I’ll start the topic with my opinions - at the moment, the main concern I have is: what’s the point of the metaverse, what is it trying to solve/achieve?
Even before the entry barrier involving tech, availability and price, I personally don’t know what metaverses for the most part are trying to achieve. Sure we can all dream of dystopian futures with virtual worlds like Ready Player One, but would it actually work in real life? Probably not. If we follow Microsoft and Blizzard’s example, they have a load of games which could fit the theme of a metaverse and Teams could be integrated for business use etc. too, but why do they need to be integrated into a metaverse when they work so well on their own? People are notoriously lazy once novelty wears off, so why would they care about booting up a virtual world when they just want to play Minecraft which they could just launch directly instead?
A metaverse in my opinion would have to be truly all-encompassing to work, which means that people would already have to be in the metaverse when they decide they want to play Minecraft. So that means people working in the metaverse, maybe online marketplaces like eBay or Amazon have a ‘physical’ representation in the metaverse. And it would all have to be a singular metaverse, or at least linked metaverses, as there’s no ‘time saved’ if people have to log out/into metaverses when they want to do different things.
Which also brings up another point - decentralisation vs centralisation. What I would imagine we would see initially, should metaverses really take off, would be an array of competing metaverses, like we see for tech ecosystems at the moment. Eventually I would imagine standards would be reached to allow horizontal integrations between metaverses, but before that we would probably see a Meta metaverse, a Microsoft one, SANDBOX-esque ones. Centralised ones have the bonus of potentially having a focus, but could be very limiting in what you can do because of limitations to what the company actually offers. Decentralised ones have a much wider range of possibilities since practially anyone can get involved, but what’s on offer may not reach the standards of a centralised one. I feel like metaverses would benefit if they used the best of both, and used collaborations between all the big companies to make a shared virtual landscape so it’s not truly centralised but still has people’s preferred products. That can’t really happen, however, until at least the basic structure of a metaverse is established and the best standards can be figured out, otherwise the standards set may stiffle development. And to get there, we would need to see at least some success from a range of more limited metaverses, which as I’ve said I have my doubts about. It’s a long road ahead!
Now it’s not all futile, as I honestly do see potential in industry and academia which I have experienced. The first example that comes to mind would be virtual conferences - during the pandemic the world made great strides with online meetings, and one of the most interesting developments were conference ‘worlds’ where each person attending logs in online and controls a Minecraft-style avatar which they can use to run around the conference ‘building’ to attend talks, look at posters and network. Up to here it sounds like a gimick, why would people do that when they can just click a button to join a talk rather than run around a virtual building? But what really made it great was how avatars interacted with each other - if you approached another avatar, when you’re close enough you would join a voice call with them. Back away and you leave. Just like in real life - approach to talk, leave to, well, leave. And it worked really well for networking. Obviously it’s still not as good as in-person meetings, but during lockdown and when travelling overseas is not possible, an academic metaverse like that is far superior to just a load of talks via Zoom thanks to the interactions betwene avatars.
Another positive example would be for industry; if things could be simulated and designed in a virtual spaces, it would open up potential for 1) better collaboration between people not physically at the same place as well as easier ‘screen-sharing’ and 2) better simulations virtually before real-world attempts, saving both time and resources. For example, Tesla already assembles cars pretty much human-free via robots, and new models are made by updating the software. Trialling the software in a metaverse first making sure the robots do what is expected lets them tune the software before pushing it out to the robots for production. There will obviously always be a real-life verification step, but the virtual world testing saves time and resources.
To wrap thigns up, I can’t not talk about Meta’s attempt… I feel like it’s a joke, a very expensive joke, as I honestly don’t know what they’re trying to achieve. That said, I am happy to see them try - if we’re to ever see a useful metaverse, it has to be built on top of failure. So I’m honestly happy to see Meta’s one struggle so much to build a metaverse I don’t care about, because it means that others can learn from it. And when someone comes to build a metaverse I might actually care about, they might have a better chance at succeeding because they don’t need to pioneer it all themselves and can instead focus on making it good rather than spending their time just troubleshooting the general concept of a metaverse.
Anyway, those are my opinions - would be very interested to hear about how other people feel about any aspect of any metaverse! And if anyone can give me arguements to help convince me to see most metaverse attempts in a more favourable light I would love to hear them!
