WTF is going on with “The Metaverse”?

18 min read Original article ↗

Wedge Martin

Authors: Katie Richman (tw: katierichman, medium: MetaKatie), Derek Puleston, and Wedge Martin

The contents of this article were created from conversations had between the authors. The opinions and ideas herein are solely ours, and not the opinions of any of our employer

What is the metaverse?

The metaverse is the concept of virtual reality encompassing (or eventually encompassing) every facet of our day to day lives. A virtual world in which our games, our social lives, our day to day business and transactions, everything is sewn together into one reality.

What is NOT the metaverse?

Sometimes it’s easier to talk about what it’s not:

  • It’s not “Metaverse” with a capital “M”.**
  • It’s not a game, in and of itself (like Minecraft or Fortnite).
  • It’s not a social platform (like Twitch or Discord or Meta!).
  • No one owns it.

It’s the maturation of the internet. Just like the internet is not a game or product (but enables games and products), so is the metaverse. It doesn’t have to load. It’s always there, always ‘on.’ The metaverse will be an extension of our lives; always there and always real-time, forever.

** Remember how we used to capitalize The Internet, as if it were a brand? Now it’s a common noun. The Metaverse should be the metaverse.

Show me the metaverse.

As of this writing, we have 0 demonstrable examples of what the metaverse is, or will be… but we’re seeing little examples of how it will operate and how it differs from Web 2.0.

Gaming has led the way, giving us the concept of “miniverses”:

  • Roblox
  • Fortnite
  • Minecraft

Think of when magazines went digital and Vogue was forced onto The Internet, formatted for iPads. What did Vogue.com look like? The print magazine. We would literally swipe through pages of a magazine that duplicated the print edition in circulation. Looking at this stage now, we look silly. Why would smart people DO that? We armchair quarterback situations. At the time, we couldn’t see the larger picture internet, nor a new way of organizing information and content or new ways of monetizing (still working on that).

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As dumb as this stage appears now, it was an essential stepping stone. We needed that dumb little ‘ledge’ of a moment, in order to scramble up and better see the real landscape. This Internet has no guardrails, rules, or parameters. We can do things in totally new ways. But the iPad magazine moment was essential.

Today, we’re seeing little ‘ledges’ and vogue iPad moments — miniverses that will let us scramble up and see the bigger picture. Without immersive 3-D experiences, the concept of real-time, always on, digital experiences wouldn’t make sense. As we mature, the bigger picture will come into view — a metaverse that doesn’t have to be called a ‘metaverse.’ It’s simply an extension or version or experience of reality, just as real as our physical world experiences. We need these ledges first.

How can that be? Everyone is talking about it already. And what is Discord?

As of today, there is no centralized Metaverse (or metaverse!). Gaming has led the way, and we now have multiplayer, always ‘on’ game experiences with our friends. This new model for real-time gaming is crystalizing a view of the internet (and life) that goes beyond the internet, social media, or gaming.

Roblox is an owned, centralized look at this new model. Take out the game aspect — the metaverse will encompass games. Remove the owned aspect — Facebook-now-Meta will have presence in the metaverse and make contributions, offer experiences, just as we all exist (but don’t own) the internet.

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Roblox is a little ‘ledge,’ too.

Interoperability will come in stages (ledges) as our central vision of life ‘online’ matures. Platforms will start to ‘talk’ to one another, allowing users to bring their in-game purchases with them (for example). Core, owned content and experiences will still very much exist (and monetize) individually, with parts of those experiences being exclusive and parts translating across brands and products.

Don’t lose patience. We aren’t where we’re going yet. Ledges.

Oh, and Discord. Discord is an application like Slack. It is analogous to metaverse as horseshoes are to black holes.

What are the benefits of the metaverse? Why will people use it?

Let’s reframe this and ask: What is the internet? Why will people use it? If someone asked that today, we’d laugh our asses off. Where to begin? It’s just part of life, part of our realities. So goes the metaverse of the near future.

Reasons will vary just as people do. Some humans might “use” the metaverse for the same reasons that Wedge says he uses alcohol. As escapism. Others might want to visit their bank in VR and speak with an actual human about opening an account. Someone else might be accruing points or crypto in a metaverse game, which she then turns around and uses to buy a new pair of shoes in an actual store down the street. Think of the literal Universe we live in. It doesn’t have a ‘purpose’ (that we know of) per se, but it’s full of essential parts of our reality.

