Universal Materials as canonical representations for Universal Asssets.
In a previous article we talked about how we might materially constrain a virtual world, check it out here, it’s highly recommended that you read it if you haven’t. This is just a glimpse into a much bigger concept — canonical worlds — that we’ll explore deeper in other articles. For now it suffices to grasp the general concept.
When you’re finished here, make sure to check out the rest of the articles from: The Universal Asset Framework Series.
What does the word Canonical mean?
Canonical, canon… is a word that’s most often used to symbolize a unique object, concept, whatever, amongst a family of similar things. In many situations and contexts we can found many examples of very similar but not quite identical things, so it’s always interesting to ask, can we single out one or a subgroup of members of any family as being unique or special in some form? In a way that we can always unambiguously tell them apart from other objects, concepts, things, candidates, clones…
Some other words like “official” might try to invoke the notion of canonicity. An official anything, makes a distinction between it and everything else. Just as a “canonical” anything does.
One of the challenges in a purely digital world is to allow for both being constrained and not constrained at the same time. Constraints usually help interoperability, simplify problems and processes, they can be a very good thing. In fact, we can view canonicity as a type of constraint. If one member of a family/group is the “official” or “canonical” one, we’ve eliminated pure fungibility (not being able to distinguish between two members of the same group). So we want constraints, or at least the possibility/option for constraints. The negative part of constraints is that they hinder diversity, creativity, degrees of freedom, which of course we also want. This is where the concept of canonical worlds kicks-in.
The Metaverse will have a governing system, and in order to help interoperability, we must choose to select some Universal Primitives (UPs) from our Universal Library as being the “canonical” ones. This sends a signal to any world-builders and Metaverse users: these are the collection of UPs we want to be used the most across the Metaverse. If you want to create a new Universal Asset (UA) or interoperable mechanic, know that if you choose canonical UPs for them they’re more likely to be supported by the majority of current and future virtual worlds.
So even though along this series we’ve been using the word “universal” to name many of our core Metaverse concepts, these only restrict us to a type/family for any given concept, all sharing a “canonical” box or set of properties. To borrow some language from a branch of mathematics called Category Theory, universal anything, really represents a type of category. But any category can contain many members, we might additionally not only want to have a “canonical” set of categories, but also assign one or more “canonical” objects to any given canonical category.
Canonical representations
The way we’ve described Universal Assets (UAs) so far for example, has been as having an arbitrary visual representation in the form of a 3D file. We haven’t imposed any heavy restrictions on what a UA might look like, only that we need to select a Universal Primitive (UP) for it. However, if we give any UA a chemical composition as we’ve described in previous articles, that’s enough to describe a material, and we could now if we desire give canonical visual representations to such materials. For example, a canonical look/appearance for a particular type alloy of steel.
Recall how we mentioned in previous articles that materially-restricted worlds could demand — upon importation — that the player is in possession of the necessary materials encoded in the UA (acquired in-world), before it can be “materialized” inside this world. However, the world still has no control or knowledge on what its visual representation might be. But if we introduce the concept of canonical representations, then it does!
You’re special
What does it mean to say that I created a virtual sword that looks like this, or is made of this or that material? Not much, when you want to allow people the flexibility to change or discard such information. However, there’s a sense in which we can make this information meaningful, with the help of canonical worlds.
Of all the virtual worlds that will populate the Metaverse, there will be a subset of them that are the purest, those that will behave more like our physical world, with physical restraints. These are our canonical worlds. They’re likely to become the most popular too, since being more restricted makes them more easily interoperable.
These canonical worlds may only allow for importing canonical UPs, UAs, etc. And further more, only canonical representations for UAs. So now if I go and create a new UA with the Universal Asset Creator (UAC), and select a material/chemical composition for my UA, and the materials chosen are all canonical ones, they’ll all have a canonical representation also. So I can say my virtual sword is truly made of pure gold, and now my sword will have a canonical look (like if it were made of gold), purely determined by the materials its made of.
I could in addition give it a 3D file looking however I want, but when importing that sword into a canonical world, the world will assign it the canonical representation of anything made of gold. It doesn’t need to be handed any textures from the player! It knows in advance what it will look like. So even though there might be many virtual worlds with more or less constraints, there will always be a subset of worlds, canonical worlds, that only allow/contain “official” or “canonical” versions of primitives, representations, etc.
In fact, given how canonical worlds are more restricted and predictable than non-canonical worlds, it could be that most worlds are canonical, or that as we’ve alluded in previous articles, that virtual worlds will have many server instances of different flavors for any given world. In the same sense a world could have separate pvp and pve servers, they could have both canonical and non-canonical servers. Non-canonical servers offer a bit more freedom to players, but are a bit like the wild west. Canonical servers have more control in certain aspects, such as how things inside their world can look like.
Different Metaverse users may have different preferences, perhaps they bought/created a UA because of its look, even though it doesn’t conform to any canonical material or representation, and want to use it in any world they go into. They can do this potentially in any non-canonical world. But if they later decide to sell that UA, a different user might only like playing in canonical worlds, so the asset only matters to them if it has their desired chemical/material composition, and therefore canonical representation they’re looking for.
A sword is made of pure gold, and looks as pure gold, if and only if, the UA is encoded with being made of 100% gold. How it looks is now completely unequivocal (in a canonical world), in a sense, we can say it’s the true form of that asset. And any current or future canonical worlds in the Metaverse should respect that, 1 year, 5 years, 20 years after the creation of that asset. Here we’re assuming once an UA has been created (most likely as a non-fungible token or NFT), it cannot be changed. One can always create a knock-off or a new asset looking like a previously created UA, by simply giving it the appropriate 3D file and textures, but then it’ll be a new different UA.
Final Remarks
As we’ve seen, materially restraining the Metaverse gave us almost for free the concept of canonical representations. Interoperable assets not only can have physical and chemical properties, they can have an official or canonical appearance, based on those. This is part of the information encoded in the UA, later on, its the choice of any given virtual world to leverage or discard such information however they want.
But notice what we might have achieved. If we can agree upon a series of canonical standards/primitives for the Metaverse, from that moment on you can create a “gold” sword, and that will actually mean something real, real at least in any canonical world that is. And there’s a fair chance this choice can be respected far into the future, many decades after. Because Metaverse or not, the concept of gold today, will be the same as the concept of gold tomorrow.
It also means creators have an additional choice to make when creating a UA, choose a material composition for it. Even if you might not care or ever leverage it yourself, other people will. You lose nothing by making this additional choice, but now it makes it unique compared to other UAs made of different materials.
