A first-principles approach to the Metaverse
What is the Metaverse?
It’s almost impossible to get people to agree on a definition of what the Metaverse “ is”, however, it’s often easier to talk about what things aren’t. So what properties and capabilities do we think are indispensable for a true Metaverse? From the top of my head I can think of one big one — Interoperability, interoperability of virtual characters and assets (weapons, clothing, 3D avatars, magic spells…).
Without such interoperability, we won’t have a true Metaverse, we’ll have a disjointed collection of virtual worlds, no matter how big, immersive, popular, or pretty they are. Current approaches to interoperability focus on “syntactic” interoperability, being able to move assets and files across worlds by implementation of a standard of data types, tooling, file formats, etc. But the assets that we move across worlds, are lacking functionality, a soul… In other words, “semantic meaning”, in context of the worlds they’ve entered.
Semantic interoperability is the key
Syntactic interoperability alone gives us a vacuous form of interoperability, for true interoperability we need “semantic” interoperability as well. The problem is, given how each virtual world is different, and has different rules, which are predefined since their inception, there’s no practical way to carry functionality or sematic meaning of a digital asset across worlds.
For example, we humans are a product of the laws of physics of our universe, if we were to step foot into a different universe with different laws of physics, we would most likely disintegrate, explode, collapse… It wouldn’t be nice. In the same manner, each virtual world is like its own universe, with its own laws of physics. Which is why currently at best we can transport data and assets across worlds that lack any complex semantic meaning. But this doesn’t mean no solutions are possible.
How can we get semantic interoperability?
There is a way we can get semantic interoperability between different worlds from a little bit, to perhaps a lot. But for this, virtual worlds would have to integrate a sort of “standardized pocket universe” inside their own bespoke world, from the moment they start building it. Virtual worlds would be constructed from the beginning with this pocket universe at its heart, it’s part of the world, just as everything else.
But for this we need predictability, everything about this pocket universe and its semantics has to be known from the start. It can’t change later on, without an explicit update to how the entire virtual world functions. So every primitive and rule of this universal pocket universe needs to be defined, outside of any given virtual world, collectively, by all users of the Metaverse. In a sense, it’s a sort of Meta-world, a Meta-universe, a Meta-verse. One preferably built in the open, fully open-source, by all members of the Metaverse at once. One of the biggest open-source projects we’ll ever have.
It’s this pocket universe that acts as our bridge between worlds, every user of the Metaverse agrees that this pocket universe has a universal (yet ever-expanding) set of rules and “objects”. Every world-builder starts with this pocket universe (or a subset of it), as the starting point for their own bespoke virtual world. This is how we can achieve true interoperability.
Final remarks
This is the type of Metaverse I would like to see us build. So far we’ve only talked about interoperability, and from that one thing alone, an entire new foundation for the Metaverse can spring. As you’ll see if you continue with the following series of articles, interoperability alone requires us to have standards, government mechanisms, infrastructure for creating, storing, updating primitives… It forces us to define how our entire pocket universe needs to work. It serves I think as the best starting point to have the discussion, What will truly be the Metaverse?
Here you can check out the remaining articles from: The Universal Asset framework series.
