Metaverse — The Future of Internet
Ivan Sutherland was a pioneer in computer science, especially in the computer graphics domain. In 1963. as a part of his Ph.D. research, he invented the Sketchpad, the first graphical computer interface. To be able to make it work, he invented the first non-procedural programming language and the first object-oriented software system. Sutherland was awarded the Turing Award in 1988 and Kyoto Award for Advanced Technology in 2012.
When asked, “How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object-oriented software system, all in one year?” Ivan replied:
Well, I didn’t know it was hard.
You can see Alan Kay, another computer science history hero, telling the anecdote in this amazing lecture from 1987.
Footage of Ivan Sutherland using The Sketchpad was shown in the lecture as well as many other interesting things. It is well worth the time (a little more than 90 minutes).
Sutherland was also the inventor of the first functional head-mounted virtual reality system called The Sword of Damocles. It was constructed by him and his students at MIT.
This is a short footage of The Sword of Damocles in action:
Both Sketchpad and The Sword of Damocles inspired generations of scientists and artists to develop virtual and augmented reality solutions, as well as to think about new ways of humans and machines interacting.
Interactions between the human and the machine combined with computer networks are a significant determinant of contemporary life.
In the 90s, we got Web 1.0 with static pages of interlinked text and some mostly low-res images. It was a revolution. Unbelievable amounts of information and knowledge were shared. DIY enthusiasm exploded due to the fact that you could make and design your own web page. One of the landmarks of Web 1.0, GeoCities, hosted around 38 million webpages. Knowledge of HTML was needed for website creation until 1997 when Macromedia released Dreamweaver, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML page editor. With Dreamweaver, you could make webpages, as easy as you made spreadsheets with Microsoft Excel.
Then, the 21st century gave us Web 2.0, adding interactivity to the game. Platforms emerged that made it even easier for everyone to become a creator. With just a few clicks you could start a blog on Blogger or Tumblr, and write about your niche interests or design a beautiful, glittery MySpace page with scrolling text. While these services exist today, their reach and influence were diminished with the introduction of social media.
A large piece of the Web 2.0 puzzle is WordPress, the platform powering around 60 million websites and around a third of the top 10 million pages. It started as a simple blogging CMS and evolved into a versatile ecosystem for building almost any kind of website. With the addition of RSS feeds, readers could keep up with the latest content much easier and creators got a more effective distribution channel.
One of the landmarks of Web 2.0 is a wiki, especially Wikipedia, a collaborative knowledge directory, with more than 55 million articles attracting around 1.5 billion unique visitors a month. English version has more than 6 million articles, more than 40 million registered editors, out of which more than 120 thousand make an edit every month. How accurate is this knowledge? Well, according to Wikipedia itself, pretty accurate, even though there are no guarantees of validity.
So, when you want to find something, you go to Wikipedia? Or, you search on Google? Search engines like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo index vast amounts of content generated every day, make it searchable and easier to find. The more data you have indexed, the more users search via your engine. What’s the point of writing a blog if nobody ever reads it? Content providers and search engines have a mutually beneficial relationship. Search engines give creators exposure and more content makes search engines better.
When talking about Web 2.0, we should also mention the Social Web, where our personalities come to full display. Not just personalities, sometimes we show a bit more. The Social web enables us to connect with people we know, or think we know, or want to know. We share beautiful and less beautiful moments from our lives retouched to look like they are perfect. Also, we shop, learn, and even work online. And share info about what we bought, learned, and worked on.
Still, we use all these services on a flat, 2-dimensional screen. Our “real“ lives are in 3D, our “online“ lives are 2D, with the exception of gaming and some experiments in VR/AR.
What comes next? After Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, naturally, we move to Web 3.0.
Web 3.0, sometimes called The Spatial Web, adds a third dimension to our online experiences. Growing technologies like AR/VR, blockchain, Internet of Things, fast mobile networks (5G), Artificial Intelligence make online experiences more immersive and closer to “real“ life.
According to Deloitte:
Just as earlier capabilities gave rise to Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, today’s leading technologies are fueling and informing the evolution into the Spatial Web as they advance across the three basic tiers of IT architecture (see figure 2):
Interaction: The software, hardware, and content that we ultimately interact with
Computation: The logic that enables the interaction
Information: The data and structure that allow computational functions to be completed accurately, efficiently, and securely
The Spatial Web brings us closer to Metaverse. What is Metaverse?
Mathew Ball defines it as:
Metaverse is typically portrayed as a sort of digital “jacked-in” internet — a manifestation of actual reality, but one based in a virtual (often theme park-like) world, such those portrayed in Ready Player One and The Matrix. And while these sorts of experience are likely to be an aspect of the Metaverse, this conception is limited in the same way movies like Tron portrayed the Internet as a literal digital “information superhighway” of bits.
and continues to define the characteristics of future Metaverse:
The Metaverse, we think, will…
Be persistent — which is to say, it never “resets” or “pauses” or “ends”, it just continues indefinitely
Be synchronous and live — even though pre-scheduled and self-contained events will happen, just as they do in “real life”, the Metaverse will be a living experience that exists consistently for everyone and in real time
Have no real cap to concurrent participations with an individual sense of “presence” — everyone can be a part of the Metaverse and participate in a specific event/place/activity together, at the same time and with individual agency
Be a fully functioning economy — individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of “work” that produces “value” that is recognized by others
Be an experience that spans both the digital and physical worlds, private and public networks/experiences, and open and closed platforms
Offer unprecedented interoperability of data, digital items/assets, content, and so on across each of these experiences — your “Counter-Strike” gun skin, for example, could also be used to decorate a gun in Fortnite, or be gifted to a friend on/through Facebook. Similarly, a car designed for Rocket League (or even for Porsche’s website) could be brought over to work in Roblox. Today, the digital world basically acts as though it were a mall where though every store used its own currency, required proprietary ID cards, had proprietary units of measurement for things like shoes or calories, and different dress codes, etc.
