessly between the two as the transition takes place. And even then traveling via hyperlink between websites is hardly a seamless experience already. Inter-site hyperlinks are also not that popular. Social websites of course deal in them in large quantities, but your average business website avoids them like the plague. I don't think there's a single hyperlink on Amazon's website that leads out of their ecosystem.
All that has real world value. You also get the more advanced stuff, like seeing what your living room would look like with that IKEA couch before you buy it. Maybe you don't even need a computer screen, since your AR device can just show one whenever and whereever - great for movie nights with friends when you don't have a projector.
VR is great for gaming, porn and video. Maybe interactive learning too, idk.
[0]: Allowing the app maker to make a fortune by stealing your shopping habits, which most people will not care about.
Think of some of the reasons people still shop in stores:
* They can interact with products and see their true size.
* Our brains are great at memorising and imagining 3D spaces. We can remember where in the store certain products are located, and so shopping can be more efficient than searching for every item. Of course, search could still work in the metaverse, but is not necessary.
* I feel like its easier for me to know if I've seen everything in a real store, because I know I have walked down each and every aisle.
* 3D spaces seem more natural to navigate with other people - they can move around the same space, pointing at and grabbing hold of products
> It's also more efficient for the vendor to provide the list than pay people to model the interior of their 3D store, scan all their products in, etc
could also have been made 20 years ago when physical stores were hesitant about moving online; it cost money to build a website and take photos of all of their products.
>could also have been made 20 years ago when physical stores were hesitant about moving online
Indeed, but what we've learned since then is that consumer convenience is king (see: dark patterns in cookie prompts). Businesses were wary of the Internet transition but the force of convenience pushed them into it, I don't see a matching spike in convenience here.
The problem is the asset licence and that can be temporarily stop-gapped with royalty free assets on a open-source engine.
But to really accelerate the movement everyone should use a common network protocol and asset file format.
I made an attempt at the protocol: https://github.com/tinspin/fuse
And I'm working on the file formats: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449
The last ingredient is to have an economy and I think all the peices are allready here; we just need to wait for the old "meatspace" economy to collapse first.
Finally, Second Life did not make anything open enough legally for the system to grow organically indefinitely. Nobody has yet, partly because the hardware has always improved, which is slowing down now.
The metaverse is going to be built on top of the web, and will be responsive not just in terms of device support but also projectionality.
But most won't notice right away since it will be a poor way to make money. Just like the big service providers missed the web.
I could say "the metaverse already exists for half a century, we just called it 'internet'" and would be just as right.
Also what's with Silicon Valley recycling old scifi novels, are they finally running out of ideas?
The interesting thing about metaverse-type propositions is of course the insertion of not just play, but also development, education and work that's a part of our lives as well. MMORPGs are incredible in terms of providing a virtual life but don't enable our development as individuals and society beyond a certain point.
Audio has fallen victim to voice-specific compression and noise-gating in almost every talk-over-the-internet app. Music performances don't translate, for example. Audio nuance doesn't translate.
But there's a further problem: how to you put everyone into the same acoustic space? Currently, all participants come from disjoint acoustic spaces. One person is in a large room with wood floors, another in a small, carpeted room. How do you strip out the sound of those rooms, and add artificial ambience as if everyone were gathered in the same room, or no room at all (outside)?
People may not think of these things, but they profoundly affect our sense of "being there" in subconscious ways. I think we're still pretty impressed that we can send video and audio over the internet. We need to get over that, and realize we still have a long way to go.
no ar glasses, no 3D. simple projection mapping, the beauty of math and immersive illusions.
Anything that succeeds is going to be the expression of desire, and anything that is not the expression of desire is necessarily imposed on people and requires an increasing proportion of its resources to sustain it against the people it is imposed on. This is why I think architecture and other artifacts of technocratic thinking are interesting, but diseconomic and dumb. Nobody will invent a metaverse where they do not rule or control it, just like nobody believes anything political that doesn't justify their own sense of protagonism.
When someone says, "let's build a metaverse!" I am glad that they are distracted by own hubris, which costs them some months or years against leveraging their resources and conceits into doing any more harm. The way to see the future is not to invent it, but to listen to what people want, choose the ones you want to help, and help them to prevail.
It's so much easier to invent internally consistent frameworks, models, and architectures than it is to make even the simplest useful tool. Want a metaverse? Write me a program that provides me security, and I'm not the dumb one for leaving that meaning unspecified, you're the dumb one for not being able to figure it out.
The genius of the other metaverse (social media) is that it is a set of programs for providing another basic human desire: approval. If someone said, "write me a program that gives me personal validation and approval," almost nobody would invent facebook, but a few did, and the winner took all. Another basic need, sex, is also mostly integrated, I don't know what new form of transaction that is going to change that as much as online dating, porn, and the ongoing normalizaiton of sex work just did, as any change there seems marginal in comparison. Going up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, from physiological to self-actualization, we've got products that provide access to most of them, where Twitter is working on "esteem," where everyone imagines themselves as a kind of political micro-warlord with their followers. These weren't the artifacts of frameworks, they are responses to desire.
Personally, I think the bargain of a metaverse is you can have simulated everything, so long as you give up self actualization and dignity. We will accumulate comforting symbols to distract and obscure the nagging shame of it, and to forget if only briefly that we forfeited our agency to a system controlled by others, and with it, any connection to something universal or divine. We'll even moralize it, saying there was never anything there but superstition, the self justifying fairy tales that people with less approval and stuff tell themselves, or perhaps artifacts of illigitimacy based on an injustice that is finally righted now that we are all subjects of the same system, with the only rules being the ones that sustain and preserve its order. In this sense, everything about the metaverse idea is a way for its inventors to break from being subject to the real, and reign over what appears to be a kind of hell for everyone else.