The Metaverse, the Multiverse and the Omniverse

Things are going to get very messy indeed over the coming months and years as we approach critical mass for the metaverse. Already Facebook is staking it’s claim that it will now pivot to be a ‘metaverse company’ rather than a social network. But what is a metaverse in the first place, and how can you have more than one?

In a presentation from 2008 and to start looking at standards and interoperability (discussed in a previous post) David Frey, Jérôme Royan, Romain Piegay proposed that the Metaverse is the overarching term for all instances and group types of servers and objects.

Solipsis: A decentralized Architecture for Virtual Environments

At the moment however what is likely to happen is the fragmentation and marketing hype of the term ‘metaverse’ and the adoption of different examples labelled as metaverse, for example, the Facebook Metaverse, the Google Metaverse, and so on. In an attempt to move forward from 2008 I looked at how we could potentially evolve that thinking at the high level before working downwards into the detail.

Within each will remain the single objects, data and content but these would very much be dependent on the tools and platforms that the Metaverse is built on. At the lowest level then we have the Metaverse. And so we will have many instances of Metaverse, in some ways as prolific as websites and blogging platforms as the tools become easier to use and more ubiquitous.

This in itself then forces groupings of Metaverse into Multiverses — many metaverse examples of the same classification or type.

For example — a Multiverse of Industry 4.0 metaverse, the entertainment-based multiverse and so on.

By doing so you are able to create a common set of standards, frameworks and interoperability requirements for these groups of metaverse. This makes the sharing of content, data, and how users can log in and out a lot cleaner, faster and more secure. It would also help define whether you would need interoperability between separate multiverse — a manufacturing multiverse would not need APIs and data standards shared with a consumer-based multiverse for example.

A proposed hierarchical structure of the Metaverse

At the highest level, you have the Omniverse. The Omniverse becomes the overarching term that covers not only the single Metaverse but also the Multiverses that will exist also. At this level, there will also be a set of overarching standards that will govern the sharing of content and data between multiverse — again making interoperability a lot easier to consider because it’s not being treated at the lowest levels.

It’s unfortunate that NVIDIA has chosen to use this as the term for their metaverse platform but no matter, the concept remains.

I’m going to use the framework in the Solipsis paper to try and deconstruct this idea further to the point where it will either make more sense or it disproves itself but it’ll be a fun journey all the same.

At the very least we should not be beholden to a novel dated back in the early 1990s about how we build the metaverse today. Heresy?

If you have any further ideas I’d love to hear them.