Be populated by “content” and “experiences” created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors, some of whom are independent individuals, while others might be informally organized groups or commercially-focused enterprises
Glimpses of Metaverse are seen in immersive online experiences combining real-world events with online worlds, like Marshmello’s concert in Fortnite, attended by more than 10 million players. In a nutshell, the Metaverse is the future of the internet. We will use it to entertain ourselves, to buy things, to connect with other people, to work, just as we use the internet today. But the experience will be much more immersive and closer to how we experience the real world.
Term Metaverse was coined by Neil Stephenson in the sci-fi novel “Snow Crash“.
According to Stephenson:
The Metaverse … could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife’s fiber-optic network
Nam-shab is a digital spell, speech with magical force, code run on the Metaverse which changes the (virtual) reality.
While the name Metaverse is nice, I would argue that the future of the internet is more beautifully described as Cyberspace in the William Gibsons Sprawl Trilogy.
Gibson’s definition of Cyberspace:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation. . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
Interestingly enough, both Stephenson and Gibson are pretty “analog“ in their daily lives and use as little technology as possible. Stephenson doesn’t even use email, but he is a chief futurist in Magic Leap, a startup developing powerful AR wearables, or “spatial computers” as the company calls them. “Reality is just beginning“ is Magic Leap’s slogan.
The video games industry is a leader in immersive experiences. The nature of video games is immersive and adding a VR or AR interface makes it even more so. Their primary purpose is entertainment but they often offer us an opportunity to practice our reflexes, senses, strategy skills, to communicate with others, form alliances, or fight our enemies. Sounds like a work environment.
Metaverse will not be just a huge business opportunity. It will be THE platform to do business. Packy McCormick, in an excellent piece called Tencent’s Dreams, Part II: Investing in the Metaverse, argues that Tencent is the company holding the best starting position to benefit from the emergence of the Metaverse:
The magic of the Metaverse is that it will seamlessly integrate the myriad platforms on which we socialize, work, and consume — merging Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), audio, the internet, and the physical world. Tencent owns key players in each, including Epic, Snap, Spotify, WeChat, and even physical retail.
and
There are two big components of the Metaverse: Platform (where) and Content (what). Tencent owns stakes in more of the components of each than any company in the world.
There is a possibility that we will have several Metaverses or at least a fragmented one. I guess there will be a fight for a dominant platform and we might end up in a market similar to mobile operating systems. Few big players controlling the platform and a lot of creators/developers using platforms to provide content/functionality.
Even though I agree with Packy about Tencent’s starting position, Apple is my favorite. They have experience in building development platforms, a long history of connections with creative people, and technical expertise to provide the hardware necessary for immersive experiences.
Rumors about AR glasses from Apple started a few years ago. Apple has acquired a few companies and engineers with AR experience. According to TechRadar:
Apple has also made a number of key AR talent hires over the years. According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple has poached a leading employee of Nasa for the project, hiring Jeff Norris, founder of the Mission Operations Innovation Office of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
He is said to be working as part of an augmented reality team being headed up by another poached talent, Dolby Labs executive Mike Rockwell.
That team is apparently 1,000 people strong, and the AR glasses they’re working on are said to have a high-resolution display, cameras, 3D scanning, and “advanced human detection”. They’re also apparently working on an AR headset, which could launch first with a design like the Oculus Quest, but a lightweight, comfortable build.
In May 2020, Apple confirmed it had acquired NextVR, a startup that produced virtual reality content from the likes of the NBA and Fox Sports. While it’s unclear how this could impact the Apple AR Glasses, it’s logical the startup’s expertise will contribute to product design in some way.
Apple is a master of integration, but they also know when to let a little bit of outside air come in. They let iPod users sync their music with PC, an extremely smart move that contributed to the world domination in the mp3 player field.
Now, with new Apple Silicon chips in Macs, making and running cross-platform (within the Apple universe) applications much easier. Your iOS apps should work seamlessly on a Mac. In the future, you (as a developer) will probably write one app for iOS and macOS with extensions for watchOS and glassesOS or whatever it will be called. Apple AR glasses will not be released until the company is certain that functionality and design are top-notch. Microsoft had tablets a decade before the first iPad appeared. Steve Jobs didn’t like the looks and functionality of those tablets. It took him almost 10 years to make a much better one.
Google was the first company to release a significant product in the AR area. The first edition of Google Glass was a business failure but it showed the way for others. It seems like Apple will do it again, release a usable, beautifully designed product a few years later than the competition. And, of course, take over the market.
We will see. Google owns the largest mobile OS platform with 2.5 billion active devices and 6 million developers. They have financial and human resources to make a dominant Metaverse platform. And a lot of hardware manufacturers on their side. The question is whether they can connect all the dots.
It will take some time until we see the full shine of Metaverse or Metaverses. Until then, we can use the internet to entertain ourselves, buy stuff, connect with others, and share as many pictures as possible to prepare for our hi-tech future.
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