The Metaverse
Why isn't it here yet?
It feels a bit funny writing about the Metaverse in 2021.
2021, when the Metaverse was “hot,” feels like a very long time ago. Much that’s written about the Metaverse today is either 1) journalistic accounts of how underwhelming Facebook’s Metaverse product is, or 2) articles about various companies shutting down their “Metaverse” divisions.
That being said, it’s still an interesting concept and important one. We are living more and more of our lives online. I really appreciated Matthew Ball’s The Metaverse as it was less breathless hype for the Metaverse and more about why achieving it will be so hard.
The Metaverse: And How It will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball
First, what is the Metaverse?
Ball defines it as:
“A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”
Said simply, virtual worlds which are connected and hold lots of people. Some specific things Ball thinks are important are:
Persistence: Changes that you make need to stay. For example, if you cut down a tree in a videogame, it stays that way for you and for all the other users. This requires a lot of computational power
3D: In general people seek out digital models that replicate reality - video over audio, 3D over 2D. This is not the same as requiring VR, though.
Interoperable: We want to be able to take virtual “content” - a shirt, avatar, or weapon - from one world to another. If we earn money in a game, we want to be able to spend it elsewhere
Unlimited number of users: we want these worlds to be populated and full, just like the real world is. Like some of the other things, this requires a lot of computing power
Why is the Metaverse important?
Ball believes it’ll be the next version of the internet - similar to how mobile devices have transformed the way we access and interact with the internet.
There are several practical “use cases”:
Education: While “Zoom School” clearly didn’t work during the pandemic, the metaverse could allow for students to be fully present (via VR and other hardware) in virtual classrooms. They could take field trips to Ancient Rome, outer space, or within the human body (basically The Magic School Bus). Using fewer (high quality) teachers to teach more kids could help slow the rise of education costs, which has grown much faster than inflation. In short, we are more efficient in creating most other goods relative to 40 years ago - whether clothing, toys, or food. But education is not anymore efficient - you still need the same number of teachers to teach the same number of kids.
Entertainment: As opposed to watching a sports game on TV, we might put on VR glasses that put us courtside
Work opportunities: Your blackjack dealer in the Metaverse’s casino or salesperson in an online store might not need to live in the same state (or country) as you.
But why is it so hard to create?
There are 2 types of barriers to creating the metaverse: business-related barriers and technology related barriers.
The primary business challenge lies in creating interoperability and standardization across closed platforms.
If you buy a virtual shirt in one game - say Fortnite - can you bring it to another? How does your avatar in one game translate to the other? Game developers and technology companies have an incentive to keep people in their “walled garden.” And different companies use different file formats and “operating systems,” making sharing data impossible today. There also need to be standards: is a 3D avatar a body with an outfit, or just a body that can be combined with different outfits? What constitutes an outfit? How many articles of clothing can it contain? Is a jacket a different category than a shirt?
In addition, there are a number of technical challenges we’ll need to solve, including:
The need to create a synchronous experience, where people all experience something at the same time. Even things like Twitter or Facebook are not synchronous - your news feed is fetching you a copy of static information every minute or two. This requires very low latency (or lags in receiving information). Latency in Netflix can be a bit annoying (and the company has lots of ways to get around it), but in a video game that’s real time, latency can ruin the experience if your reaction time is slower than other people’s. In the Metaverse, even a simple game of rock-paper-scissors requires low latency, or you'll end up with a virtual hand that's always a second too slow. Even if we’re not playing a video game, low latency is important because we’re very sensitive to slight facial movements and very small delays between someone’s speech and video can come across as very creepy.
Technical limitation of concurrency: Rendering (showing) players in a videogame requires a lot of computing power, which limits the number of people in any given world. For example, Fortnite had a “live concert” in 2020 with 12.5 million people attending, but these people were split up into 250,00 different copies. Even “Battle Royale” games with 100 players will use enormous maps to ensure players are scattered around so they don’t all need to be rendered at a single time. Imagine walking around Manhattan, but there could only be 20 people around you at all times.
Hardware limitations: Virtual reality seems like an interesting way to generate an immersive virtual world, but the hardware is still it its infancy. We’ll need much better resolution and performance to avoid headsets making us nauseous. It’s likely our main device for the metaverse will be our phones. Over time, there might be other sensors make these experiences feel even more lifelike (the way a videogame controller rumbles when you get hit).
You put this together, and we’re a long way off: different experts say “at least 5 to 10 years” or an “1000x increase in computational efficiency” are needed to realize the Metaverse as we imagine it (and this is just to solve the tech issues alone).
Thoughts and reactions
As mentioned above, I really enjoyed this. The book itself felt very different from its title, which is promises to tell us how the Metaverse “Will Revolutionize Everything.” I also appreciate how detailed and granular Ball was in his assessment of all the technologies needed for the metaverse - there’s a lot of detail in here that I’ve excluded.
This book had an extremely high density of “random but interesting fun facts about tech” that I found as interesting as the subject matter itself.
On one level, it’s easy for me to dismiss the Metaverse - the main use case I’d want would be some way to facetime with my family in a way that made it truly feel like we were in person. Part of it for me is a desire to spend my free time doing things that don’t involve computer or phone screens. But plenty of people play videogames or have different preferences than me. He makes a good point that the average American watches 3+ hours of TV a day - if they could interact with others during some of that time, it’d be a huge positive. And hypothetically, if the Metaverse could help in gamifying more of life - whether socializing, exercise, or learning - people would be better off. The downsides to the Metaverse have already been laid out in books like Ready Player 1: that is becomes a way to distract people who are being exploited or living in bleak circumstances (kind of like the Matrix); that people spend all of their time and energy in virtual worlds as opposed to “the real world”; that it will become a way for a few tech companies to have even more influence on our everyday lives.
Some other specific thoughts:
In some ways, it feels like parts of the Metaverse are already here. Video games are already immersive experiences in 3D; there are sites like Discord or Reddit that let you interact with thousands of strangers at a time and find common interests. It is possible, to some extent, to live your life on the internet.
One other large barrier to the Metaverse is that nobody’s on there. All the articles about Horizon Worlds talk about how it’s populated largely by little kids using their parents VR headsets - is that really where you want to spend time?
No matter what happens with the Metaverse, the last 2 years are a good reminder to stay humble and realize that it’s really hard to predict the future. He tells us how in the 90’s, people thought the Times would send a PDF of the paper to people’s home printers, which would print a fresh copy every morning d help.
It was really interesting to read about all the challenges, which range from technical (delivering a good experience) to business (getting worlds to interoperate) to government (who controls your data). You would think that this would be easier than something like generative AI (ChatGPT), but generative AI requires less interoperability and everybody doesn’t need to have a state-of-the-art computer or internet connection.
With any technology, there will be unintended consequences (like how the iPhone team thought their device would be “fun…easy to use thing” as opposed to - their words - “the center of your life.”)
Random fun facts:
Apple’s app store is large enough to be a Fortune 15 company by itself, just by taking a 30% of some purchases (largely games). Apple doesn’t want an integrated virtual world, but instead a lot of different worlds that all use its platforms. Apple also iron control over its iPhone ecosystem. The “Chrome” app is essentially Safari with a Google account login
The cheapest iPhone is 40% cheaper than the 2007 original with 100x the computing power
How does Netflix stop your video from lagging? In any given scene, it will determine what parts of the picture can have lower resolution - e.g., the background blue sky - and adjust accordingly. They’ll also pre-load videos you’re more likely to watch at datacenters closer to your location