Welding Together the Metaverse
Arguing for a change in design
Key points:
- I talk about the potential of virtual reality and virtual worlds to improve language teaching.
- That application requires software tailored to it, and it’s unreasonable to expect the same virtual world that runs games and virtual storefronts to do that as well.
- Extrapolating from there, I argue that the Metaverse is likely to come together as a cluster — a soldered-together mass of many virtual worlds.
I received my master’s degree from a Korean women’s university. I’m neither Korean nor a woman. …It’s a long story.
Regardless, the degree was in “TESOL,” which is essentially just foreign language education when the target language is English. Through study and praxis, I came to understand that acquiring a language has much more in common with learning to dance than it does with learning biology, history, or most of the other subjects that one encounters in school. Language competence is largely a matter of practicing skills. It’s not simply a mass of information to memorize and elaborate upon.
As such, a classroom is just about the worst place to go about learning it. We arrange the students like eggs in a carton, and force them to silently watch the teacher as he explains things like how to conjugate an unusual verb, or the difference between “they’re,” “their,” and “there.” Imagine the absurdity of learning to dance this way, and you begin to understand why so many intelligent pupils come away from years of language instruction with no actual proficiency. Students need to be able to do the language, by which I mean practice, interact, and make use of the language to accomplish tasks. All of this is made more difficult by the classroom setting.
Virtual reality, then, presents a much better alternative to the dusty wood and unyielding concrete of a modern classroom. In a moment, two students could be role-playing as a cashier and customer in a virtual grocery store, learning how to politely interact in such contexts. Later in the lesson, they may find themselves dining together in a virtual restaurant, politely contesting a bill with AI-controlled waiters and staff.
There’s undeniable potential here. Potential worth developing. But, as a former language teacher, I know I would need certain things from a virtual environment to do my job well. These would include:
- the ability to bring up visual aids
- the ability to change the students’ environment to suit a scenario for practice
- a “virtual whiteboard” that I can use to display key notes for the lesson
- integration of my students’ records so as to review tests, mark attendance, jot down notes about performance, and so on
- a method of contacting senior staff in case a serious issue arises
- a clock or timer
In short, I would really need a virtual world application designed specifically to suit the task of teaching. The vanilla, “one-size-fits-all” metaverses that currently exist would not suffice.
I only bring up the matter of language teaching because it’s a job with which I have intimate familiarity. The same must be true for people hoping to do other sorts of work virtually. An event planner will need quite different functionality than a therapist, who needs something totally different from a musician. This is quite well understood in the context of software — so obvious as to be not worth mentioning — but it is apparently missed in metaverse development. Not all people are going to occupy the same virtual environments, but we continue to act as if they might.
An Alloyed Metaverse
Whether as a result of science fiction or the influence of Mark Zuckerberg, the model that seems to have overtaken the popular discourse is that of the “Metaverse-with-a-capital-M”: a single virtual environment in which we can perform all of our activities online. It’s a monolithic conception — an alloy of all the capabilities anyone might need in a virtual space, forged into one unitary, shining, digital whole.
And it’s not just Meta. The developers of the other existing metaverse platforms seem to have taken this paradigm on board as well. The various projects are each so strikingly broad, so replete with possible use cases as to have no actual ones. Have a look at a newer example: a metaverse in development called Everdome. These are the use cases presented on their website.¹
Among other things, Everdome is positioning itself to be a place to game, shop, meet your doctor, engage in social media interactions, and even to use AR to check how you’d look with a new tattoo — all in the context of a near-future sci-fi environment on the planet Mars. It’s incredibly ambitious.
Everdome might be the most explicit about this aspect of their vision, but they are actually quite typical with regard to their proposed scope. Somnium Space provides nine or ten broad use cases for their product.² Decentraland, for its part, has boiled its list down to one, almost comically ambiguous proposition: build “anything like static 3D scenes to more interactive applications or games.” ³ Application, games, or scenes. What couldn’t that be?
Lest I be accused of being uncharitable, there is a definite market for things with a built-in variety of options. Buffets exist. So do Swiss Army knives. But the food at a buffet is never that great, and trying to use the individual components of your Swiss Army knife can drive you insane with frustration. Quality, it seems to me, is almost always born of focus.
A Welded Metaverse
If “The Metaverse” is to come together, it seems likelier to coalesce as an assembly of innumerable, limited-use-case virtual environments. It will not emerge from the ground whole, like some sleek monolith, but accrue over time as a somewhat chaotic, interconnected cluster, welded together piece by piece. It will still make sense to speak of “The Metaverse” when describing the aggregate mass of it all, but one could just as easily discuss it in terms of its constituent parts — much like how websites, social media, apps, emails, and a million other things come together to make the digital tangle we call “the Internet.”
So, I wish more Metaverse projects specialized, both for the sake of the larger endeavor and for the sake of quality. Virtual worlds are incredibly difficult to build, typically requiring years of effort to do anything at all reasonably well. Look at multiplayer online games. Their development cycles span several years, often only having arrived at the alpha release by the time they originally planned to ship the final product. Imagine, then, the difficulty of trying to make a virtual world that runs many kinds of games… plus hosts virtual events, storefronts, meeting spaces... The proposition very quickly becomes unreasonable. How can one team, no matter how large or well funded, produce something that adequately serves the needs of so many?
I can only speculate as to why this has been the approach so far. Perhaps it’s a result of failing to question the popular, Zuck-fi conception of the Metaverse. Perhaps it’s done out of a fear of losing potential users. I suspect, however, that it comes from an unspoken desire to make something truly revolutionary rather than something “just” useful and good. I could never prove it’s there, but I feel like I sense it in the air some days, the smell of a slightly desperate sort of ambition.
Anyway, regardless of the cause, the strategy so far employed does not seem like an effective approach for reaching mass adoption. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, developers should give us a reason to enter their virtual world — something we can do there that we can’t quite do anywhere else. Make it work beautifully for that purpose, and we will use it. We’ll spend money for it. Naturally and of its own accord, when several such spaces exist, someone will develop a convenient way to connect them. And, as I see it, only through that coming together can we finally have a workable metaverse — the Metaverse.
