10 Future Scenarios of Metaverse Development
Snow Crash
When everything went to hell and the CPU began spewing out random bits, the result, on a CLI machine, was lines and lines of perfectly formed but random characters on the screen–known to cognoscenti as “going Cyrillic.” But to the MacOS, the screen was not a teletype, but a place to put graphics; the image on the screen was a bitmap, a literal rendering of the contents of a particular portion of the computer’s memory. When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set–a “Snow Crash.”
This is how Neal Stephenson recounts the genesis of the book title where the term “Metaverse” was coined.
In this 1992 dystopic novel, the metaverse is depicted as a huge urban environment developed around a road that runs around a smooth black globe for 65 thousand kilometers.
Curiously, in the intervening 30 years, no film has been made about it: the only one who has tried is the Italian-American director Marco Brambilla in 1998, but we will discuss this later.
Where are we now?
Some have defined Second Life as the first attempt at a Metaverse, as it incorporates many aspects of social media into a persistent three-dimensional world, populated by avatars.
But that’s not true: BowieWorld was the first 3D virtual world, which was itself part of Bowienet, a network dedicated to his fans that, among other things, provided low-cost connectivity, 5 MB of hosting, and an email box.
Launched in 1999, it has since allowed its fans to interact with each other, and to meet David Bowie in avatar form.
Yes, you read that right: this Metaverse has been up for 23 years.
In addition to various snippets of songs of the Thin White Duke, there are also 5 tracks by the Balkan Tribes, which form the significant line “I Will Be With You, less Than A Dream: Heaven, don’t close the door — one way in”
CenterVerse
As long as we talk about an artist creating a virtual world in his own image, centralization is a necessary evil, while the problem posed by a centralized for-profit Metaverse such as Second Life is basically the same as that posed by Vitalik Buterin regarding his experience in World of Warcraft, namely related to the lack of shared governance, as well as susceptible to sudden rule changes that can rewrite our past experience, as well as disrupt the present and future: the furthest thing from blockchain can be.
Even the Linden Dollar, Second Life’s current currency, eschews the logic of cryptocurrency and is considered a simple closed-loop virtual token, with an exchange rate arbitrarily decided by Linden Lab.
With premises like that, privacy will be one of the first casualties of this possible future: regardless of whether we pay to enter this world or not, we will probably find our data exposed, with rules arbitrarily changeable by managers and the risk of high virtual volatility regarding experiences and assets.
ChainVerse
We all know the effects of what happens if a blockchain gets hacked, but if entire virtual worlds rested on it, what would be the consequences for their inhabitants?
It is therefore difficult to consider building a Metaverse using the blockchain as a foundation; however, the fact remains that in a world where banknotes cannot be printed (at least not in the strict sense of the word) there will still be cryptocurrencies.
Since 2008, avatar transfers from Second Life to OpenSim have been experimented with, so it is safe to predict that it will be possible to exchange cryptocurrencies linked to different Multiverses, with an exchange rate related to their value. (Maybe in 20 years I will do an article related to how to value a Multiverse, but now is not the time yet).
The blockchain will thus be the detonator of a new world order that it will eventually supplant:
- Trading regulations
- Borders
- Privacy regulations
- Public record keeping
- National currencies
Unfortunately, the global nature of cryptocurrencies facilitates the exploitation of weaker populations: the risk is to have first-class users, who can afford to fulfill the experience, at the expense of the second-class, forced to do the legwork to afford it.
FarVerse
The Metaverse raises several questions: for example, what is left of the “mental projection of our digital self”? If for whatever reason we are not connected, what becomes of our avatar? What behavior does it adopt? Is it safe?
A set of rules of engagement must be established before getting started for real, otherwise, we will run the risk of finding ourselves in a Wild West Metaverse where everything is allowed: a modern gold rush, allowing a few bad apples to endanger the wellbeing of the majority.
The era of haptic devices has only just begun, and you don’t need to have a fervid imagination to imagine what use will be made of them, and there will surely exist in the future small bedrooms, along the lines of pin art, that will allow us to physically interact with our loved ones albeit thousands of miles away, or to generate scenarios in real-time, such as Ethan Hunt’s famous climb at the beginning of Mission Impossible II.
More expensive versions will be equipped with 3D printers to create impromptu objects and will also be able to bend the other three elements (Fire, Wind and Water) to our will, creating, for example, a heat source exactly in place of that fireplace we are seeing with our headset, or recreating an Amazonian environment with plenty of rain.
Devices of this kind will have to be equipped with safety features, certified, and will require an annual service, like our cars.