Reality as we define it will adapt. As tech progresses — and once the resolution of our VR displays gets close to the precision of our retinal images — integrations with reality will get deeper. Each person will choose how much of their reality exists in the physical world and how much in digital spaces. Even the real world will have digital aspects to it — and we’re already there in many ways. We run at the gym and our watch tracks cardio. We visit the doctor and give them our Apple Health data to check the health of our heart.

Escapism. The internet for Wedge in 1990 was a place to escape to — whole virtual worlds called MUDs (or MU*s), which had meta languages on top of them that would allow us to build robust maps, robots, and other objects and interact with people from all over the world in a shared fantasy. (MUSH was a variant of MUD that stood for Multi User Shared Hallucination). The problem is, the interface was text. Pre-dating Snow Crash, William Gibson wrote about the ‘ICE’ as a network that you plug your brain into and everyone shared that reality. The key element here though, is that it’s *one* world. We’re not going to swap out our headsets to switch between games / applications. One ring will rule them all. Back in the 90s, some people actually thought that if they made good enough content, they could compete with the internet and be silo’d online experiences. AOL was a perfect example of this. Content lost out to the common platform as anyone could create content and publish it there. Anyone who knew about the Internet in the early 90s that thought AOL had a chance weren’t dumb. They were unable to see where we are now, as it is unlike anything that had come before. All of these ‘miniverses’ of today are like dozens of little AOLs. They are silos. The real metaverse will encompass these little metaverses and experiences, just as the internet encompasses your website.

When will that happen? And who will own it?

Holy shit we’re getting to the right questions.

Facebook’s VR team / Oculus have fired the first shot. They’ve built an app ecosystem where you can publish onto the platform, and people can use a top level menu and interact with a plethora of virtual realities. This is a step in the right direction. But this is not the metaverse.

Meta’s miniverse experiences and products are a good start, and these will be included in the metaverse. But the metaverse goes way beyond what one product or company builds. Like the internet of today, it will be endless and open. Unlike the internet of today, it will organically bridge gaps between our online and offline lives and realities.

We will be able to experience the Meta products, worlds, and games. And when we’ve had enough, we’ll travel on over to our live digital grocery service to buy tonight’s dinner. Then head to our metaverse workplace to put in some time on a project. Maybe we then hit the gym in the real world, but our digital fitness tracker is updating inside the metaverse. We’re getting points or rewards for this. At bedtime, maybe we’re staying alone and we’re lonely, so we put on our VR device and join a space where lots of lonely people are trying to go to sleep. We’re never alone in the metaverse if we don’t want to be.

But what about interoperability?

The ‘key’ to unlock the true, open metaverse will be enabling interoperability. Closed ecosystems — like Roblox, or Minecraft, or VR device experiences — will still exist…just as our physical reality is full of stores, businesses, services, neighbors’ homes… The big difference will be that one open, international, virtual space will be the water in which we swim, owned by no person or organization.

Just like NFTs on blockchain, humans will have one central unique ID, unduplicated now or ever. To enable interoperability, all games, experiences, and services on the metaverse will have to agree to use this non-denominational, unique user NFT to unlock my user id in their product experience. We need high-level interoperability between siloed businesses, games, and experiences to truly enable the metaverse. We need all hardware vendors are selling devices that connect users to the *same* metaverse. We need all software vendors to enable our unique user token for login. This ecosystem becomes open, and these interfaces become standardized in the same way that TCP/IP standardized networking and HTTP created the web.

You haven’t said much about blockchain and crypto, wtf.

Wedge climbs up on his soapbox:

That’s right. That’s because blockchain is a technology that may or may not be adopted by the metaverse. Blockchain is independent of the metaverse. Today, blockchains solve (albeit poorly) the centralization of currency and objects in the metaverse. Technologies like IPFS are already getting broad adoption for use as a decentralized data store, as today’s blockchain — by design — cannot perform well in this context.

Even with cryptocurrency, many of the existing operations needed to store and transact are far too clunky and heavy to operate without help. Thus we’re seeing the rise of venture-backed companies (such as OpenSea and Moralis) offering APIs to store this data offchain, in their private centralized databases. And today, most blockchain developers are required to use those APIs for even the simplest functions and queries.

