What is the Metaverse, Anyway?

It’s not Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert, for multiple reasons.

Current definitions of the Metaverse vary depending on which company you ask. To name a few, Meta’s definition focuses on immersive “social experiences,” Epic Games’ definition depicts an “online playground,” and Microsoft’s definition describes it as an “app canvas.”

You might have read that and thought it was all over the place. I concur; each company’s definition of the Metaverse usually happens to coincide with the use cases that they are industry leaders in. I said in the first post of this series that there is not yet an overarching Metaverse definition, but even so, I’ll try to provide a working one that’s not tied to a specific use case or industry.

An attempt at a definition

The best definition of the Metaverse that I have seen is given by Matthew Ball, an investor in multiple Metaverse companies, in his recent book The Metaverse: and How it Will Revolutionize Everything:

“A massively scaled and interoperable network of realtime rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.” (Ball 2022, 42)

Although comprehensive, I’ll admit this is a bit hard to digest. While the book provides a deep dive on what this definition entails, here’s my own take on how this definition acts as a useful framework.

The Metaverse is a single encompassing “universe” composed of many 3D virtual worlds. These worlds, or instances, can live on different platforms built by different individuals, organizations, or companies. Depending on a person’s needs, whether social, educational, or otherwise, they should be able to fluidly move between these instances and have the ability to transfer their assets and identity from one world to another with ease. Server capability constraints should not limit the number of people accessing the Metaverse, and those people should be able to interact in real-time with the worlds and other people in it.

I’d like to point out something this definition deliberately does not specify: the devices used to access the Metaverse. Despite how tech companies like Meta and Microsoft are publicizing their efforts to develop lighter and more powerful mixed reality (XR) headsets, it’s probable that in the next 5 to 10 years, the main gateway to the Metaverse will actually be the smartphone — something that already exists in the hands of most of the world’s population. This is taking into account the current hardware limitations for VR/AR devices, the widespread adoption of smartphones, and what smartphones are already currently capable of (Citi 2022, 43).

Due to better processing power and cloud computing, a smartphone can do much of what a standalone headset can in terms of display. Some VR headsets, like the Samsung Gear VR, were specifically designed so you could slot a smartphone in front of your eyes instead of having an integrated display (Citi 2022, 66). However, due to the extremely close distance between the screen and eyes in a headset, there are far more usability and fidelity considerations for a headset than a smartphone. VR/AR devices will be an important segment of Metaverse devices, but likely not the mainstream one until technology progresses further.

Fortnite concerts: A case study

Let’s go back to Travis Scott’s 2020 Fortnite concert. It had blown up in public awareness, racking up almost 200 million views on Scott’s Youtube channel; one Forbes article had dubbed it as a “stunning spectacle” and a “glimpse of the Metaverse.” You could say it was a glimpse into a specific example of what’s possible in the “proto-Metaverse” today, but it falls far short of what the Metaverse should be capable of in three key ways:

1. It was an isolated instance, which means it never intended to allow users to jump to other non-Fortnite instances, much less transfer any assets or data to another instance.
2. Server constraints significantly limited the people within the instance.
3. Server constraints also required much of the data to be pre-loaded in, instead of rendered in realtime.

A single instance with non-transferable data

The Fortnite concert was one of the instances in today’s proto-Metaverse: an isolated event for the purpose of entertainment, on a single platform. You couldn’t do much beyond participating in the concert, and you could not smoothly jump to other instances to satisfy the multitude of use cases that someone would want in their day to day life. These could include anything from brushing up on job skills with VR-enabled training, socializing with friends outside of the concert, or buying digital assets like clothing for use across multiple platforms, not just Fortnite.

For more clarity on the range that different Metaverse instances can cover, I’ve previously highlighted some of the key use cases for the Metaverse today, many of which do not fall in the consumer entertainment category.

Limited number of users due to server capability constraints

The concert also failed to fulfill the technological requirements for the Metaverse. While Epic Games put the attendee count at 12.3 million, there were actually around 250,000 separate copies of the concert, each copy containing a version of Travis Scott and up to 50 concertgoers. Moreover, these copies apparently didn’t even start at the same time (Ball 2022, 68).

This was because of the current technological limits on computing. The servers needed to keep track of how each avatar perceives and interacts with this virtual world, and to respond accordingly. One concertgoer might be swinging an axe at another over by the stadium, while another is trying to chop down a tree, while another is spamming all the free concert emotes. All the while, other concertgoers would be watching the brawling, the tree-chopping, and the emoting — all at different angles. What if — one shudders to think about it — what if there was lag? The platform would have to decide which “version” of the world, the one with lag or the one without, was the “truth,” and make sure all the worlds synced up to that truth. Multiply a single avatar’s actions by 12.3 million, and it would be far beyond even the most powerful servers’ capabilities.

That being said, it’s concert-scale events like these that would test the limits of what the Metaverse would be capable of, due to the number of perceivable participants that need to be included. To give our current tech some credit, we can already handle smaller scale Metaverse instances, like meetings with a couple dozen people.

While you could see some other avatars in the concert, the number of avatars per “copy” of the concert was capped at 50. Image source: The Verge

Not in real-time

Concertgoers had also jumped from one world to another during the course of the event, from the actual Fortnite map to an ocean, a grid floor, an asteroid belt, then a black hole. Even though this might have seemed like an effortless, real-time loading of each scene, Epic Games actually had to do a number of technological gymnastics to make it work. They sent packages for all the concertgoers to download prior to the concert, which included the different worlds teleported to over the course of the event. As Scott performed in one world, the concertgoers’ devices were loading the next world in the background. To accommodate loading constraints, the worlds subsequently became smaller as the concert went on (Ball 2022, 90). Flying through space at the end took the least amount of effort; there was nothing you could interact with there, it was largely featureless, and the concertgoers were flying through it in a pre-established path.

The last “concert venue” for the Fortnite concert was a largely featureless expanse of space, Fortnite’s Black Hole from the Season X event. Image source: IGN

While this concert demonstrates a specific use case within the proto-Metaverse today, current technological constraints prevent it from truly embodying the definition of the Metaverse. In fact, it’s safe to say that most of our current use cases can’t be considered a good representation of the Metaverse yet. In order for something to truly embody the definition of the Metaverse, it would have to be simultaneously much more all-encompassing across multiple platforms and use cases, and built on much more advanced technology than what we have today.

Additional sources

1. Ball, Matthew. The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. W. W. Norton & Co Inc, 2022.
2. “Metaverse And Money: Decrypting The Future”. 2022. Icg.Citi.Com. https://icg.citi.com/icghome/what-we-think/citigps/insights/metaverse-and-money_20220330.