As we move into 2024, items and Spaces are coming to the LAMINA1 Hub. Many will be built with interoperability in mind. But what is interoperability? And why is it significant to the open metaverse at large?
Get ready for a busy year, L1 builders. As we move into 2024, the LAMINA1 core team is preparing to release a number of important updates to Items and Spaces on the LAMINA1 Hub.
We previewed our initial framework for how the two will integrate in our first demo space — Space Lasers — launched in late fall 2023. Now, we are on the cusp of unveiling two new features to the LAMINA1 platform: The Creator Studio and our inaugural partner space, Nyric, which will lay the foundation for our next phase of testing and iteration.
The vision is clear: by Mainnet launch in Q2/Q3 2024, anyone will have the ability to explore Spaces and collect, publish, trade and sell content on the LAMINA1 Hub. Many of these items and experiences will be built with interoperability in mind. But what exactly are we building to empower it, and why is it significant to the open metaverse at large?
A New Paradigm for Creation — Spaces & Items on LAMINA1
In many ways, Spaces are the cornerstone of LAMINA1’s vision for an open metaverse, designed with seamless world-jumping and item integration at their core.
As we describe them in the L1 Users & Developers Guide, “LAMINA1 Spaces are, at their simplest, individual metaverse worlds, applications or experiences that are interactive, interoperable, and support different types of digital Items. They are where open metaverse content is rendered, collected, and engaged with — or, on a more technical level, individual applications that define an interface to a set of properties that it will accept for imported contents across the open web.”
Their interfaces may be inclusive or exclusive, meaning they can accept any kind of content that has at least a minimum set of properties defined in its metadata through a smart contract, or just content that has a complete set of properties defined to support integration — for example, specific file types, variants for different environments, or behavior properties.
Soon, the launch of Spaces from our partners will be accompanied by the Creator Studio, a no-code, intuitive toolset enabling anyone to seamlessly publish content (as NFTs) to the LAMINA1 blockchain for use in Spaces — no coding or smart contract skills involved. Its accompanying Templates will empower other creators to easily create content that is instantly integrable into a specific Space or set of Spaces across the L1 platform.
The Creator Studio is a testament to our belief that the open metaverse will be shaped by the digital content, items, and experiences we create and share — and interoperability is one of the core principles that Web3 builders are talking about when it comes to publishing their content and creations.
So, What is interoperability? Why does it matter? What are its challenges? And how do we start building it together?
Interoperability 101 — The Heart of the Open Metaverse
Interoperability, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the ability of computer systems or software to exchange and use information.” Originating from IT and system engineering in the early 80s, this concept has evolved significantly over the last three decades, especially in the context of Web3, blockchain, and the metaverse.
To put it simply, interoperability in the context of the open metaverse L1 envisions refers to the ability of different platforms, technologies, and services to work together and communicate with each other so that users can move seamlessly between virtual worlds. A lack of it restricts users’ access in the metaverse, limiting their navigation of the digital world to a single platform or project, instead of allowing them to navigate freely across an open web.
We see this in the context of current “walled garden” or proto-metaverse ecosystems that have emerged over the last few years: Roblox, Horizon Worlds, Fortnite — all of which encourage co-creation and item integration, but mostly in their own proprietary ecosystems.
But, as Sam Anderson of the Drum recently wrote on the topic: “When people picture a metaverse, they don’t picture a bunch of disparate immersive experiences. They dream of a unified reality, where digital and physical selves are merged, with a continuity of identity and experience across platforms — as in the science fictional metaverses of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and more recently Ready Player One.”
Driving Progress — The Blockchain Revolution
Today, many open metaverse developers believe that this kind of interoperability is inherently linked with using blockchain technology. In this vision, digital assets, virtual land, and avatars are represented as tokens on the blockchain, enabling users to carry them, via their wallets, across different decentralized applications across an interconnected web.
While not all blockchain networks are interoperable with one another, industry developments in creating interconnected Web3 systems through the adoption of standards such as ERC-1155 and ERC-721, the industry-wide push to support EVM compatibility, as well as the development of Information Oracles, and Messaging Bridges to connect EVM and Non-EVM blockchains have proven that different systems can be built to interact, share arbitrary data, and utilize each others features and services. This provides the ability for participants to be able to move themselves, their assets, and their creations across platforms and experiences.
Or, as worldbuilder and interoperability expert Jon Radoff writes: “Blockchain provides an interoperable means of storing, exchanging and programming property rights, currencies, assets, and identity. Communities and companies become software applications in this ecosystem.”