As an example of a simple query that leans on 3P APIs, let’s consider this basic developer ask: ‘list all of the NFTs owned by this wallet ID.’ To execute this query today on Ethereum by yourself, you’d need to walk the entire blockchain and list all Transfers of ERC721 type to the given address. Then you must scan the Transfers data set for ‘Outgoing,’ to ensure they haven’t been sold to anyone else. Today, the developer has to lean on the commercial entities (like OpenSea) to act as the front-end of our NFT chains. We’re effectively funneling open-web functionality back into tech companies (as they provide an essential part of our development processes), thus ceding control back over to Big Tech.

Katie pushes Wedge off the soapbox and climbs up:

I see things slightly differently. Blockchain development IS clunky today. It is our 1st collective step, and 1st steps ARE clunky always. The huge moment here is in reframing everything about how we ‘see’ and experience transactional relationships, starting with the exchange of money.

I could write a book on just this reframing. Today, we still exchange paper dollar bills in the US. What is a dollar bill, other than a ‘smart contract’ without metadata? Our society all ‘agrees to agree’ that this particular piece of paper represents a certain value of currency, based on the number we print on it.

Cryptocurrency gives us a solid example and prototype for reframing the way we collectively think about banking, paying, and agreements about money. Trust takes time. People around the world will come around to trust this digital financial system, much like we have gained trust in things like online banking. Or the veracity of Wikipedia.

Old folks like us remember when Wikipedia first launched to a wave of incredulity. It was not trusted because…who was this source of truth anyway? Who’s the boss? Now, we have much higher levels of trust in Wikipedia’s data…because it is crowdsourced and cross-checked. Nothing erroneous or one-sided stays up for long, as the collective guardians of Wikipedia would never allow it.

I believe that crypto is our first digestible example of what blockchains ARE and why they matter. The question “Why care?” seems off-base, thinking about decentralized, digital currency systems.

NFTs in 2022: Faster horses. Little ledges.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford

Ah, the (debated) Henry Ford quote. Yeah, it’s overused and a bit hackneyed…because it’s true. It applies so perfectly to this moment in time. We are asking for faster horses because we know horses.

NFTs are a ledge (see above on little ledges). NFTs are faster horses. Non-fungible tokens are a huge concept, with the potential of creating a real-world version of the Facebook Graph.

Facebook created a graph, in which we are all nodes. NFTs can do this via blockchain.

Art and Sports collectible NFTs are the first iteration of blockchain technology that many people ‘get.’ We understand collecting baseball cards and art. We understand that there’s no intrinsic value in these items–society collectively values the item, often based on scarcity. Rather than scoff at these overpriced ‘bubbles’ and the fools collecting them, we should be seeing this iteration of NFTs as a little ledge. This ledge will give people a toehold to get to the next level on DAOs and decentralized web3.

Our next phase will be an explosion of look-alike NFTs. “Its like Uber for dogs!” Businesses, celebrities, media companies will roll out collectible NFTs that mimic the baseball card collectibles model. That’s okay! Let’s welcome them in the door. Once we get them inside the tent, we can advance together in a way that people understand.

Faster horses and little ledges are the gateways to the good stuff: smart contracts, DAOs, interactive AR integrations based on things you purchase, the rise of universal, decentralized currencies. It goes on and on…but we gotta get em in the door.

So people are on the ledge with collectible art and sports NFTs. Lots of people. Too many people. We’re predicting a huge crash and burn around collectible jpeg NFTs, and a lot of people will lose a lot of “money” or perceived value. That will hurt. People will be chastened and need to lick wounds for a little while (remember 1999?).

But wow. Post- crash and burn…when the smoke clears…we’re going to be left with the real deal. NFTs will actual agreed-upon value. Smart contracts developed beyond crypto and real estate in Decentraland. Development of non-fungible token systems for all unique datasets. This is when the real fun begins.

What other technology needs to be in place for us to have our metaverse?

Wedge sees three big developments that need to occur before any cohesive metaverse will emerge.

NFT IDs for All People

We hear about the challenge of interoperability all the time. It is a crucial missing link to developing our one true metaverse system.

For this, we in tech are going to have to go back to our open-source, early-internet-days roots and remember that we’re all in this crazy world together. We need to create an entire data store and blockchain, with the sole purpose of issuing every human a unique NFT. This NFT node is yours and yours alone, forever. Some day, we’ll mint and issue this ID when babies are born (like the US does with social security numbers). Your digital ID will be used for any and all accounts for the rest of your life–both in the ‘real’ world and the metaverse. When you die, your unique NFT ID does NOT. It continues to live on forever, along with associated metadata.

