The Metaverse: A brave, new virtual world

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.

1. https://www.ushistory.org/Us/19c.asp

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.