Introducing a set of interoperating tools and services to support virtual worlds for builders and creators on LAMINA1.
Via Tony Parisi, Chief Product Officer at LAMINA1:
Proud to share that today LAMINA1 has released our latest whitepaper: Metaverse-as-a-Service.
With Metaverse-as-a-Service, we are bringing together a set of well-understood areas of virtual world technology with innovations in blockchain — packaged into turnkey services to help make it faster, easier and reliable to build for the open metaverse at scale. With it, we want to offer freedom of choice to all stakeholders in the next online era — creators, end users, and technology providers alike.
Framing The Challenges
Today, most popular metaverse experiences are built on proprietary tech, controlled by a single platform or company offering walled garden experiences. With such platforms, the content you create—experiences, objects, and avatars, for example—is trapped in their world. You can’t bring the content into other places unless they are operated by those same companies. You also don’t have freedom of choice in the tools you use to build.
From an end-user point of view, today’s proto-metaverse experiences are limited to specific art styles, driven by business models that favor certain types of content, and controlled by centralized authorities that get to decide what is appropriate. The technology and tools under the hood are also controlled by these same entities, leaving little room for independent technology providers to participate and add value. All of this adds up to limited choice for everyone in the ecosystem.
The Metaverse-as-a-Service Vision
At LAMINA1, we envision an open metaverse free from all of these restrictions. We imagine it much like the open web: built on standards, in a collaborative fashion, enabling a level playing field for content creators, aggregators and discovery services, and service providers alike. This proposed future should also be demystified and democratized — a place where creating and deploying a world is as straightforward as authoring and hosting a web page. Sure, some new skills will be required to create 3D content, but it shouldn’t be a black art to deploy and host that content.
The good news is that we are not starting from scratch. There are well established techniques and solutions that support simulation and multiplayer networking—from simple collaborative spaces containing just a few people, all the way up to massive game worlds. There is already a wide range of choices for creating content, from simple world-building tools to game engines like Unity and Unreal that offer complete control for professional development. And there are several existing standards and new standardization efforts underway to ensure maximum interoperability in the coming years.
“In order for the open metaverse to succeed, it needs to be decentralized to avoid control by a single entity, and it must enable creators to get compensated for their work and experiences fairly.”
But there is still a lot of work to be done, in particular, around how open 3D systems integrate with blockchain technology. This part is key, because in order for the open metaverse to succeed, it needs to be decentralized to avoid control by a single entity, and it must enable creators to get compensated for their work and experiences fairly.
This is where we have put a lot of emphasis in this latest whitepaper. With it, we explore novel ways to connect the blockchain with best-in-class virtual worlds tech as follows:
- General- and special-purpose LAMINA1 subnets (i.e. metachains) for flexible and scalable deployment of a variety of applications and experiences — because one size does not fit all and a single blockchain can’t meet all needs and scale at the same time
- On-chain rights management integrated with high-performance multiplayer simulation and world state storage systems — to build a path toward fully decentralized world servers
- High availability, reliable asset storage and delivery—because existing solutions are lacking
- Early experiments in blockchain-based identity management — because privacy, security, and interoperability are paramount in the next online era
There is even more that goes into powering a virtual world. The paper also identifies several third-party system services LAMINA1 intends to integrate in partnership with other open metaverse builders, including:
- Real-time multiplayer simulation
- World state storage
- Secure decentralized user messaging
Dive In & Explore
I know, this is a lot of ground to cover! The whitepaper hits a broad set of topics. We are hoping that it inspires technologists and toolmakers to join us in building out infrastructure for the open metaverse. It’s a massive vision with a high stakes outcome. But the metaverse won’t truly be open unless it’s open to all, and that can’t happen unless it offers freedom of choice for everyone: citizens, builders and developers alike.
Click here to read the Metaverse-as-a-Service whitepaper.
Share your feedback and join the LAMINA1 community of 39K+ open metaverse builders at https://discord.gg/lamina1.
