Well, that’s maybe not the most tantalizing title, but it’s about right (and I did mis-title it originally – see the URL).

[And, before I start: to give a virtual space or two a try next week, register for I3D 2022 – happening next week, May 3-5, 2022 – for free. Due to COVID, they continue to experiment with ways to connect attendees through various means. Virtually see you there – say “hi” if you see me.]

I had a chat with Patrick Cozzi on the podcast “Building the Open Metaverse.” Our episode came out on Tuesday. It was fun, I rambled on about various topics. But after it was over I thought of other things I had neglected to mention or clarify, plus pointers to resources, plus… So, I thought I’d add a few tidbits here, with links as possible.

The negative themes I’ve been seeing lately in some articles about “the metaverse” are along these lines:

• The metaverse is a long time off from being fully realized,
• It’s a lot of hype,
• I wouldn’t want to spend time there, anyway, and
• The metaverse is already here.

Some examples are this PC Gamer article and this one from Wired.

I agree with all of these to some large extent! Short of direct brain interfacing, having a full-featured “you feel like you’re there, you can walk around and touch things” holodeck-like experience looks way unlikely. “The metaverse” is definitely peaking on the hype cycle, even though Gartner says it’s further than 8 years out (which is as far out as they ever go). The Economist says cell phone sales are declining, so investors are looking for, hoping for, the Next Big Thing. So, yes, lots of hype and people floating technologies, 90% of which will fail. That’s nothing new, happens with all new tech.

The “who’d want to go there?” question is the more interesting one, on a few levels. Do we truly want to visit Chipotle in the metaverse? Is Powerpoint more compelling? Going to see a concert “live” via VR could be fun once or twice for the novelty and simplicity, but ultimately seems a bit of a hollow experience. If we value a live experience, say seeing a play vs. watching a film, we like to get all four dimensions aligned, close as possible in XYZ real space and time. Shift any of those, even if it’s “well, that famous person was in the room next door giving a speech and we all saw them on a giant TV screen outside” and there’s a loss of immediacy (and loss of bragging rights). Or even this, which I’ve certainly experienced.

At “holodeck-level” support, you could indeed have all sorts of experiences become available. Sail the seven seas as a pirate with others (oh, wait, there’s already Sea of Thieves), see if you can survive a zombie apocalypse (OMG where do I start?), or just chill out alone under the ocean (ABZÛ). I don’t think we want lots more realism, e.g., I truly don’t want to feel a bullet hit me or what falling off a skyscraper is really like, a la “the artwork formerly known as PainStation” (and if you do want that, go get this and don’t let me know how it works out).

Which gets to the last point, of the metaverse already being here. I admit to entirely losing myself in Valheim for hours when playing with my two (grown, each living elsewhere) sons. Making “actual” persistent changes with people you know in a virtual world, one where there’s no real save and restore system, is compelling – 10 million people agree with me (and the game is still not officially released).

Minecraft is the ultimate example of how making changes is great. It’s the best-selling game of all time. For a long time there was no actual game goal, beyond “survive the creepers” and other monsters. Even with that, it’s still not much of an adventure, more just virtual Legos. But what Legos they are! I think a major part of its success was an accident, that it was written in Java, which could be easily decompiled – Minecraft has over 100,000 mods for it.

Just being social is fine, too. I remember around 2005 wanting to quit the grind of playing the original World of Warcraft (“monster’ll be back in 15 minutes – see you then”). I had been tapering off, mostly been playing the auction house for a month at the end, making a pile of gold coins as sort of a mini-game. I ended my time there by going around newbie zones and holding informal trivia quizzes (“what’s the name of Harry Potter’s owl?”) and sending winners money. It was about the most fun I had in the game, interacting with strangers, since I didn’t have a group of people I played with. Other people liked the quizzes, too. I remember one stranger responding to the reward I sent, messaging me back about how they had been feeling down when they joined that night, but simply winning a little unexpected prize with their real-world knowledge had lifted their spirits.

All that said, I hardly think “the metaverse is here, game over.” There’s lots we can work on that helps immersion, interconnectivity, and much else. I talk about these a bit in the podcast, such as good data interchange through USD, glTF, or whatever other means evolve. Having objects developers or users could purchase and use in various shared spaces is intriguing (though for games I believe mostly unrealistic, beyond costuming – bringing a stirruped horse, let alone a spaceship, to a game about ancient Rome is going to break the balance). Buying a virtual item easily usable as content, vs. having artists and programmers spend days or weeks making a bespoke version for a single use in a game or film, seems like a huge efficiency and variety win. We’ve seen this “sell a hat” model work (and crash) in single games. This should be doable with a rich enough simulation representation.

That’s another area where I think one element of the metaverse is “here” (wherever “here” is). The idea of digital twins of the world, where you can test and train without fear of serious consequences, is being used to design factories, train robots and autonomous vehicles, and for other industrial uses. BIM, building information modeling, has been around a good long while, and covers similar ground as a digital twin – a virtual model of the building you can use for maintenance or upgrading operations after it’s built. There’s of course tons of other simulations out there – from viruses to stellar evolution – but the ones I like are when the virtual and real overlap, Pokemon Go–style or otherwise.

My sense of the metaverse is of technologies – hardware and software – that extend our senses. Do I need the fully realized 100 meter wide and ridiculously-long Street from Snow Crash? I liked that book, but that place sounds kinda dull and limited. Do I need to have all my senses overridden by the virtual? Doing so opens up a lot of questions, most involving some episode of Black Mirror…

I see extending our senses as more open and organic, where the real world and the virtual connect in diverse and fascinating ways. Ignore the obvious “almost all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips.” We meet with distant friends to play in a virtual space. We scan a QR code in a museum’s room to learn about the art on the walls. We hold up our phone to instantly translate a sign in a foreign language. Our car hits a pothole and registers the jolt (through a cell phone app or from the car itself) with the city; enough jolts from the community and a crew is sent out to fill the hole in. All of these are “obvious” now, but thirty years ago they were barely conceivable. And these, plus those we don’t yet even dream of, will become obvious and seamless in the future.

Now to take a walk outside. It’s a bit cold, but the sun’s out and I need some bananas. The world’s a convincing simulation.

(And hyperlinks are yet another lovely example of new technology quietly layering atop the old, making for a richer world. The unseen just behind the seen. Imagine a world where you can’t use links. If you want to reference something, you write “go to the library and look up this article in The New Yorker from two months ago, if your library has it available.” Welcome to 1990. I’m amazed we got anything done back then.)

[Feel like commenting? I’m interested, but comments on this blog are dicey – we’ve had too much spam. Easier is to respond in the tweet. – Eric]