In a more tangible context, this means not having to start from scratch every time you enter a new world or metaverse platform. Instead, a future open and interoperable metaverse would allow you to keep your avatar, your privacy settings, and your content items, your currencies with you as you move across the online world.
As Fast Company’s Ash Koosha recently explained it: “It’s a lot like teleporting. Imagine in one world you’re diving deep in a dark green ocean, complete with an oxygen tank, and in a click, you move instantly to another where you’re traipsing across the desert of a far off planet with a full canteen of water. For you and I, interoperability can be experienced as digital objects and/or states that exist seamlessly between different virtual worlds, no matter how experientially disparate.”
In other words, interoperability is key to creating a more free, and intuitive user experience — one where creators and citizens don’t have to carefully choose which platforms to invest their time and money in before signing out, leaving it all behind, and transitioning to another. One where the digital world is more like the physical world many metaverse platforms are seeking to interact with and embody.
Layers & Components of an Interoperable Ecosystem
To enable the seamless transfer of identities, items, and assets across the open metaverse, interoperable infrastructures must be built from the ground up.
A useful diagram we adapted from an article by AI/Web3 software development company LeewayHertz does a good job of defining these components.
Below, we’ll synthesize the layers of interoperable technologies required to empower the “true metaverse” many builders and platforms like LAMINA1 are working to embody.
- Layer 1: The Foundation Layer — a.k.a The Internet
The foundation layer is the existing infrastructure of a global internet that supports connectivity in the Metaverse. Without the internet and everything we’ve built to empower it over the last 40 years, the metaverse would not exist. - Layer 2: The Infrastructure Layer
The Infrastructure layer supports hardware components needed to create an authentic user experience. Other technologies forming this layer are IoT, big data, and blockchain for creating a shared ecosystem among builders and creators. - Layer 3: The Content Layer
Content layers include the applications and platforms designed to create more natural and vivid experiences for metaverse projects, and make it easy for them to create, host and distribute their creations to the world at large. - Layer 4: The True Metaverse
The True Metaverse does not exist yet, but forms when the lower layers develop and create a parallel virtual space where various content and infrastructure layers can share resources, data, and seamlessly interact with themselves, and the real world to create interconnected content ecosystems and economies.
With the upcoming launch of Spaces and the Creator Studio, LAMINA1’s focus mainly lies in developing the infrastructure and content layers of an integrated system like this: empowering technologies for builders, delivering a decentralized ecosystem for development, and providing a platform for the publication, distribution, and exploration of multiple vivid worlds — all of which could work together and interoperate with other metaverse platforms and partners across the open web.
Components of Interoperability:
Now that we understand the layers of an interoperable metaverse, it’s also useful to define what kinds of content and technologies can be interoperable within the multi-faceted architecture of an open metaverse. This recent article by venture fund, research agency and accelerator Paradigm does a decent job of it and is summarized here:
- Avatars & Identities: The ability to create and customize one avatar/digital identity, set custom content/privacy preferences, and move them across different metaverse platforms — allowing you to maintain a consistent identity and digital presence across multiple virtual worlds.
- Digital Assets & Items: The ability to have things like virtual items, equipment, collectibles, and real estate be able to be bought, sold, and used across different metaverse spaces and platforms. A standardized way to characterize the behaviors and properties of objects in the metaverse that translates across platforms.
- Communications & Messaging: Allowing users to communicate with each other across different metaverse platforms or Spaces that are compatible. For example, using the same chat system as other virtual worlds.
- Data & Information: Transferring data and information between different metaverse platforms so that they are able to share functionalities, applications, and services.
- Features & Services: Pulling in features and services from other platforms to assist users. For example one project pulling in smart contracts from another to run their specific dApp within a Space or project.
- Virtual Environments: The ability to move seamlessly between different virtual environments via a singular in-game interface (e.g. the LAMINA1 Hub Overlay) allowing users to explore different metaverse worlds and discover new experiences without being taken out of the one they’re currently in.
- Currencies & Economies: One metaverse project incorporating an external API or various forms of payment so that it can start accepting payment in a user’s native currency without the need to transfer or exchange in an external platform or marketplace.
The benefits of empowering interoperability in all of these spaces are manifold. Again, it would empower a more frictionless online experience for both citizens and builders, for which standardized tools and practices could mean significant cost and time savings for developers.
For IP holders and franchises, a more interoperable metaverse would mean more streamlined distribution — with artists, filmmakers or musicians no longer being limited to negotiations within a single world or collective, and instead easily share their creations with the metaverse as a whole.