This is so crucial that we have an upcoming post JUST about the need for a universal ID system, NOT owned by a government or big tech company.

Common Data Stores

As we said earlier, we’re lacking a fundamental element right now: a data store. We need a common, open-source data store solution not owned by one of our tech giants like AWS. Even the lightest of applications have some need to store data related to unique NFTs, applications, assets, and resources. IPFS is promising and may live on well into the first incarnation of the metaverse. As Katie points out, each unique metaverse project or product will have a root blockchain node. Unlike cryptocurrency, that node doesn’t function without lots of related metadata (our root resources).

So we need common data stores to house all of the related metadata for each blockchain node. Each metaverse product experience will have to engineer unique queries into this data (with user permission), to parse and extract whatever is relevant to that experience.

For example, I have 30 points in a Tennis World, a top tennis game application, and i’m ranked #3 across my age group in the app. My 30 points and #3 rank need to be stored as metadata associated with my account by the Tennis World dev–somewhere centralized that can be parsed by other apps–like IPFS functions today.

In the metaverse, I then port over to Tennis Pros Only, an exclusive tennis club I am trying to be accepted into. TPO requires that all members are ranked in the top 3 for their age group. TPO will need to query data associated with me…but not ALL of my metadata (which is agonizingly slow and how it works today). TPO knows to only query the database for tennisWorld_rank and leave the rest.

How products/experiences in the metaverse utilize data will still be case-by-case, as it is today. When I go to the DMV, for example, my tennis rank is irrelevant. DMV will query relevant driving-related metadata for my NFT ID.

Most importantly, humans will own their unique NFT ID root node AND your lifetime collection of associated metadata. This model will make it more obvious to user’s that they are in control of who is permitted to access their data. Metaverse products will request the data they need (and why) directly to the user. The user will consider this particular value exchange each time they use an app. Users will be discriminating, and that will pressure products to ask for only the metadata they need for their product experience’s functionality.

When the user is done with a particular metaverse product experience, they leave with ANY and ALL new metadata, associated to their root NFT ID. They leave with their data and, based on the use case, may require the product to completely delete the user’s cached metadata.

User data, privacy, and control are at the crux of a functional metaverse as well. Look for an upcoming post just about user data control in the metaverse.

Common Interfaces and Protocols

Also mentioned previously, we will need a common standard, much like HTTP was required to make the 1st generation of the internet happen. This common standard will be the glue, connecting all of the applications and experiences across the metaverse. We need “doors” on the same plane, in order for users to travel between product experiences.

Let’s use MUDs (multiplayer realtime virtual worlds) here. Within a MUD, the developer must create doors between worlds, allowing the user to travel across worlds, games, and experiences seamlessly. The overarching ‘game’ has a distinct set of rules that act as the MUD’s backbone. At the same time, this structure doesn’t impede user creativity, allowing for wild development within the overall structure.

Metaverse-related platform and hardware (i.e. the headsets) need to support a common set of data models (such as Unity) and modeling languages.

Distributed Message Bus

In addition to the need for a persistent data store, we need the ability to subscribe to changes on a user’s public metadata. This will likely be coupled with the distributed data store, as these messages may be updates to the objects in the data store. These change updates should be available immediately to subscribers, and should not have to wait for a miner to compute the hash for a block.

What else is needed?

Buy-in and collaboration. Facebook will concede that it is, itself, a node within the actual metaverse. These Quest and social experiences like Horizon will have areas of interoperability with Fortnite and Roblox and Twitch and YouTube (hard to imagine but yes).

Facebook (hopefully) will be a leader in helping to build out the larger open-source, decentralized metaverse, with Oculus Horizon (etc) as ‘miniverse’ examples of the larger concept.

Why will companies like Facebook decide to open up their platforms instead of maintaining ownership over their user bases?

Because the leaders of Big Tech are some of the biggest proponents of an open-source, interoperable metaverse. Some of them may hold on to this idea of ‘owning’ the metaverse…but that will soon seem as silly and outdated as the original companies who tried to ‘own’ the World Wide Web.

You can have the best slide on the playground…but you can’t have the playground.

Relevant Links & Notes — Stuff to read, share, save