Building and understanding the metaversal landscape
I’m Jono, Creative Technologist and Developer at Wunderman Thompson. I’ve been creating games, virtual spaces and AR experiences before metaverse was cool, and spent the last couple years helping brands understand what it means for them.
Get building
Really the best way to understand what the metaverse is now (and create your ‘metaverse strategy’ or whatever), is just to spend some time in metaversal platforms.
Download Fortnite, Roblox, Zepeto (trust me you’ll have fun!) or create a MetaMask wallet and hop into Decentraland.
If you have a remote social meeting coming up, why not try Spatial.io or Mozilla Hubs and their amazing drag and drop world builders. All of those work on your 2D screens, but if you can, buy or borrow a Meta Quest 2 and try Altspace and VRChat or Horizon Worlds!
If you want to really get into it, download Blender (free and open 3D software) and follow any of the thousands of amazing tutorials on YouTube. In no time, you’ll be building your own words and avatars from the ground up!
Is Augmented Reality more your thing? Try Meta’s Spark Studio, or Snap’s Lens Studio or TikTok’s Effect House (none of them require code to make amazing AR experiences, and all have a great selection of templates!). If you want to make web-based AR experiences and are up for a coding challenge, then try 8th Wall or follow some WebXR tutorials! When you find a community you’re interested in, join their Discord, Slack or Facebook group!
Metaverse in context
This article is in aid of getting more people into understanding and building this space, rather than trying further define it. Because realistically, as Matthew Ball puts it, it’s a vision, a hypothesis. So let’s explore the current landscape.
Futurism
Stemming from the coinage of the term by Neal Stephenson, the future vision of the metaverse is a real-time, persistent, universal immersive iteration of the internet that facilitates a sense of presence for practically infinite amounts of people. It often incorporates ideas of decentralisation and interoperability for standards and the economy.
Today, our heavily centralised infrastructure (ownership-wise) and free markets mean that this operating model currently appears to make little financial sense for many businesses operations, however elements of this vision (especially in the Web3 space) have and are being proven, and are on their way to becoming a viable alternative and competition to our current system. Immersive hardware-wise, every major headset is currently owned/subsidised by large tech companies (more on that later).
Games and social platforms
The most popular platforms deemed to be ‘metaversal’ are games. In contrast to the future vision, by and large they are based on traditional centralised infrastructure, generally do not facilitate interoperability outside of their own ecosystems and are predominantly experienced on 2D screens. Take Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox, for example. Combined, they have around 100 million daily users.
The most popular social shared worlds: Zepeto, IMVU, VRChat, Rec Room, Second Life, Altspace and Horizon Worlds, account for around 40 million monthly users.
As it’s games getting the big numbers, it makes sense that it’s game studios (and game engines) that are furthest ahead when it comes to 3D experience development and the challenge of multiplayer given the limitations of our current internet infrastructure. Microsoft recently bought Blizzard to help them ‘provide building blocks for the metaverse’ (more on Microsoft later), while Epic Games’ takes seem to vary depending on who you speak to. The main thing is they have Unreal Engine (the most common engine used for photo-real virtual worlds), and leading game titles. Their CEO Tim Sweeney talks about the path to an open metaverse that’s free from dictation from big tech. Popular rival game engine Unity are focused on their Digital Twin solutions.
Big tech
Big tech is using ‘metaverse’ as way to brand generally immersive experiences and a digital overlay over the physical world. It feels bigger and less technical, and has gotten more engagement than technical terms. The tech giants are all vying to be fundamental to the underlying tech that’ll power the next iteration of the devices and platforms we use every day. This category tend not to pluralise (so one ‘metaverse’ not multiple ‘metaverses’).
Meta talks about the metaverse as one day being a digital overlay over the physical world, with it currently being a set of more fragmented shared experiences across AR, VR and our 2D screens, for example Meta Horizon Worlds and the evolution of their AR experience building platform, Meta Spark Studio. Meta’s clever name game has meant plenty of people think the metaverse is their thing.
Microsoft define the metaverse as a bridge between the virtual and physical — and more practically they’re using it in the context of HoloLens (their business-focused Mixed Reality headset), Mesh (branding for their virtual spaces, including in Teams) and their cloud offering (Shared Mixed Reality experiences powered by the cloud, and PlayFab, their gaming focused user and multiplayer management service).
Google talks about metaverse as being always-on ambient computing (including AR) — their vision for their services and hardware.
Nvidia describe metaverse as the ‘3D internet’, and use it to refer to their shared, collaborative and real-time simulated 3D spaces in their Omniverse platform.