Interoperability can also empower new kinds of creativity and innovation across the open web, inspiring new ways to share content, combine assets and experiences, and remix new, unique content types and creator collaborations while still maintaining control and ownership of their creations.
It also has potentially major implications for metaverse users’ privacy and control over their personal data, allowing citizens to set their own, personalized terms of service for navigating the open metaverse and take them with them across platforms — not the other way around.
So, How Do We Get There?
While interoperability could help power the next online revolution, the challenges we’ll need to overcome and the steps it will take to get there are not to be taken lightly.
For one thing, the technical difficulties of bringing metaverse experiences built with different game engines, hosted on different platforms, and created with all kinds of 2D, 3D, audio, and video assets into a single, interconnected virtual space will be a monumental feat of engineering for any platform — requiring common standards and protocols to be developed, followed, and built upon by millions of creators.
That widespread collaboration itself is also bound to create conflicts and disagreements among open metaverse builders, from developing and maintaining viable business models in a more open and shared economy, to managing disagreements over rules, user-bases and the kinds of virtual economies various metaverse platforms would like to empower.
Interoperability also brings up a number of concerns around protecting intellectual property, privacy, and security in the open metaverse. With more data being shared, open metaverse platforms will need secure solutions in place to ensure data or content isn’t leaked or used without a user or creator’s consent.
Getting Web2 creators and builders to sign on to this new paradigm is also a challenge. Though interoperability is becoming more mainstream among open metaverse creators, it is still highly unusual today for game developers and content creators to want to allow people to transport their assets or identities in or out of their experiences. Interoperability itself presents all sorts of new challenges to worldbuilders when it comes to maintaining game balance, creative control, and even user retention. Any platform enabling interoperability will also need to ensure there are mechanisms in place for builders to maintain the kinds of control they’d like over their creations — opting in or out of this open world of sharing and collaboration where they see fit.
To do that will require multiple organizations, companies, projects, etc. to work together toward a common interest of open information, and asset exchange. It will require technical standards that define how different systems can interact with each other — something like HTTP protocol or HTML for the metaverse. It will require new software that allows different platforms to communicate with each other. It will require builders like us to create platforms and prototypes for enabling smooth, and cross-platform navigation between worlds. And it will take time.
That said, this future, while difficult, is not just a pipe dream. Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum published a paper encouraging work toward interoperability in the metaverse, noting recent developments in blockchain that could bring us closer to that reality. There are also a number of standards organizations that have been recently formed to advance these goals, including the Metaverse Standards Forum, OMA3 and Open Meta DAO, all of which LAMINA1 is a member, alongside hundreds of the world’s top tech companies and leaders.
Not only that, but some aspects of metaverse interoperability are already happening, albeit slowly and in fragmented use cases. OpenSea allows users to buy and sell digital items across blockchain platforms. ReadyPlayerMe distributes avatars that work in environments made and owned by different metaverse companies, from VRChat to Animaze. Even Meta, Roblox and Decentraland are now working toward integrations that would allow participants to traverse multiple virtual worlds with a single digital identity.
Over the coming months, we hope to bring some of those same aspects and inter-platform collaborations directly to the LAMINA1 Hub.
Building an Interoperable Metaverse Together
Interoperability in the context of the open metaverse and interconnected online Spaces represents a major paradigm shift away from the values and business models of traditional Web2 technology to a new era of more open navigation and collaboration.
As such, we’ll need your inputs and collaboration as we begin testing, releasing, and developing a potential framework for seamless creation, distribution, and exploration of integrated/interoperable items, spaces and identity services on LAMINA1.
To accompany this post, we’re releasing 3 Quests this week encouraging L1 community members to dive deeper into the concepts of interoperability and learn more about the frameworks and technologies behind it.
- First, make sure you read this article, and share your thoughts about it with other builders in our designated #spaces channel on the L1 Discord.
- Second, take our new survey on interoperability, and submit questions around our upcoming launches and the interoperable architecture LAMINA1 is building.
- Third, join us for an AMA early next week featuring Jon Radoff, one of the interoperability experts quoted in this article, who has written extensively about the topic on his blog and is currently building technology to empower it via his company (and L1 Early Access Partner) Beamable.
Together, we’ll be diving even deeper into the definition of interoperability, its components, origins, use cases, and challenges as well as strategies LAMINA1 is (or should be considering) as we begin to test our own early framework and standards for creators.
This journey isn’t just about technological advancement; it’s about building a connected digital future where creativity, innovation, and user experience are paramount.
Stay tuned for more updates and join us on Discord to help shape the future of an open metaverse together.
