Metaverse Inception — Someone Just Created Minecraft Inside Minecraft

Theo Priestley
3 min readSep 20, 2022
Inception for real, yo!

WWW used to stand for World Wide Web but now it should stand for Worlds Within Worlds. Sammyuri on YouTube posted a video recently of an instance of Minecraft inside Minecraft and it could potentially blow a lot of assumptions about the metaverse out of the water.

The way they did it is that they ported the Minecraft server to run in a multithreaded high-performance (Rust-based) server. Most of the components are being simulated server-side but using high-level Minecraft elements. Think of it like serverless computing, but over Minecraft.

The technical architecture part is pretty incredible for what it is in itself.

This is actually more important than you realize though — depending on the flexibility of new metaverse platforms, and if they hold true to the ideologies of web3 being open, composable and decentralized, then building fully functioning virtual worlds within an existing virtual world instead of being a new world linked to one could create some very interesting results.

Metaverse interoperability, apparently

Metaverse interoperability is the ability for different virtual worlds and platforms to interact with each other. This means that users on one platform can communicate and interact with users on another platform, as well as share data and content.

Metaverse interoperability is important for several reasons as shown in the diagram above.

But the lack of interoperability is one of the major hurdles. It restricts users’ access to the Metaverse, limiting their navigation to a specific project instead of allowing them to navigate freely across multiple virtual worlds integrated within the 3D horizon of the Metaverse.

And that’s the problem — 3D….because this particular feat now requires 4-dimensional thinking about the metaverse, its constituent architecture, and interoperability.

This particular achievement highlights a major flaw in thinking — the ideas around interoperable worlds currently run linear and flat, not deep. And the mind boggles when you think just how deep that rabbit hole could go.

Just think of the movie Inception and let the possibilities sink in and the changes in requirements needed to consider interoperability that in an existing virtual world environment, not necessarily connected to.

Will virtual worlds built inside an existing one inherit the properties of the parent for example, like most parent-child relationships in software? Or are there some other 4th dimensional properties that need to be taken into account?

Can economic interoperability — the flow of tokenized assets and monetary economies — exist separately and also interact and influence one another if I build a fully-fledged metaverse within someone else's existing framework, not alongside it?

Take a look at the video and think ahead to 5–10 years when something even more fantastical can occur. And whether distributed compute, storage and embedded systems can support this as a native occurrence.

Yes, yes, virtualization is nothing new but this is not just about spinning up a VM to run a piece of software.

Time to reset some assumptions made in various books and articles written over the past 12 months on what interoperability and the metaverse really mean.

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Theo Priestley

Keynote speaker, author, futurist, entrepreneur, gamer, cat slave, sci-fi aficionado. Fascinated with retrofuturism and lost futures.