Of note is Apple and CEO Tim Cook, who instead uses ‘AR’, which he suggested in the future people might liken to how we see the internet now, in place of ‘metaverse’, which he said he didn’t think the average person could define. It appears then, that Apple sees AR as more than a medium. Apple hasn’t publicly revealed much more, but they are known to be working on an immersive headset.
Also of note is Snapchat — arguably the biggest platform for which AR is the central component. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel took Cook’s take and raised him one, describing the term “metaverse” as “ambiguous and hypothetical”, and so Snap isn’t using it.
Web3
First, a couple of key terms:
Web3: decentralised web built, operated and owned by users
NFT: Non Fungible Token (a digital token stored on the blockchain that can represent basically anything)
Idealistically, decentralised digital currencies and tokens are seen as the economy of the metaverse. However, currently outside of platforms like The Sandbox and Decentraland (which base their economies on the blockchain), the most popular shared virtual world platforms and games deemed metaversal currently go about as far as featuring art NFTs in virtual galleries. Their in-platform economies and ownership systems remain firmly within their own walls, centralised and non-interoperable.
Web3 is about who governs the internet in the future, and Metaverse is more focused on how we interact with it. I’ve been seeing Web3 platforms separating themselves from the term ‘metaverse’, the buzz from which they are perhaps no longer benefiting from, and which for some has begun not to represent the open nature of Web3. Though even that open nature is being challenged with the rise in platforms that look after crypto wallets for businesses on behalf their customers, who instead use traditional means of authentication, like an email and password to use them. Whilst this lessens the risk to those businesses (because their customers cannot accidentally misplace or leak their wallet keys), it also could be seen as not being in the spirit of, or not even being Web3 at all.
Whilst often keeping metaverse and Web3 separate in discussion, tech giants are involving themselves in the latter too; Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services have Web3 facilities, and Microsoft has made a series of investments into Web3 platforms. Meta’s metaverse course they recently released covers NFTs, blockchain, Web3 and cryptocurrency, and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri did a TED talk on a creator-led internet built on blockchain — and they’re even introducing NFTs onto the platform.
When I’m speaking to brands, I also separate metaverse and Web3 because as things are now, building a virtual shared experiences is usually a fairly different task from creating a tokenisation platform or an NFT drop. That’s not to say you can’t bring them together for NFT galleries, event-gating, NFT assets / avatars, or even virtual worlds / ‘microverses’ with their own economy and decentralised operations.
As an aside, I’m excited to note that we are (finally) emerging out of the art NFTs for-the-sake-of-it era, as the immense capabilities of Web3 and blockchains are more broadly recognised and interest moves to building longer-term communities and infrastructure.
My takeaway
You can see that the term ‘metaverse’ is being used because it’s seen as the simplest way to describe a complex mix of different ideas that are forming the next era of our internet and devices. But because it’s been used to describe both future visions and a wide array of the precursor technologies we have now, it has become at times, unhelpful without context.
I think we owe brands paying more attention to gaming, XR, tokenisation and even their communities, on the buzz that metaverse has brought.
I’d even go as far as to argue that for many brands, the biggest value of adopting metaversal and Web3 platforms now, hasn’t been the actual use of, say blockchain — instead it’s that those platforms are fresh, fast moving, adaptable and tapped into communities in ways some traditional platforms aren’t.
An aside on hardware
It seems topical to cover hardware here. First, a couple definitions:
VR : Virtual Reality: digital experience surrounds you entirely
MR: Mixed Reality: immersive digital overlay over your view of the real world
AR: Augmented Reality: digital overlay over the real world experienced on a handheld device.
Of the above immersive categories, AR is the largest. We can experience it on most of our phones — whether on social platforms or the web. AR experiences I’ve personally made have been used (organically) over 100 million times, with social views from people using some of them approaching a billion. That gives you a sense of scale.
Right now, it’s estimated there are 170 million people using VR. The most popular headsets are not designed to be, or even cannot be used on the go. They’re great for immersive games, socialising, and for some, working (you can have as many monitors as you want on your virtual desk).
I spend a lot of time in VR. My Quest 2 is half my fitness routine, my office space and a social hangout. Right now though, VR is mostly situational; a deliberate charge it up, clear your space setup. It’s not yet always on and present like many of our other devices are.
To me, a sense of self and presence is essential for anything I might call metaversal — Meta’s new Quest Pro has face tracking which goes much of the way to feeling like you’re in the presence of others — and while incredibly impressive, immersive hardware still has some way to go (avatar and experience breadth, frequently having others in spaces at the same time as you, and just general internet infrastructure to make it all seamless).
I think the hardware is only a few years away from being something people use as a larger part of their daily routine — maybe for some even replacing their Chromebook, but it is further off from being always on and replacing our phones.
That’s it, folks. I hope this was helpful, if you have any questions or additions, you can contact me via my site jonothan.dev