MultiMetaVerse
At the moment, there is no regulatory force in the Metaverse except that of profit-seeking companies. Perhaps mindful of the bloody Videotape format war of the 1980s, on June 21, 2022, Microsoft, Sony, NVIDIA, Meta, Adobe, and many other companies, came together to announce the creation of the Metaverse Standards Forum: a consortium whose purpose is to ensure interoperability among the Metaverse, thus taking it for granted that there will be several of them.
This is a winning approach from their point of view, but the whole community will lose out: either a way is found to build a collaborative, (quadratically) democratic multiverse along the lines of wikipedia, or we will be faced with a plethora of Metaverses all competing with each other, albeit partially interconnected.
The possibilities of a Unified Metaverse would be limitless: Red Cross Rooms could be set up in war zones and doctors enrolled in the program could volunteer in their spare time and save lives remotely without risking their own and immunocompromised children would finally be able to feel part of the class.
Creators of objects and assets for and in the metaverse could be the sole holders of rights to use and sell them.
Mixed Blended Reality
What if the Metaverse were simply an augmented version of our reality?
Okay, they had already tried this in 2013 with Google Glass, but it fell out of favor for a number of reasons.
• Price too high: $1,500 for a pair of glasses? No kidding…
• Perceived risk: things nowadays haven’t changed much, but in the 10’s people were much more susceptible to all electromagnetic radiation issues, and having an emitter so close to the brain, was not so reassuring
• Bugs: the glasses could crash at any time, and given the hardware limitations of the period, frame rates and performance were not always satisfactory.
• Few use cases: poor sales led to little progress in dedicated software development
• Privacy: running around with a pair of glasses that can start recording at any time is just not so cool, and raises a number of ethical issues.
As we all know, failure is the first step to success, and augmented reality devices capable of reproducing plain or three-dimensional holograms, usefuls for a compelling interaction with one’s surroundings, continue to be under study: surveyors will be able to instantly get the number of tiles in a bathroom, while Elvis will finally leave the building, to the delight of all his fans.
Ill or Well
Returning to the mythical Marco Brambilla, he may not have succeeded in making a film based on Snow Crash, but I want to unlock for you a memory of a film he directed the following year which pours Metaverse from every pore.
The world we live in is increasingly dominated by the MAANG quintet: Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. They are traditionally defined as multinational corporations, but they are becoming supranational. For now, they are still forced to bow to the wills of pre-established geographical entities
• Meta: privacy in Europe
• Apple: antitrust practically everywhere
• Amazon: taxes in Europe
• Neflix: Sexually themed censorship in authoritarian countries
• Google: censorship in China
But are we sure that a Metaverse dominated by these societies, would be any better?
Inside one’s prison cell in Siberia, even nowadays prisoners can enjoy a minimum of privacy, but in a fully-immersive VR, we risk being at the mercy of those who run it and at the very least monetized by virtue of indiscriminate profiling that is only in its infancy.
The beauty of a TV is that we can turn it off at any time, switch channels, adjust the volume, or, whatever happens, look away in the presence of unpleasant scenes.
A VR device in the wrong hands could inflict untold suffering on a victim
Consider the manner in which China’s re-education of Uyghurs is being conducted: from a hood on the head to brainwashing headsets, the step is much less short than it seems.
Hikikomori²
What if some people decide never to take it off? In the most old school scenario of accessing the Metaverse via an Oculus-like VR device, a slice of people might opt to remain inside this world indefinitely: how should they be handled, from a fiscal, health, and social perspective?
Assistance from the state toward the weakest is an unwavering principle in much of the world, but is it right that society should provide for those who by choice decide to no longer be productive members? It is likely that such a “life” will be able to be led only by those who can afford it, somewhat as is the case now for Web2 addicts.
An Unrealistic Escape
Many more will be the people who will choose to have nothing to do with this world, somewhat like some elderly folks who lives without a cell phone.
The majority will enter for a few minutes, then leave for good, while the base of the metaverse will composed of regular gamers and the younger segments that have always been more likely to embrace new technologies, and it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a mass phenomenon.
The energy requirements necessary to operate the metaverse will take a back seat to the enormous savings that will be achieved by the massive reduction in business and leisure travel, as they are no longer needed, and a fee will be charged for each mile traveled using fossil fuels.
In the same way that we are reaching the point where we cannot drive a car without a navigation system or other assistance systems, we will lose many of the capabilities we have now, replaced by the ability to use assistive technology.
The more polluted and dirty our world is, the more palatable the Metaverse can be, but a headset will never faithfully reproduce our lover’s eyes, or a sunset over the sea: the best reality we can have is out there waiting for us: we have to cherish it.
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